Santa Fe schoolkids forcing decision on plastic bag ban; chemical toilet not yet dead

Packaging, packaging, packaging!

To fix the global economy: "Put a price on carbon." --Jessica Mathews president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

@BenjySarlin:

Obama talks up wind today. Romney talks up coal. We're 2/5 of the way to summoning Captain Planet.

KCRW's To the Point:

25% of the world now bans plastic bags, and Los Angeles County is one of a growing number of US communities getting on board. Will the limits of cloth bags like Grandma used to carry require thinking about what goes in them?

From a piece by Julie Ann Grimm in the Santa Fe New Mexican:

Fifth-grader Sofia Ortiz waited for nearly an hour to speak her piece to Santa Fe city councilors. Ortiz, 10, read in The New Mexican about a vote this year by the city of Los Angeles to prohibit single-use plastic bags at retail stores. She wants Santa Fe to “share that same kind of leadership,” she told councilors, and she promised to help. Staff in the Economic Development Division and members of the city Business and Quality of Life Committee are working on a draft proposal for a way to limit plastic-bag use at retail stores in the city. The topic is slated for discussion at the committee’s 11 a.m. meeting Tuesday at City Hall.

From Biomass Magazine:

200 billion pounds of plastic is produced every year. Due to the technical limitations or inconvenience of recycling, only a fraction of that material resurfaces in new plastic products. It takes no imagination whatsoever to throw away plastic and doom it to the fate of a thousand years in a landfill, but plastic waste doesn’t just threaten terra firma.

Paper, plastic...or hemp: broken pipelines and 70 million acres of collapsed pine forest. What a way to run an empire.

Today’s weird news, chemical toilet not dead yet:

Residents of Wyoming, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Vermont expect the least improvement.--Gallup.

New Mexico scores well, too.

Bill McKibben on today's To the Point.