High in a cherry tree on Raymond Street, 300 yards from Main Beach in Santa Cruz, a tattered plastic shopping bag wrapped around a white-blossomed branch snaps in the breeze. It might have come from CVS, Safeway or the Apatzingan Taqueria up the block. Where it came from, however, isn’t as important to the environment as where it is now and where it will go once it finally blows down.
Since 2007, the locally based environmental group Save Our Shores has cleaned up 17,363 plastic bags from county beaches and riverbanks. There are plenty more where those came from. Statewide, Californians take home an estimated 19 billion plastic bags each year. Only about 5 percent of them are recycled.
So when the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors meets on April 13—nine days before Earth Day—it won’t be to simply encourage more people to recycle their single-use bags. It will be to discuss banning them altogether and simultaneously placing a per-bag fee of 10 to 25 cents on paper sacks in hopes of nudging shoppers away from unsustainable bag use of any kind.
The city of Santa Cruz has its own similar “ban-and-fee” ordinance ready to go before the city council, though no date has been set for its discussion. Several cities including San Francisco have nixed plastic shopping bags, and nine other cities and counties—including Scotts Valley, Watsonville, Capitola, Oakland, Los Angeles and Santa Clara County—are investigating doing the same. In addition, Marin County, Berkeley and San Jose are in line with Santa Cruz in attempting to tackle plastic and paper bags in one shot.
Laura Kasa, executive director of Save Our Shores, says the plastic-ban-paper-fee approach is the only way to achieve the ultimate goal: to get people using their own reusable bags.
“If you just ban plastic bags, people will simply switch to paper,” says Kasa. “Paper bags are, in a lot of ways, just as bad as plastic because of the [greenhouse gasses] involved in their manufacturing. We need to make single-use bags a faux-pas, just like wearing fur.”
District Five Supervisor Mark Stone, who proposed the ban back in November, says the greatest good would be a sea change in the way people regard single-use bags.
“The biggest impact would be a change in attitude, and we can’t always legislate that,” he says, adding, “It’s still important that we do something.”
The American Chemistry Council, a trade association representing plastic manufacturers, not surprisingly rejects the idea as unnecessary government interference. It says bag users simply need to recycle more.
“You don’t need to make people do this with a government mandate,” says Tim Shestek, a senior director with the Virginia-based ACC and the author of an opinion piece.html in last week’s Santa Cruz Weekly. “I think we have a fundamental difference of opinion in the proper role of government. Educating people about recycling is effective; banning or taxing products is not the way to go.”
Master Blaster
The city’s and county’s efforts to curtail plastic bag use comes on the heels of a widely anticipated “Master Environmental Assessment” published last month by policy consulting firm ICF International. The scientific report, which was bankrolled by the non-profit Green Cities California through donations by 18 cities, counties and nonprofits, investigates the nuts and bolts of enacting a plastic bag ban and paper bag fee. The document effectively allows interested jurisdictions all over California to use the data as the bulk of the required Environmental Impact Report that each city or county would have to complete before imposing a ban—exponentially reducing the cost of enacting a new law.
Hiring a firm to conduct the review came about after the plastic industry sued several cities in 2008 including San Francisco, Manhattan Beach and Oakland, when similar plastic bag bans were imposed. The lawsuits claimed the cities did not thoroughly investigate the environmental cost of increased paper bag use before banning plastic bags. Carol Misseldine, coordinator with Green Cities California, says she thinks the MEA will help keep other plastic bag-banning cities out of the courtroom.
“The [MEA] document will provide 80 percent of the content needed for any city to do an [Environmental Impact Report],” she says. “We think this will keep the new laws from being challenged legally.”
In interviews with county grocers and retail stores, a ban on plastic bags receives generally strong support. A fee on paper bags, however, is decidedly less popular.
George Sierra of Deluxe Foods in Aptos, for example, says he doesn’t want to charge his already cash-strapped customers any more money than he has to.
“We would support a ban on plastic bags,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s a good idea to put of fee on paper, especially in this economy.”
Supporters of the ban-and-fee approach know it isn’t perfect, but they say something has to be done. “We tend to live in a throwaway society,” says Stone, “and we, as a community, need to take more responsibility.”
