The American Chemistry Council will spend more than $1 million to fight a 20-cent fee on plastic shopping bags in Seattle, hoping voters reject the proposal in August.
Or send the Bag Monster and all his friends to Copenhagen this December!Photo by Bag Monster via FlickrIf it seems absurd to spend a cool mill defending something as ubiquitous, hard to love, and (very often) wasteful as disposable bags … consider that this trade group for the plastics industry sponsored a program to pay parents to expose their children to pesticides and allow researchers to study the effects.
Before the ACC’s check clears, we’d like to suggest some better uses for the money, ones that would still promote the wonderful qualities of plastic.
- Buy some Legos—perhaps 2,000 of the $500 Star Wars Ultimate Collector’s Millenium Falcon. Give them away and makes some kids and geeks really happy.
- Hire Radiohead to record a peppier, more PR-friendly version of Fake Plastic Trees.
- Get the Plastic Ono Band back together. Through cryogenic freezing or something.
- Bobbleheads. Lots of them.
- Titanic and iceberg-shaped ice cube trays for nautical cocktails. At $6.99 a pop, 142,857 of them oughta be enough for a pretty great party.
- Hire pirates to attack Plastiki, David de Rothschild’s boat made of recycled bottles, before he can raise awareness to the problem of ocean debris. Scratch that—he told Grist his actual goal is something different: “We’re looking at the Plastiki not to vilify the material but to understand it. A big part of this project is to use technology to innovate new plastics, innovate new uses.”
- Reusable canvas shopping bags. Wait, those are canvas.
- Stock up on wine in new eco-friendly (but not wine-friendly) recycled-plastic bottles.
- More ad campaigns like this one to help young folks love plastics. Because millennials are “a group that really hasn’t been exposed to the overall benefits of plastics.”
- Distribute a lot of copies of American Beauty, with the scene of the shopping bag dancing in the wind. Watch the scene with your friends and say, “Really makes you think, huh?”
