[1]
Hilex Poly [2]
Hilex has created a web site [3] to promote their alternative solution to the bag ban, one that increases plastic shopping bag recycling across the state of Oregon without banning products or taxing families.
The site lists a number of problems facing Oregon today:
Recent reports and studies have shown that Oregon has major issues that the state government needs to focus on. Oregon’s unemployment rate was 10.6 percent in December, outpacing the national average by nearly 15 percent. The US Department of Agriculture ranks Oregon among the top five states in the nation for hunger. Last year, nearly 20,000 Oregonians reported themselves as homeless, and over half of these were in families with children.
And then asks the question:
With problems like these, why would Oregon’s state legislators waste their time banning plastic shopping bags?
Hilex is a participant and endorser of the EPA’s WasteWise Program [4], and their web site explains that they are deeply committed to the environment, but they don’t agree with the bag-banning bill as it stands today.
They are a US-based company with more than 1,250 employees across America, and they are also an environmental innovator—the company created the world’s largest closed loop plastic bag recycling plant, which recycled more than 20 million pounds of post-consumer bags and films in 2010 alone.