Five Cent Bags

I heard a lot of grumbling about this last week and I was going to wait a bit to watch the (r)evolution before commenting, but the AP just ran an article on Washington DC's new tax on disposable bags.  Every time you buy something in DC, the cashier will ask if you want a bag (or how many).  You are then charged 5 cents per bag.  The article talks about people avoiding it by shopping in Virginia - where other taxes are higher - or imperiling their purchases.

Apparently, the tax is an attempt to clean up the Anacostia River by reducing litter. My plastic bags almost never end up in the garbage.  In fact, I let up on using the reusables a bit because we kept running out of plastic bags to hold our recycling.  And the smaller ones I brought to the library for use at the Used Book Store. 

Here is my favorite part of the piece:

"This is like a behavioral economist's dream," Dan Ariely, an economics professor at Duke University and author of "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions," told the Washington Post. "Here we will see people go to extreme lengths to save very little money."

It seems that since its January 1 effective date, the estimate is that plastic bag use has been reduced by 50%.  I expect there will be some sort of counter-revolution.