https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/world/europe/italy-plastic-bags.html
The Italian government learned the hard way, early this year, that no good deed goes unpunished.
Acting under a 2015 European Union directive addressing the global disaster caused by plastic bags, which take hundreds of years to degrade, Italian lawmakers enacted a measure banning the use of plastic bags for fruit, vegetables and baked goods in favor of eco-friendly biodegradable and compostable alternatives.
The government was firm on one point: The new bags could not be given out for free, and the charge of 1 euro cent to 3 euro cents per eco-friendly bag had to appear on the sales bill. Failure to charge consumers would result in a fine for the retailer.
But since the law went into effect on Jan. 1, it has been met with a flood of protests in grocery stores and supermarkets throughout Italy, as well as on social media.
...Stefano Ciafani, the director general of Legambiente, Italy’s largest environmental association.
“You would think that the director general had never been in a supermarket,” Mr. Ciafani retorted. “He suggests that the fruit and vegetable aisle is akin to a sterilized operating room where nothing must be touched. “There’s dirt on those vegetables, that’s a fact.”
Legambiente applauded the spirit of the law but gave low marks to the government for execution.
“The crazy thing is that the Italian law is very advanced — more advanced than the E.U. directive. But the government handled it all badly,” Mr. Ciafani said. “They allowed a cutting-edge law to become the object of political conflict, but, then, we are in a period of electoral campaign.”
“Everyone is always quick to say that they are environmentally friendly and mock Trump for global warming, but where you ask them for a minuscule and a little-more-than-symbolic concrete contribution, they become indignant,” the historian Marco Gervasoni wrote in a front-page editorial published on Thursday in Il Messaggero.
Italian news outlets reported that the annual cost per family averaged between €4 and €12.50 per year, or about $4.80 to $15, depending on how much one paid per bag.
The irony is that the griping over the need to pay 1 or 2 cents for produce bags far outweighed protests over 5 percent increases in domestic gas and electricity bills as well as increases in highway tolls.
