Today is the last day of shopping bag sanity in New Jersey (Opinion)

Tomorrow is Wednesday, May 4, 2020. The day New Jersey's strict plastic bag ban goes into effect. You can also mark it on your calendar as the day common sense died.

Of course, it died a long time ago. Its memory has been vanishing more quickly with each passing day.

Did the internet and social media sap out so much of our attention span, that we don't think, we just emote? Or perhaps it's our public school system concentrating on telling kids to feel more than think and what to feel and think.

This move tomorrow is just a local colloquial symptom of a much bigger problem. The activists and pandering politicians have convinced even normally clear-thinking people that we're helping to save the planet by forcing people to take "reusable" bags to do their shopping.

Will it really make a difference? As Judi Franco points out, even the normally far-left tree-hugging emotional hemophiliacs at NPR make the case that these bag bans are pointless and possibly more wasteful.

In their article, they cite a 2011 study in the United Kingdom that found a person would have to use a cloth bag 131 times before it was better for climate change than using a plastic grocery bag once.

There's also a Danish study that finds you'd have to use a cloth bag 20,000 times over a plastic bag to make any difference after calculating the environmental impacts of producing and cleaning the bags.

All of that doesn't matter. It makes people feel like they're doing something good for the planet and the people "in charge" were wise and caring enough to make it a law.

It's a pointless law with little to no impact on the environment or the planet. I've taken a stand against compliance with stupid, pointless, virtue signaling lawmakers and their laws. Some of the supermarket personnel I've spoken to say they have a policy of not bagging groceries with usable bags unless you buy them brand new at the point of purchase.

Plus, the shopping services will only be able to bring you your groceries in new reusable bags, costing 6,7, 8 dollars or more for each trip.

I'll be showing up with my usual plastic bags that I bought online and bagging my own stuff as I usually do on my almost daily trips to the supermarket.

I can't wait for the dirty looks and occasional lecture. That's what people live for today, and I'm happy to help them out.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Dennis Malloy only.

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