New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently proposed a plastic bag tax in an effort to generate income and change the behavior of city residents.

Bloomberg’s idea is to implement a 6-cent fee on each bag, a penny of which would go to merchants as an incentive to keep track of the fees collected. It’s estimated that New Yorkers use 1 billion bags per year, and that the tax would bring in $16 billion for the city.

Like many cities across the country, the Big Apple is cash-strapped, and this is just one of the ways that Mayor Bloomberg proposes that his city close the budget gap it faces.

But city residents, not just its government, are also in economic distress. In a New York Daily News online poll, 53 percent of respondents thought that the plastic bag tax was a bad idea because “times are hard enough.” On the other hand, another poll on the same website reveals that 56 percent of respondents thought that the additional tax was enough to make them change their behavior.

If these polls generally reflect the opinions of New Yorkers, then the plastic bag tax would accomplish the behavioral change that the Mayor seeks.

“That’s like having a cigarette tax,” argued the mayor. ”The most wonderful thing in the world would be if we collected nothing from our cigarette tax. Think about how many people’s lives you’d save.”

San Francisco and Oakland, CA were the first and second cities to ban “urban tumbleweed,” and earlier this year, Los Angeles also followed suit with a law to take effect in 2010.

“This is a major moment for our city, to bite the bullet and go with something that is more ecologically sensitive than what we’ve ever done before,” said Los Angeles Councilman Bill Rosendahl, according to a story in the July 23rd Los Angeles Times.

Many other cities have considered similar legislation, which in numerous cases, has been voted down by local councils. However, other municipalities like Portland, Seattle, and Phoenix are attempting to take action against the single-use plastic, and have serious legislation with strong support in the pipeline.

Commendations to these progressive city leaders who have fought for their cities to make a move in the right direction.

Hopefully, New York City’s leaders will be bold in passing the tax proposal. If the largest city in the country, and the second largest in the world, took this major step in legislating more eco-friendly lifestyles and the use of reusable shopping bags, they would be setting a shining example for the rest of the world.

We’ll keep you posted on this exciting news…

This is a guest blog post from a friend of the Envirosax team who is currently backpacking around Australia. Having never lived in a coastal environment before, her perspective on a problem us coast-dwellers are sometimes complacent about is a refreshing wake-up call.

Traveling around the East coast of Australia I’ve been hearing stories from scuba divers, aquarium workers and locals on the beaches, about the growing problem of plastic bags on marine habitats. The most common story is of turtles dying after swallowing plastic bags they have mistaken for jellyfish. However this is hard to comprehend when there is limited coverage on the exact effects of disposable plastic bags on wildlife. Or so I thought, until last weekend when I read in the local news that a 3.5m crocodile died of starvation after swallowing 25 plastic shopping and garbage bags, a plastic wine cooler and a rubber float. The build up of plastic in his stomach prevented him from digesting food and led to his death in captivity on Sunday, after being taken in by authorities the previous day. What a horrible way to go.

After reading this I did a bit more research in to the actual numbers of wildlife deaths from plastic, and found that the Australian Seabird Rescue estimate that there are about 100,000 animals killed by plastic each year… so apparently our crocodile Whitey, as he was named, is far from the only casualty.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said Whitey’s death “reinforces our general view that the amount of marine debris in the ocean is too much and it’s damaging wildlife.”

Spending even a small amount of time researching the dangers of plastic bags turns up a frightening amount of information, but one that made the most impact on me was this documentary from Vice Magazine about the colossal amount of plastic waste (larger than Texas apparently!) now collecting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean:

http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1485308505&r=teaser