Monroe County residents who shop in Toledo will want to know about this headline:

The Toledo Blade reports today that Mayor Finkbeiner is considering a 5-cent tax on plastic shopping bags.

A snippet:

The mayor is following New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and wants to tax you an extra 5 cents for every plastic bag you take home from a store.

In a letter sent yesterday to city council, Mr. Finkbeiner said other cities are “aggressively acting to discourage citizens from using disposable shopping bags.”

He said the bags litter the streets, clog sewers, and take up valuable landfill space.

Well, I guess this boils down to personal responsibility. Why on earth is anybody letting those plastic bags just fly around in the wind?

Here’s what I do with my plastic shopping bags – they go into a kitchen drawer for re-use. Most of them become trash can liners for four small trash cans throughout my house. That means I only need to buy new plastic bags for my kitchen-sized trash can.

If I am given paper bags, and some stores still use them, I use the paper bags to haul newspapers to the recycling bin.

Now, I might use cloth shopping bags if I had some. I’ve been known to put a small purchase in my purse or messenger bag rather than take a shopping bag.

However, most of the cloth shopping bags I’ve seen have a store logo and still cost the consumer a chunk of money. That doesn’t seem to me to be a very attractive investment.