Strike up another victory for the plastic bag lobby.  The city of Seattle was to begin a 20 cent fee per non-reusable plastic or paper bag distributed at the checkout counter beginning January 1.  The deep-pocketed Progressive Bag Affiliates, which "promotes the responsible use, reuse, recycling and disposal of pastic bags" (huh?), pumped $1.4 million into a campaign to bring the issue to a referendum.  The law was voted down by the people today.  

Progressive Bag Affiliates and savetheplasticbag dotcom (I won't link to them here) have been chasing down proposed "plasti-taxes" and bag bans across the country, helping to get many of them overturned. "Save the Plastic Bag" has launched  a strange-logic campaign based on comparisons between plastic and paper bags, with little or no mention of reusable bags in their analyses.  

 I believe that the plastics industry arguments to "save" their product is deceptive by design.  While there are some valid points in favor of the former in the "plastic or paper" debate, to ignore that reusable bags are part of our social conscience is a pretty hefty (pun intended) sin of omission. 

I'll be taking on some of the points that the "save" coalition presents in favor of plastic in future posts.