Thread by @bopinion

Things California has banned:

2016: Plastic bags 🛍️
2019: Plastic straws 🥤

What’s next? Paper receipts 🧾 bloom.bg/2FQkF6c

A San Francisco lawmaker has introduced legislation to ban paper receipts unless a customer asks for one. Proponents argue the environmental benefits will be significant.

In reality, #SkipTheSlip would have almost no impact, writes @AdamMinter bloom.bg/2FQkF6c

Like the plastic-straw ban that preceded it, the receipt ban is simply another low-impact environmental campaign that asks little of Californians and will accomplish less.

Worse, it diverts attention from more pressing waste and recycling issues ♻️ bloom.bg/2FQkF6c

Receipt-making in the U.S. uses:

📃 314,000 tons of paper
🌲 Five million felled trees
🌫️ Generates six billion pounds of CO2 bloom.bg/2FQkF6c

Those sound like big numbers, but they’re not.

🧾 314,000 tons is less than 0.08% of the more than 400 million tons of all paper products – from receipts to cardboard – used per year across the world.

Paper receipts are merely rounding errors bloom.bg/2FQkF6c

What’s really filling up California’s trash bins?

📦📦📦📦📦📦📦📦📦📦📦

Cardboard and other packaging left over from e-commerce shipments

Dubbed the “Amazon Effect," the global market for packaging is set to grow 14% annually through 2022 📈 bloom.bg/2FQkF6c

Ideally, all that cardboard could be recycled at no extra cost to anyone. But in 2018, China slammed the door on many imported recyclables.

California's recycling programs started losing money, raising rates and seeking new locations for their trash bloom.bg/2FQkF6c

The current situation should alarm environmentalists and spur serious proposals to create sustainable solutions, like making it easier to set up paper mills and plastics recyclers in California.

Bans on paper receipts and straws are not those proposals bloom.bg/2FQkF6c

"Forgo a slip of paper!" is no way to change the environment.

The proposed legislation only serves to distract California consumers from addressing one of the state's most complex issues.

Environmental advocates who are serious will skip such campaigns bloom.bg/2FQkF6c