Santa Cruz County lawmakers are one step closer to banning plastic shopping bags from stores. On Tuesday, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors approved a plan to ban plastic shopping bags and impose a 10-cent fee on paper bags. The actual ban, however, may take another year to impose as county leaders ordered a full environmental review of the plan before they enforce it.
The move, which was originally proposed by District Five Supervisor Mark Stone, is described as an effort to wean residents off single-use bags altogether and encourage them to bring their own sacks to stores. Local non-profit Save Our Shores claims its volunteers have cleaned up 17,363 such bags from county rivers, beaches, parks and streets since 2007.
The city of Santa Cruz has its own similar ban in the works, as does Capitola, Scotts Valley and Watsonville.
Enacting bag bans in the Golden State was recently made easier when the non-profit environmental group Green Cities California sponsored an independent “Master Environmental Assessment” that investigated the impacts on a community of a single-use bag ban. The MEA provides the bulk of information needed in any local environmental review and thus saves cash-strapped governments like the county and city of Santa Cruz large amounts of money involved with completing the reviews. Before the MEA, plastic makers had also successfully sued several cities when similar bans were imposed.
