Should flimsy plastic bags be banned or taxed?

A single discarded bag can wreak havoc on a farm

By Wilmer N. Stoneman II

Members of the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation, the state’s largest agricultural advocacy group, support legislation encouraging retailers to use paper or reusable shopping bags to reduce the problems litter from plastic bags cause farmers.

Jodi Roth argues that plastic bag litter accounts for only 0.6 percent of litter and 0.5 percent of the solid-waste stream. The damages a single discarded bag can wreak on a farm, however, outstrip those percentages.

Virginia farmers and foresters contribute $79 billion annually to the state’s economy and provide more than 500,000 jobs. Why would anyone endorse the use of an item that can potentially harm the state’s largest industry?

Plastic bags in farm fields have killed cattle. Beef cattle are Virginia’s second largest agricultural commodity — generating $373 million in cash receipts for the state’s economy in 2010. Plastic bags also damage equipment and pose safety hazards to farmers who try to remove them from machinery.

For Virginia cotton growers, who contributed $51 million to Virginia’s economy in 2010, plastic bags create a serious economic problem. The plastic from bags in cotton fields gets shredded as cotton is picked and ultimately renders finished textiles useless. Mills don’t want to buy cotton from farms where plastic is mixed into the fiber.

Paper bags are biodegradable and don’t cause the same problems if they end up in farm fields. And when timber — a renewable resource — is harvested for paper, foresters plant more trees.

Increased use of paper or reusable shopping bags will reduce farm damages caused by plastic bags and help keep the state’s agriculture industry strong.

Stoneman is associate director of governmental relations for the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation.

Plastic bags save time, money and the environment

By Jodi Roth

All litter can be a detriment to the environment, but plastic bags make up only a tiny fraction of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream. Plastic bag manufacturing and recycling also provide 2,000 jobs to hard-working Virginians.

The Farm Bureau is pushing less sustainable and environmental options such as paper and reusable bags. But plastic bags produce significantly fewer greenhouse gases than paper or reusable bags.

Reusable bags cannot be recycled and are mostly made from foreign oil and are imported from Asia, and they have also been proven to harbor dangerous bacteria.

Plastic bags are 100 percent recyclable and are made into dozens of other products such as playground equipment, backyard decks and fences.

We agree with the Farm Bureau that existing litter laws should be enforced to the fullest, but banning or taxing plastic bags is not the answer and will have zero impact.

Encouraging plastic bag recycling, which has grown nearly 55 percent since 2005, is a better way to capture plastic bags and other film product.

The effects on retailers and consumers if plastic bags are banned or taxed:

– Retailers stand to lose. When they have to switch from plastic to the more expensive paper alternative, they need to either raise prices or take a hit to their bottom lines.

– It takes much more room to store paper bags, limiting warehouse space for other items. At a time when food prices are up 8.5 percent from 2009 and consumers are already tightening their belts, an added burden in this economy simply isn’t good policy.

– Would consumers pay the bag tax out of pocket? Will they have to sacrifice groceries to pay the tax?

– Would a ban impact how much consumers paying with SNAP will be able to purchase at one time if they cannot afford to pay for reusable shopping bags?

–  This would significantly slow down the checkout process, with clerks having to stop and count bags before closing a transaction.

Roth is director of government affairs for the Virginia Retail Merchants Association.

Roanoke City Council members may not like what the public has to say about huge raises. But they’ll have to listen.

Roanoke City Council ordinarily leaves no navel ungazed upon when deciding even the nit-pickiest of issues. For substantial decisions, months drag by in briefings and meetings that offer ample opportunity for all to be heard. So it is astounding that council initially failed to consider that the public might have something to say about the 28.5 percent raises the majority wishes to grant itself.

It looks as though those hankering for a big raise wanted to slip something by unnoticed. Fat chance. The raises are the talk of the town, and the town now will have two chances to speak directly to the council members. Those opportunities, though, come merely as a byproduct of the majority ensuring they are all in attendance for two consecutive meetings so that the vote goes in their favor.

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A federal shield law is needed, but that alone won’t absolve Obama for secret subpoenas on journalists.

Embarrassed by revelations of his administration’s flagrant intrusion into press freedoms, President Obama last week sought to squelch the bad publicity with an announcement that he still supports long ­dormant legislation establishing a federal shield law.

The law, which would protect reporters from being forced to reveal confidential sources, is worth resuscitating. But it’s a tattered and inadequate fig leaf for the embattled president. The proposed law is riddled with loopholes, and it’s impossible to assess whether it would have prevented the Department of Justice from snooping through journalists’ phone records because administration officials have refused to discuss how they obtained subpoenas in secret.

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Some Montgomery County voters will go back to the future when they cast ballots in the June 11 Democratic Party primary.

Voters in Montgomery Precinct F-1 will use paper ballots when they step into the booths at Luther Memorial Lutheran Church in Blacksburg, but not in an old-school way. They will feed their marked ballots into a Unisyn OVO optical scan voting machine, a new piece of equipment scheduled to be phased in at other Montgomery precincts in time for the 2016 presidential election.

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By Frank Beamer

As many of you know, I grew up in the wonderful little community of Fancy Gap. For those of you not familiar with my hometown, it is nestled atop the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Carroll County not too far from the North Carolina border.

Fortunately for me and my brother and sister, we grew up in a home where getting an education was not a question, but a quest. Our mother, Herma, taught for 30 years in the public school system and inspired us to read and achieve.

I was fortunate enough to receive an athletic scholarship to attend college, but I knew I had to continue my education even if I had not been a student-athlete. That was more than 50 years ago. Today, further education beyond high school is even more important. By 2020, 60 percent of all jobs in America, and in Virginia, will require education and training beyond that provided by a simple high school diploma.

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Beamer is the head coach of the Virginia Tech football team.

By Pete Hamilton

As I was driving down the interstate recently, it occurred to me that perhaps the National Rifle Association is on to something.

There I was, driving along in the right-hand lane, striving to remain within striking distance of the posted speed limit while staying at least a heartbeat in front of the continuing stream of grilles that kept looming up ominously in my rearview mirror. I tried to ignore the glares of the drivers of these vehicles when they zipped past me as soon as a brief gap in the oncoming traffic in the passing lane opened up.

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Hamilton is a retired business executive who lives in Rockbridge County.

By Caleb Simon

Virginia is at a critical juncture in setting its new building code that would dramatically boost energy efficiency in the state. Saving energy saves money and offers a variety of benefits to our communities. Sadly, an organization is attempting to prevent this adoption that could cause Virginia to miss out on this opportunity to modernize and improve our infrastructure statewide.

The Home Builders Association of Virginia has spent a great deal of time and money to prevent the adoption of the latest energy efficiency code. It is disguising its attempt as concern for the consumer; however, when we look at the facts, they reveal that the only concern they are really protecting is their own profit margin.

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Simon lives in Christiansburg and is a licensed contractor and energy auditor.

By Keith Martin

Re: Ed Palm’s commentary, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” published on May 8:

First, I would like to thank Palm for his service to our country, and congratulate him on his first grandchild.

Although I am not quite sure what motivated Palm to pen this article, I know what has caused me to respond. My oldest daughter is graduating high school in a couple of weeks and will be attending Liberty University in the fall. She is more precious to me than oxygen, and I would never want to put her in a place that is unsafe.

That is one of the reasons that I approve of her decision to attend Liberty this fall. I firmly believe that Liberty is a safer environment because of concealed carry.

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Martin lives in Roanoke.

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By George Will

Leaving aside the seriousness of lawlessness, and the corruption of our civic culture by the professionally pious, this past week has been amusing. There was the spectacle of advocates of an ever-larger regulatory government expressing shock about such government’s large capacity for misbehavior. And, entertainingly, the answer to the question “Will Barack Obama’s scandals derail his second-term agenda?” was a question: What agenda?

The scandals are interlocking and overlapping in ways that drain his authority. Everything he advocates requires Americans to lavish on government something his administration, and big government generally, undermines — trust.

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Will is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.

By Wade Gilley

Dark clouds are forming over America’s public universities as the Wall Street mind-set spreads across more of our institutions. A decade of excessive spending based largely on unlimited student loans is looming dangerously over a major national asset.

In January, Moody’s, the nation’s premier credit rating organization, issued a report titled “U.S. Higher Education Outlook Negative in 2013.” Moody’s evaluation was based on the hundreds of billions of dollars in institutional debt incurred by America’s public universities, including exotic non-traditional financial schemes.

Moody’s evaluation did not include the trillion dollars of debt currently owed by college and university students and former students. Today, more than 35 million Americans owe an average of $24,000 in college loans and half have not earned and are not likely to earn a four-year degree.

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Gilley, a retired university president and former Virginia secretary of education, lives in Reston, Virginia. He is the author of more than a dozen books on higher education administration, including one translated into Japanese and one into Chinese.