Letter: There are negatives to banning plastic bags

If Iowa City goes green on plastic bags, will Cedar Rapids be far behind? Not so fast. There are many negatives to banning plastic bags.

I live in a senior complex with a common garbage chute so we are required to use plastic bags. Most households would continue to use plastic bags because garbage is messy, i.e. food containers, nose tissues etc. Instead of using store bags we would have to buy them. This is a trade off. Where is the advantage?

A good number of bags are recycled so there are not very many unused bags in landfills or blowing about the countryside. There will always be a few people who litter. The deposit on soda bottles and cans did not stop littering.

Bag for bag, paper uses more energy and is more expensive to make, so where is the savings? Paper is no substitute for soggy garbage. And what about the trees destroyed to make those 100 billion paper bags that are to replace plastic.

I read a medical article that said cloth grocery bags are unsanitary because they are soon covered with food pathogens. People do not wash them. I stopped using them.

Now if Iowa City or Cedar Rapids wants to impose another hidden tax when we buy plastic bags, that is another story.

Thomas Janik

Cedar Rapids