It seems like I am on a plastic kick lately. Yesterday, I read a story in U.S. News and World Report (from April) about how San Francisco is banning some vendors from using petroleum-based plastic bags. The city hopes that more biodegradable forms of plastic, like corn plastic, will become the norm. Yet, the measure does raise some other issues. For one, vendors will have to pay a lot more to use paper or biodegradable plastic. Many are opposed to the shopkeepers having to foot this extra bill. My solution? Make the consumer bring their own reusable bag to the store. This may not work everywhere, but in a city that is imposing a widespread ban on the bags, it sounds like the answer. Other opponents to the new law say that other types of compounds used for plastic may simply complicate recycling efforts. Yet, after reading the article I wrote about in my last blog, I'm starting to wonder whether plastic recycling is mostly fiction rather than fact. The other concern (which was not discussed in the article, but I thought of) was whether biodegradable plastic is really the panacea people are looking for. After all, if a 30 year old newspaper does not biodegrade in a landfill (as revealed by the show, Modern Marvels), what makes us think a bag will biodegrade when buried underground and not exposed to oxygen? This brings us back to reusable bags made of cotton or hemp or something else. Maybe we need to reframe our thinking such that bags are not viewed as so disposable. Let's start looking at a grocery bag like a suitcase--something we store after a trip and break out again for another trip. San Francisco can likely do much to start the change in mindset.