 So far New Jersey's lucky with only a few towns that have plastic bag bands in them But what's it like to live in a plastic bag town? Hey there njrude22.com here with a general interest vlog today It's about the plastic bag band Right now New Jersey has maybe a little over a dozen or so Cities that have this plastic band bag ban at supermarkets and other retail stores There's a couple big cities, you know like Jersey City and a whole bunch of shore towns are Jumping on this bandwagon of plastic bag bands, which is silly because you can just go to a next town over and Buy by your groceries and get them in plastic bags We don't live in a plastic bag town yet, but we spent a week we went to Cape Cod for a little vacation and I want to do a few comparisons between You know the majority of New Jersey and the towns that are heavy on their plastic bag bands Now just for comparison even though, you know, Massachusetts is a bigger state I guess I'm not sure what the overall population is between New Jersey and Massachusetts, but I think Massachusetts has you know, almost a hundred towns That have enacted this plastic bag band and one of the towns we were staying in or visited to go supermarket shopping had the plastic bag band and It was a real big pain in the neck I'll tell you because they gave you paper bags which are clunky and you can't carry like like 10 of them at once you have to you know Wrestle with them or you know normally I can carry like a hundred pounds of groceries on each hand with the plastic bags And we have these awesome little hooks in our trunk of our car and I can hang the plastic bags. Nothing spills They all stay suspended in the trunk Plastic bags are great and they're also not single use by a long shot for us here We use them for everything over and over Primarily as a as kitchen garbage bags We use them almost 100% for kitchen garbage bags, but we have other uses as well such as dog poop Cleaning up or bringing some yucky laundry or whatever you need it to the schlep things around so the plastic bags are Are very useful and I think they're very wrong when they say that they're single use Maybe they're single use for for some people and maybe some of those people who only use them once bring them back They have all these plastic bag return centers at both non Band cities as well as Cities that are all full-on recycling for the environment. There was these other things. We saw at a supermarket in Massachusetts They have like all these heavy-duty machines, okay that crush Your cans and your plastic and your bottles But they require electricity from the power plant and so on and so it kind of makes me laugh that they requires Electricity to crush these cans. I don't know And they had all these books that weren't printed on 100% recycled paper It seems so ludicrous, but we noticed also In Massachusetts where the band has been been going on for at least a year in some Some cities that the the large number of customers were already conditioned into bringing their bags like like like obedient Like bees or workers like I sat there in the parking lot I just want I watched all these people, you know, they get out of their car instead of just running into the Supermarket buying what they need and getting out of they went to their car they they Rifled through their trunk. They had to get a cart over because then you know They had to put like ten reusable bags in their cart and and they're like all Obeying which I think is kind of funny And I asked some people I said this is kind of ridiculous Isn't it and most of the people if not all of them looked at me like I had two heads Oh, this is this is for recycling. They looked at me like I did something wrong by even suggesting how silly it is to Ban just one kind of plastic bag and not the million others that they have out there like dry cleaning bags poop bags garbage bags Which is I mean are they gonna ban got plastic garbage bags next I don't understand this at all and I think it's just sort of like Redistributing the money from one group to another and that's how it is in society most of the time these days And there were other differences between these these very progressive and Forward-thinking cities in Massachusetts. I mean they they went out of their way for bike lanes and all sorts of stuff And it seemed like the entire Energy and productivity of these cities we visited seem to just bring everybody down and We didn't like that so I don't know what to do in the future I'm guessing as long as these people are are Controlling the narrative that that the plastic bag ban will probably eventually Take over until someone wakes up and says what are we doing here? This is ridiculous. We're going in reverse So that's it Just a very interesting observation And I hope I hope that more people in New Jersey just say you know give it a give it a rest Go find something else more important and to take care of other than what we take our groceries home with and the Convenience that they provide us have a good day