Adele Ferguson

Whale with 20 plastic bags revives calls for ban

WELL, THERE GOES the Seattle Times again, pushing the City Council to ban plastic bags only two years after voters said fuhgeddaboutit.

It apparently was driven to take up the cudgel again by the finding in West Seattle last year of a beached whale that had more than 20 plastic bags in its stomach.

Now I like whales as much as anybody, but I would be curious to know what kind of bags they were so their source could be identified. Campaigns to ban plastic bags are chiefly aimed at those in supermarkets but I receive my daily copy of The Times in a long plastic bag that I don’t hear the paper complaining about.

I’m not really crazy about plastic bags but they are handy if you can get the damn things open. A highlight of my life was the day I was in a grocery store and a woman walked up, picked up a sack, popped it open and started chucking apples into it.

How did you do that:? I demanded. When I think of all the time I have spent clawing at paper bags I could just cry. What is your secret? I’ll pay anything.

“Wet your fingers,” she said.

I wet my fingers and it was open sesame. I had discovered a truth that would make my life easier, after wasting God knows how many hours, probably months, working on bags I was convinced were sealed with Krazy Glue.

BEFORE I COULD communicate this newfound knowledge to those readers who have suffered this same defeat and humiliation at being confounded by a bag, an Associated Press story brought me up short.

A Savannah, Ga., state lawmaker announced she was introducing a bill to stop grocery baggers from licking their fingers before they opened the plastic bags. “Spit is spit,” declared Rep. Dorothy Pelote. “By any name, it’s still spit.” Baggers’ germs were being transmitted via grocery sacks that were handled by checkout clerks who didn’t wash up between customers, she said, and she was by Godfrey not going to have her groceries exposed to their germs.

Not only that, but the Georgia state epidemiologist warned that there was more danger to the finger licker than to the recipient of the bag opened with spit because it was like licking a dollar bill or the counter top. “You are getting the same germs,” he said.

Knowing how attentive the Seattle Times is to making everybody toe the line it draws for them, I wouldn’t be surprised if the city council isn’t encouraged editorially to call for a spit ban. You watch. I am in a quandary of deciding whether to carry Handi-wipes so I can dab off my fingers before licking them and open bags.

Even then, will witnesses take me for an employee and call the manager?

SO FAR AS I know, Bellingham is the only city in the state where plastic bags are banned, but if Seattle goes for it, the next battleground will be the state.

My solution is to take the battle to the manufacturers. Remember when the push was on to ban tabs in pop and beer cans because they somehow wound up in fishes’ stomachs? The can makers solved it practically overnight by making the tabs undetachable.

Surely they can figure out how to make a plastic bag that won’t melt during use but will dissolve in the dump. That’s the complaint about the current bags, they take forever to dissipate. How they wind up in Puget Sound for the whales to munch on I don’t know, that’s never been explained.

A further suggestion: offer a reward for the best idea on use of bales of plastic bags so they can go on being useful in their second life. Building of levies in flood areas? Bridges across all waterways? Think about it.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)