If you live in Columbia, Missouri the area’s branch of the Sierra Club is advocating for a policy that will literally make you sick if you shop in the city’s grocery stores. Members of the Sierra Club Osage Group are pushing for an ordinance that will ban the use of plastic bags in city grocery stores that sell perishable food.

Hopefully reason will prevail and the ordinance will be rejected. The results of a study released in 2012 on municipalities that had bans on plastic bags turned up some pretty harrowing results. It was conducted by Jonathan Klick of University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Property and Environment Research Center and Joshua D. Wright of the George Mason University School of Law. The two researchers found a correlation between increased emergency room visits and even deaths in places with plastic bag bans in which foodborne bacteria like coliform and E.coli as the reason for the increases.

If the ban passes hopefully the city and Sierra Club will encourage people to wash their bags after usage. However, I have noticed people have a tendency to either forget or procrastinate when it comes to things like that. A report done by the Association for Food Protection discovered that in many cases shoppers rarely washed the bags which means increases in food borne illnesses. Maybe even deaths. Even Jonathan Klick one of the study’s researchers noticed the same thing.

None the less, if increased sickness or deaths related to food borne illness come to Columbia, Missouri you know who is ultimately responsible. To avoid this possibility, shopping in a town or city nearby that lacks a plastic bag ban would be a better choice. ReasonTV reported on Los Angeles’ ban on plastic bags with some surprising answers from city politicians. In particular, the one council member interviewed that voted against the ordinance. Meantime, ask not what environmentalists are doing for you, but rather what they are doing to you.