HELPING TO STOP PLASTIC AND PAPER BAGS
Under the plastic bag legislation, called the Anacostia River Cleanup and Protection Act, businesses would keep a penny for each bag sold, and the other four cents would go into a fund to clean up the Anacostia. If businesses offer a discount to consumers who bring reusable bags, they would get to keep two cents for each bag sold.
The legislation, sponsored by council members Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) and Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), was fast-tracked even as some cities rethink proposed plastic bag taxes because of the recession.
The Seattle City Council tried to impose a 20-cent fee on plastic and paper, but the proposal must go before voters in August. In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) had inserted a similar 5-cent fee on plastic bags in his budget proposal, but the City Council blocked the measure last month over concerns that it would hurt consumers in tight times.
San Francisco is the only large U.S. city that has banned plastic bags. Unlike most other cities that have passed (or attempted to pass) legislation on this issue, the DC tax will apply to both plastic and paper bags. Paper is sometimes seen as an improvement over plastic as it is more biodegradable and contains fewer toxins. However, it is not significantly more friendly to the environment as its production contributes to habitat destruction (through tree harvesting) and uses a great deal of energy for a product that will be used once and then discarded.
Making the tax apply to both plastic and paper bags removes at least one objection that opponents of bag taxes from the plastic industry are fond of advancing. It also pushes residents towards using reusable bags rather single-use disposable bags. Many stores now sell cheap reusable shopping bags (made from oil. IE: poly bags, polyester bags). These are not the only options, however. Cloth bags are best, as long as the size and strength are appropriate for the purchases. While obtaining reusable bags may add some up-front cost, reusable bags generally pay for themselves if grocery stores offer a per-bag discount for customers who use them.
Taxing single-use shopping bags is one step towards cleaning towards reducing the volume of waste and cleaning up trash-strewn waterways. Dedicating the revenue raised through this legislation towards Anacostia River clean-ups should bring some needed attention to a beautiful but neglected river. Hopefully few residents will pay the tax and more bring their own bags.
Washington, DC, collected $149,432.27 in January from its tax on plastic and paper bags, according to the district’s Office of Tax and Revenue. January was the first month of the 5-cent-per-bag tax on plastic and paper carryout bags. D.C. Council member Tommy Wells, who supported the measure, said businesses are handing out 50-80 percent fewer bags as a result of the tax.
“While it’s difficult to project the annual results based on just the first month’s experience, the report shows that residents are making great strides in reducing disposable bag use,” Wells said in a news release on his Web site. He said the numbers suggest that residents are beating projections in how quickly they start to use fewer dispoable bags. The District’s Chief Financial Officer estimated last year that residents use about 270 million disposable bags per year, or 22.5 million bags per month.
The new report suggests that residents used a little less than 3 million disposable bags in January. That could also mean the CFO’s estimate was unrealistically high, or that January was a slow month for retail shopping in Washington. But no matter how you compare the numbers, it’s evident that the tax is having an impact.
“I’m thrilled with these initial results,” Wells said. “Not only are we reducing the number of disposable bags entering our environment, but we also have new resources flowing to help with the cleanup and restoration of the Anacostia River.”
Source: plasticsnews.com
Fact: No. In fact, plastic bags have not been banned anywhere, not even in San Francisco. San Francisco is requiring that consumers use compostable plastic bags instead of 100% recyclable bags. Contrary to popular belief, there is a growing movement to increase access to recycle plastic bags – not eliminate them. New Jersey, Connecticut, and cities in California have all taken recent action to table legislation that would ban certain types of plastic bags and instead are now looking to implement plastic bag recycling programs.
Fact: Plastic bags are 100% recyclable and for all environmental impacts related to air emissions, water emissions and solid waste – those of paper bags are significantly greater than that of plastic grocery bags:
• Plastic bags use 40% less energy to produce and generate 80% less solid waste than paper1
• Paper bags generate 70% more emissions, and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags.2
• Even paper bags made from 100% recycled fiber use more fossil fuels than plastic bags3
Fact: The item most frequently encountered in landfills is paper—on average, it accounts for more than 40% of a landfill’s contents.4 Newspapers alone take up as much as 13% of landfill space.5
Cigarette butts, chewing gum, and candy wrappers account for about 95% of all litter in the English-speaking world.6 Education, as well as responsible use and disposal of all materials and products, is the key to reducing litter.
Fact: Virtually nothing – not paper, food, plastic or even compostable or bio degradable products – decompose in today’s landfills, because they are actually designed to be as stable and dry as possible. Research by William Rathje, who runs the Garbage Project, has shown that when excavated from a landfill, newspapers from the 1960s can be intact and readable.
Fact: Plastic bags are extraordinarily energy-efficient to manufacture. Less than .05% of a barrel of oil goes into making all the plastic bags used in the US while 93% – 95% of every barrel of crude oil is burned for fuel and heating purposes.7 Although they are made from natural gas or oil, plastic bags actually consume less fossil fuels during their lifetime than do compostable plastic and paper bags.8
Fact: In order to breakdown, compostable bags must be sent to an industrial composting facility, not backyard piles or municipal composting centers. There are very few of these facilities in the U.S. and where these facilities are not available, compostable bags will sit in landfills because they can’t be recycled.
Fact: Since paper bag production has more negative environmental impacts related to air emissions, water emissions and solid waste than plastic grocery bags, they’re not a solution. Recycling and proper disposal of all products would make sure that any threat to the environment, including wildlife, would be reduced.
Fact: Recycling does work. The problem is not everyone knows that plastic grocery bags are 100% recyclable and not everyone has access to plastic bag recycling in their community. A national at-store plastic bag recycling program would bring the recycling solution to everyone and increase rates. One Southern supermarket chain has such a program, and recycles more than 20% of the volume of plastic bags that it provides to customers.
Fact: The price of not recycling them is high. Recycling can help save resources and minimize the amount of waste going to landfills. Also, recycling helps reduce litter, as bags are contained and stored. Its worth noting that it takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound of paper.9
Fact: Today there is a growing market for recycled plastic that didn’t exist 15 years ago. It’s also cheaper now to use recycled plastic than to obtain new materials, increasing potential for more recycling of used plastic bags. Recycled plastic grocery and shopping bags are currently being made into new consumer products such as clean new plastic shopping bags, outdoor decking and railing products.
1. U.S. EPA website, (www.epa.gov/region1/communities/shopbags.html)
2. Ibid
3. REPA of Polyethylene and Unbleached Paper Grocery Sacks, Prepared for the Solid Waste Council, Franklin Associates Report, June 1990
4. U.S. EPA website, (www.epa.gov/msw/paper.htm)
5. U.S. EPA website, ( http://www.epa.gov/msw/faq.htm)
6. Litter Composition Survey of England, October 2004, produced by ENCAMS for INCPEN www.incpen.org/pages/userdata/incp/LitterCompSurvey24Jan2005.pdf).
7. Chemical Market Associates, Inc.
8. Évaluation des impacts environnementaux des sacs de caisse Carrefour (Evaluation of the Environmental Impact of Carrefour Merchandise Bags), Prepared by Price-
Waterhouse-Coopers/Ecobilan (EcoBalance), February 2004, #300940BE8, (www.ademe.fr/htdocs/actualite/rapport_carrefour_post_revue_critique_v4.pdf).
9. U.S. EPA website, (www.epa.gov/region1/communities/shopbags.html)
American Chemistry Council spent $180,625 in August fighting a 20-cent fee on paper and plastic shopping bags.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported last week that the American Chemistry Council spent $180,625 in August fighting a 20-cent fee on paper and plastic shopping bags.
The “green fee,” which also imposes a tax on Styrofoam containers, was approved by Seattle’s city council in July and is set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2009. But the ACC, an Arlington, Va.-based trade group that mainly represents plastics and chlorine manufacturers, has been trying to have the issue put to a citywide referendum. To that end, the the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax, which consists of the ACC and 7-Eleven, Inc., has collected about 22,000 signatures to get the referendum on the ballot. (That works out to about $8 per signature, notes the P-I.)
If the coalition’s efforts are successful – and the Seattle Times reports that it looks like they will be – then the ordinance will be held off until the voters decide to accept or repeal it. The earliest it would go on the ballot is August 2009.
Some Seattleites are confused by the campaign. In a separate article, the P-I quotes one signatory – a shopper who brings her own bags to the supermarket – who thought she was signing a petition to outlaw plastic bags.
The coalition argues that a 20-cent bag fee would cost consumers $300 each year. This figure seems high. First, it assumes that the tax wouldn’t be at all effective in dissuading shoppers from using the bags, which is the point of the ordinance. Second, $300 assumes 1,500 bags per year, or almost 29 per week. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that Americans throw away some 100 billion bags per year, which works out to about 6 or 7 bags per American per week.
The site also asserts that Seattle found that 91 percent of its residents “reuse or recycle” plastic shopping bags. While this may very well be true – I’ll bet that most of us line our wastebaskets with the things – this is not the same thing as a 91 percent recycling rate. In fact, according to Worldwatch, only 0.6 percent of plastic bags are recycled.
The coalition says that in Ireland, which enacted a fee for plastic bags in March 2002, “consumers ended up purchasing heavier plastic bags to replace the shopping bags they previously reused around their homes. Today in Ireland, they use even more plastic bags of all types than they did before the tax” [emphasis in original]. As evidence, the coalition cites a report from a British plastics trade group that shows a six percent increase in the mass of plastic bags imported to Ireland from 2001 to 2006. But what they don’t mention is that the Irish population grew by more than eight percent during that period.
Seattle is just the latest front in the ACC’s battle against laws that seek to reduce plastic-bag consumption. In March 2007, San Francisco became the first US city to ban the bags, a decision condemned by the ACC, which argued that the ban would harm plastic-bag-recycling efforts. The ACC used the same argument in opposing anti-plastic-bag measures on Maui and Hawaii’s Big Island and in Malibu, Fla., which passed, and again when in opposing an act in California’s state legislature, which didn’t.
The ACC also often argues that making a plastic shopping bag uses only about 70 percent of the energy required to produce a paper bag that carries the same amount. But the group isn’t using this argument in Seattle, because the city seeks to tax both paper and plastic.
Source: csmonitor.com
Lobbying, legal threats turn prohibitions into voluntary recycling drives
The plastics industry had no intention of allowing the San Francisco model to spread without a fight, though. It quickly and quietly joined with retailers and other business interests and launched a successful counterattack, using lobbying muscle to quash proposed bans. In the face of the onslaught, the cities have instituted voluntary recycling programs that proponents of the bans say are ineffective and likely to remain so.
And in at least two instances, plastics interests have turned the tables on their green adversaries by filing lawsuits on environmental grounds in an effort to prevent bans from taking effect.
“The plastic industry … will try to win local battle by local battle,” says Marc Mihaly, director of the environmental law center at Vermont Law School. “They will intimidate where they can. If they can’t intimidate … they will try to influence legislators.”
Plastics industry representatives attribute their successes to a growing realization that plastic bans are misguided.
“The trend is that cities who are taking a look at what San Francisco did … are all taking a step back and going toward recycling,” said Donna Dempsey, a spokeswoman for Progressive Bag Affiliates, which represents plastic bag makers.
The so-far scattered skirmishes are part of a grander battle over bags, a conflict in which plastic and paper industries are fighting for supermarket supremacy while fending off an ecological newcomer: the reusable fabric bag.
Plastic bags have established the clear upper hand. Nationwide, grocery stores and pharmacies go through about 92 billion plastic bags a year, compared with about 5 billion paper sacks, according to paper and plastic industry estimates.
That success also has made the light, strong polyethylene sacks a prominent target for critics. Their manufacture requires non-renewable petroleum or natural gas. And, once discarded, they tend to take flight in a puff of wind, snagging in trees and fences or floating in bodies of water, where they can choke marine life and birds. As litter, a plastic bag’s life expectancy is far greater than a human’s — 1,000 years or more.
In Philadelphia, one of the cities that drafted legislation to ban plastic bag distribution by large retailers, they also have a habit of choking the city’s antiquated sewer system. “It was a common-sense issue,” said Brian Abernathy, a legislative aide to the proposal’s sponsor, City Councilman Frank DiCicco.
But while the ban had popular support, Abernathy said, proponents were ill-prepared for the industry opposition they encountered at the first public hearing on the plan in October. Among those who spoke out against the proposal were the Philadelphia-based petroleum and chemical company Sunoco; the state’s food merchants association; bag wholesalers and distributors; the American Chemistry Council, which represents plastic and chemical companies; and the Progressive Bag Alliance, as the plastic bag makers trade group was formerly known.
In short order, the proposed ban was withdrawn and, after meetings with representatives of the opposition, the sponsors agreed to implement a voluntary program to recycle plastic bags instead.
Other cities and counties that considered bans on disposable bags but instead approved bag recycling programs include New York City; Austin, Texas; Phoenix; Annapolis, Md.; and Los Angeles County.
Environmentalists and business interests are closely watching a key legal test unfolding in Alameda County, Calif., where the plastics industry and related businesses are using the California Environmental Quality Act to challenge a ban on nonbiodegradable plastic bags approved by Oakland in July 2007.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit is the Coalition to Support Plastic Bag Recycling, a group that includes seven plastic bag manufacturers, a plastic recycler in Texas and Kevin Kelly, “a taxpayer, residing in the city of Oakland,” who also is the president of the California Bag and Film Federation.
The coalition argues that the measure violated a provision of the state law requiring that a study of the possible adverse environmental consequences of the policy be conducted before enactment. Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch agreed in a preliminary ruling, halting implementation of the ban, which would have taken effect Jan. 17, until the lawsuit is heard.
The complaint states that the ban will force consumers to use more paper bags, “which are more costly, generate more pollutants during manufacturing and require more energy to produce and recycle than plastic bags.” It also alleges that the continued use of biodegradable plastic bags, allowed under the ban, would “contaminate” recycling programs for disposable plastic bags.
While Oakland decided to fight the lawsuit, an identical legal challenge by the same group forced another California town to back off plans to ban disposable plastic bags. The City Council in Fairfax, population 7,000, proposed a plastic bag ban in July that would have extended to all retailers, but dropped it when faced with the prospect of an expensive environmental impact report.
“They were calling for a full-blown environmental impact report, which can cost $100,000,” said City Councilman Lew Tremaine. “That is a lot out of the budget of a little town.”
But Fairfax residents have begun collecting signatures aimed at putting the ban on the ballot as a local initiative in November. If passed, it would be exempt from the environmental assessment process.
In its drive to defeat bans on disposable bags, the plastics industry and its retail allies have become the loudest voices in favor of bag recycling. “The trend is clear that recycling is the best solution,” said Keith Christman, senior director of packaging at Progressive Bag Affiliates, an arm of the American Chemistry Council. “It can be made into other stuff, as long as it becomes recognized and (people) see that it can be a valuable commodity.”
But critics say that plastic bag recycling has never proven effective on a large scale. Between 1 and 5 percent of plastic shopping bags distributed by retailers are typically recovered through such programs, according to Darby Hoover, a recycling expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
One reason for the low rate is that municipal curbside recycling programs that collect glass, paper, plastic and aluminum products can’t easily deal with loose plastic bags, which tend to get caught in and jam sorting equipment at recycling facilities. Some curbside programs will take plastic bags if they are bundled, but even then the commodity is low-grade and brings a low price because it gets dirty during handling and transportation.
These problems force the plastic industry to champion an approach that relies on consumers to return clean plastic bags to recycling containers at stores. While such collection points have been in existence for years in some areas, in-store recycling has never caught on.
The market for recycled plastic bags also is tiny. At the moment, a single manufacturer, the Trex Co. of Winchester, Va., purchases 70 percent of the plastic bags recovered nationwide, mixing the plastic with wood scraps to make outdoor decking. But the company lost $75 million last year, raising questions about the long-term viability of the end market.
Despite such problems, some cities are still optimistic that plastic bag recycling can work with enough support. Among the most aggressive is Phoenix, where discussions by the City Council of a ban on disposable plastic bags instead led to a citywide bag recovery program called “Bag Central Station.” The program allows any plastic bag — regardless of where it was distributed — to be returned at any of the prominently marked receptacles placed with retail outlets. The city has coupled the recycling push with education efforts and a large giveaway of reusable bags.
Al Shiya, a spokesman for the Phoenix Public Works Department, said the program was the result of a “very concerted effort on the part of Arizona grocers to respond in a positive way to a threat on the part of some City Council people to ban plastic bags.” The program, which took effect in November, will be assessed in June.
If the recycling numbers don’t stack up, however, Phoenix and others could end up taking a look at restrictions. That is how San Francisco ended up with its ban on disposable plastic bags. The ordinance, which went into effect Nov. 1, mandates that large grocery stores and pharmacies (over $1 million in annual revenue) can distribute only paper bags with 40 percent recycled content, compostable plastic bags and reusable bags.
The city first considered charging a fee for plastic bags — an idea it borrowed from Ireland, where a per-bag fee imposed in 2002 caused plastic bag usage to decline more than 90 percent. This idea met strong opposition from grocers, however, leading city officials to institute a trial recycling program for plastic bags.
While the trial was under way, the state of California — with support from the plastics industry — passed a bill requiring large retail stores to accept plastic bags for recycling. The bill also was amended to bar local governments from imposing fees on plastic bags.
When San Francisco’s trial program came to an end, it was deemed a failure by the city because grocers didn’t provide verifiable figures on the number of bags that were recycled, citing trade secrets, said Mark Westlund, a spokesman for the city’s Department of the Environment.
Dave Heylen, a spokesman for the California Grocers Association, which represents about 500 grocers, confirmed “there was a disagreement on the numbers.” He said consumers returned 7.6 million plastic bags to participating stores during the trial, surpassing the goal by 1.5 million, but “San Francisco felt the numbers weren’t collected correctly.”
With no option remaining to place a fee on the bags, Westlund said San Francisco saw few choices.
“We only had one alternative, and that was to ban them outright,” he said. While the aggressive stance of the plastics industry has dampened interest in plastic bag bans, it has not completely halted such measures. In Santa Monica, Calif., the City Council is drafting a ban that some environmentalists say will go well beyond San Francisco’s and avert a legal challenge such as the one faced by Oakland.
“This is too big of a problem to recycle our way out of,” said Sarah Abramson, coast resources director at nonprofit environmental group Heal the Bay in Santa Monica. And in Annapolis, Md., proponents of a proposed ban that turned into a recycling program say that they at least managed to set aggressive targets that — if not met — could trigger tougher action.
“We have legislation to require major retail chains to aggressively market reusable bags to reduce use of plastic bags by 40 percent,” said City Councilman Sam Shropshire. “If they can’t do it we will put the ban back on the table.”
In the meantime, at least one retailer is getting out of the plastic bag arena altogether. Whole Foods Market recently announced that it will eliminate the use of plastic bags in all of its U.S. stores by Earth Day, April 22. The chain will then provide customers only with paper bags made of 100 percent recycled material and reusable bags.
Source: www.msnbc.msn.com
WASHINGTON: For a small product that doesn’t cost a lot to buy or make, plastic carryout shopping bags have certainly caused the plastics industry a lot of anguish and given them a lot of publicity — much of it negative.
Hardly a day goes by, it seems, without someone proposing a ban or fee on plastic bags or calling the industry out for making a product that, when it is littered, is an eyesore with the potential to harm marine life.
What’s more, at times the issue seems to have a life of its own, powerfully moving forward, regardless of what measures the industry takes to confront the ongoing challenge.
Once strictly a California issue, it has spread up the West Coast, over to the East Coast and to areas as far away from the ocean as Iowa and central Texas. “I don’t know how much we have actually changed,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste in Sacramento, Calif. “But we have probably helped contribute to the negative perception people have of plastics.”
Yet for all the negative headlines, image problems and legislative threats, only five U.S. cities — most notably San Francisco — have banned plastic bags. Toronto is the only North American city to enact a fee on bags (5 Canadian cents, starting June 1) and the number of proposed bills appears to be declining.
At the end of February, there were only 80 pieces of legislation on the table for 2009 compared to 147 for the same period in 2008, according to figures from the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council. About 10 states are looking at bag ban proposals and a similar number are considering fees ranging from 3-25 cents per bag. But Virginia, Colorado, Washington state and Santa Clara County, Calif., already have rejected attempts to ban plastic bags this year and in Portland, Ore., Mayor Sam Adams has shelved his plan to seek a 5-20 cent surcharge on plastic and paper bags.
In addition, the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition — which has several bag manufacturers among its 12 members — has successfully prevented a number of bans from going into effect through lawsuits, real or threatened.
“Some of the smaller cities are reluctant to take action because of the threat of being sued,” Murray said. “It is the same strategy that the polystyrene folks used in the early ‘90s,” when there was an outcry about takeout packaging. “A lot of policies were adopted, but never formally enforced,” he said.
In many respects, the outcry against plastic bags is only the most visible of many challenges the plastics industry faces today — and will face going forward. It also raises the question of how the industry should meet or prevent those challenges.
“Plastic bags have become a symbol of everything that is wrong with society,” said Pete Grande, chief executive officer of custom bag manufacturer Command Packaging in Vernon, Calif. “We consume too much. We spend too much. We waste too much. That is the prism environmentalists look through.”
Bill Carteaux, president and chief executive officer of the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc. in Washington, agreed. “Plastic bags have become the poster child for what’s wrong with society in general from a wasteful standpoint,” he said at the recent Plastics Recycling Conference in Orlando, Fla. “I’m going to get in trouble for saying this. But plastic bags being littered are society’s fault, not industry’s fault. We have to change the culture in this country to recycle not just plastics, but everything we use.”
“Litter is unsightly, but why don’t people put [plastic bags] into waste containers like they do everything else?” asked Bill Seanor, a former partner in bag manufacturer Vanguard Plastics Inc., who now is CEO of Overwraps Packaging in Dallas, which converts film into flexible packaging. Vanguard Plastics now is part of Hilex Poly LLC.
“How the hell is the plastics industry going to solve the litter problem?” said Seanor. “It certainly is a broader problem than just the plastics industry.” It also is clear that the plastic bag issue triggers strong emotional reactions from stakeholders when they’re talking about the issue. Some even question whether the issue would have escalated the way it did had the industry not discontinued a long-running image-building campaign at about the same time the issue was emerging.
“I don’t think anybody could have done anything to stop this from happening,” Grande said. “When you are painted as the Great Satan and the evil empire, and people say that you only have value if you are terminated,” there is no common ground for discussion, he added.
“Change doesn’t get initiated until you get up to the precipice of that cliff, and 10 years ago, no one was willing to listen, because the pain threshold wasn’t high enough,” Grande said.
The Arlington, Va.-based ACC holds a similar view. “We could have communicated earlier. But I believe these issues have such a strong emotional appeal that they were going to be compelling social issues in any event,” said Steve Russell, managing director of ACC’s plastics division.
ACC in 2007 assumed the major responsibility within the industry for dealing with the plastic bag issue, when it formed the Progressive Bag Affiliates. That group replaced a similarly named organization, the Progressive Bag Alliance, which had been formed in 2004 by the five major U.S. bag manufacturers as a unit of the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc.
“There is always something that could have been done differently,” Seanor said. “But from a practical standpoint, I don’t know what it was. If there was something, we would have been pushing it. If someone has come up with an idea of what we should have done, they haven’t told us yet what it was.”
Murray agreed: “The plastics industry is in a very tough position when it comes to plastics bags because the very thrust of the issue is to get rid of plastic bags,” he said. “So there is not a lot they can do.”
For its part, ACC has put 530 plastics recycling bins on state beaches in California, and larger grocers in the state have mandated in-store collection programs since July 2007.
ACC said it is close to an agreement with another state agency to place additional recycling bins elsewhere in California.
Mandated bag recycling programs also exist in Chicago, Rhode Island, New York City, five counties in New York state, San Juan Capistrano, Calif., and Red Bank, N.J.
But Murray said he is not sure that even recycling programs can address the issue, because plastic bags remain a litter source due to their physical properties.
“Even if they are disposed properly, they can still blow around,” Murray said. “It is not the fault of consumers. It is not the fault of industry. I am not sure there is anyone to blame. The problem is we just have too many of them and the only solution is reduction.”
Some suggest that plastics industry infighting, an attitude of denial by the industry that bags were a problem, and a lack of support from grocers allowed the issue to escalate.
The California Film Extruders and Converters Association was initially the only group that addressed the issue, said Laurie Hansen, a California lobbyist who does work for CFECA and who formerly dealt with similar issues for a group within Washington-based SPI.
“Unless you saw it, you couldn’t comprehend how large a litter problem it had become in California,” she said. “It was ugly. You would go all over California and all you saw were [plastic] bags everywhere.”
It also did not help that grocery stores and retailers, faced with other vexing issues at the time, did not believe it was going to become a big issue, she said.
A third factor escalating the issue was that many California cities were under a mandate to eliminate trash in their storm-drain systems.
“Bags clog and block those systems and increase costs for cities,” Murray said. Bags thus became a visible target — as well as a potential source of revenue to cities through taxation.
Seanor said he and others in the plastics bag industry tried to warn the industry of how heated the issue was becoming, but the pleas fell on deaf ears. “We started to see the situation heat up in 2002 and 2003 because, with the increases in volume of plastic bags, you now had a very, very visible, ugly product floating around the streets because there were so many of them,” he said.
Seanor said some industry leaders were — and remain — shortsighted. “It was not the case of the bag manufacturers not taking the issue seriously, but more a case of the rest of the industry not taking it seriously. We weren’t getting any support from the broader industry groups because their ox wasn’t getting gored,” he said.
“These people were not in the direct line of fire, so they found it easier to say ‘I’m not interested. You guys are going to have to fight it on your own,’ ” he said, adding that it wasn’t until the entire plastics industry was under fire that the issue got attention.
The issue gained further momentum because the supermarket industry decided not to join plastic bag producers in fighting against the attacks, Seanor said, because supermarket owners stood to profit from passing taxes through to their customers in the form of increased prices.
“Why would [grocers] want to fight this when their economic interest is served by not resisting?” he asked.
In addition, the focus of the battle had changed from simply a discussion of the environmental impact of paper vs. plastic bags — as it had been in the late 1980s and early ’90s — and the plastics industry was caught off-guard by the shift in the debate.
“A lot of the environmentalists didn’t even want to talk about comparing plastic bags to paper anymore,” Seanor said. “They would prefer to get rid of all disposable items and not use Earth’s resources to create disposable items.”
One legislative source offered a different view: “The issue changed and I don’t think the [plastics] industry knew how to handle it.” Hansen agreed. “The usual way the industry has dealt with this was to use a life-cycle analysis to show that alternative products were not any better,” she said. “But it wasn’t just about the life cycle of plastic bags anymore. It was about the litter sitting on the street. It was something that just got legs because people bought into it. I think the environmentalists’ arguments succeeded because there was a real litter problem.”
Compounding the problem, the bag ban issue surfaced right around the time ACC discontinued its “Plastics Make It Possible” ad campaign. Grande said the image-boosting ads were expensive — they cost an estimated $20 million annually — but successful.
“If you look at how much money we have spent defending the position of plastic bags, had we just continued that ad campaign and educated people that plastic bags can be recycled, I think we would have been further ahead than we are today,” he said.
Seanor said the plastics campaign never should have been discontinued. “I think the industry has an obligation to combat the suspicions about plastics. Without that, the only publicity the plastics industry ever got was negative,” he said.
But some suggest the industry has been very successful in warding off the attacks on plastic bags. “The plastics industry did succeed [in the early '90s] in defusing the situation enough so that plastics was off the radar screen as an environmental target for almost a decade,” said a high-ranking official in an environmental group, who asked not to be named. Taking into account all the time and effort focused on anti-plastics campaigns by groups such as the Surfrider Foundation, Heal the Bay, the Earth Resource Foundation, and Californians Against Waste, “we have little to show for our efforts,” the source said.
“The plastics industry has been fairly sophisticated and put a considerable amount of resources in the issue and proven to be a formidable adversary,” said the source. If the industry succeeds in getting Seattle’s proposed 20 cent tax on plastic bags overturned, “any amount of money [the industry] spent will be worthwhile,” the source said.
For all of the headaches that the plastics bag issue has caused, it also has taught the industry some lessons that could be valuable in fighting other attempts to ban plastic products or chemicals used to make plastics.
“When there is an issue like [plastic bag bans], the industry has to realize there is a problem and get moving right away to solve it, instead of analyzing it to determine if there is a problem,” Hansen said. “Waiting didn’t help. Immediate action is what the public wanted.”
Seanor said he hopes that “the industry has learned that there needs to be a program of extended duration of selling the value of plastic products to the American people. We need a cohesive campaign to educate the public of the value that plastics has in society. It is the most efficient way to contest the populist ideas that are unfounded.”
Seanor said it has become clear that fighting battles just with facts is not always going to win the battle. “What [the industry] probably should have learned is that when [something] is a very populist issue, facts don’t always count,” he said. “It becomes a problem of educating the consumer and that is a very challenging proposition.”
As ACC’s Russell puts it, the industry needs to act more with its heart and less with its head. “We need to better understand that issues have emotional drivers and maybe don’t make sense from the way [the industry] looks at them,” he said. “Human perception isn’t always data-driven, but driven by photographs and emotions.”
Because of 24-hour TV news channels and the rapid spread of information on the Web, industry has to react more quickly, he said. “Because of the different ways of information sharing, there is more opportunity for misinformation to be spread rapidly and become set in the national consciousness,” Russell said. “That means our time to respond is shorter and that we have to become more nimble.”
There are some indications that when bag recycling programs are put into place, bag consumption goes down. For example, in the first six months after five major retailers in Austin, Texas, began a voluntary program in 2008, demand for plastic bags dropped 40 percent, plastic bag recycling increased 20 percent, and the stores sold more than 443,227 reusable bags.
“Maybe this attack on plastic bags is manifesting itself in some reduced consumption,” said Murray, hopefully.
The global economic recession also has cast the discussion in a different light. “I’m fearful that we have a limited window of opportunity and can’t always be so greedy with the policies we pursue, because the public sentiment may not be with you forever,” said one source who works for a California environmental group. “I think the window may already have passed for state policymakers to adopt” either a ban or 25 cent tax, the source said.
Grande agreed: “The issue has not gone away, but I think the issue has basically lost some of its sense of urgency because of the economic climate,” he said. “The only effective way for legislators to address this issue is with a ban or a tax, and no one wants to do that right now.”
But a California legislative expert warned that if the industry thinks the issue is going away, it is sadly mistaken. “The biggest danger I see today is the industry thinking that the issue will go away because of the economic climate. It is not going to go away,” the source said.
Hansen said the industry should work to develop a solution. “It is going to require some form of extended producer responsibility to change the situation,” she said. “Manufacturers have to say they recognize the problem and that they are going to participate in the solution. If they propose a solution to solve the issue of litter, responsible environmental groups won’t blow them off.”
CFECA is working with state legislators to get some form of an extended producer responsibility bill passed, in which bag manufacturers would pay an upfront fee, based on the number of bags manufactured and the estimated cost to municipalities of litter cleanup.
“We want manufacturers to be responsible for the downstream effect their products have,” Grande said. “That would make us leaders, instead of followers.” Despite the challenges ahead, bag manufacturers believe their business is not going away, only that it will be different.
“There are hard times ahead. We have a black eye, a bad reputation. But plastic bags are not going away. They will still be here,” Grande said. “But they will probably be bigger and thicker because what most people are upset about is litter. “We need to figure out a way to make plastic bags the reusable bag. Then a lot of what people are upset about will go away,” he said.
In the long term, governments need to help create a market for recycled film, Grande said, because when virgin resin prices drop, there is no financial incentive to collect plastic bags and little interest in bags with recycled content.
One option could be recycled-content mandates. Seanor agreed. “Something is only recyclable if it has an economic value,” he said. “A huge part of the incentive for recycling film has been taken away in the past six months because of the drop in cost of oil, gas and petrochemicals.”
Source: plasticsnews.com
This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.
In the end, the wayward plastic bag wafts its way to the ocean, into the tides, and out into the Pacific Ocean trash vortex — a promised nirvana where it will settle among its own kind and gradually let the memories of its maker slip away.
I have eliminated the need for most of my disposable items by incorporating reusable items into my everyday life. I bring my own reusable cup for coffee in the morning. I pack my own salad in a reusable container and take my bamboo To-Go Ware with me everywhere. When I have to choose between glass and plastic containers, I always choose glass. I fill up my reusable produce bags at the grocery store and bring them home in a reusable shopping bag. I’ve found that it is actually very convenient to have my own things on hand, and would not want to return to my previous throwaway habits. So much of environmental awareness comes through building self-awareness. This means becoming aware of your every day actions and how they impact the world. The closer we can connect to our landscape and our fellow inhabitants (both human and non-human), the better chance we have to create a sustainable and equitable future for all of the earth’s inhabitants to share.
Years after first learning about this issue I ask myself the same question: To use plastic or not to use plastic? I realize that the answer can’t feasibly be just a clear-cut “no” at this point in time. What has become clear, however, is that we should make and use objects in our world so that they match their purpose. If something is meant to be used for only a short period of time before it is discarded, then it should be able to truly biodegrade completely into the environment or be recycled into materials that retain their initial value.
What the plastics industry needs (and what we can help them do through lobbying for bans on disposable plastics) is creative destruction. Plastic products don’t need to be eliminated from society completely, but we need to make sure that their place in this world conforms to ecological principles and matches the purpose for which we make them. Plastics should be produced sparingly, for important purposes such as medical products or for items that are intended to survive for very long time periods. And plastics should be infinitely recyclable, so that every piece of plastic that is produced can be recycled to produce new products. We can use these materials, if we use them wisely.
Source: http://www.futurestates.tv
Fox News once again is trying to sway public opinion by spreading propaganda. Their target this time, plastic bags. Below is their ‘report’.
Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags that they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.
The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times of London. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced last month that he would force supermarkets to charge for the bags, saying that they were “one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste.”
Retailers and some pressure groups, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, threw their support behind him, and similar movements have spread across the United States. But scientists, politicians and marine experts attacked the British government for joining a “bandwagon” based on poor science.
“The Government is irresponsible to jump on a bandwagon that has no base in scientific evidence,” said Lord Taverne, the chairman of Sense about Science. “This is one of many examples where you get bad science leading to bad decisions which are counter-productive. Attacking plastic bags makes people feel good but it doesn’t achieve anything.”
Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, the Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals.
They “don’t figure” in the majority of cases where animals die from marine debris, said David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject. Most deaths were caused when creatures became caught up in waste produce. “Plastic bags don’t figure in entanglement,” he said. “The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag.”
He added: “The impact of bags on whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals ranges from nil for most species to very minor for perhaps a few species.For birds, plastic bags are not a problem either.” The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.
Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags.”
The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the “typo” remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing “plastic bags” with “plastic debris”. But they admitted: “The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine.”
In a postscript to the correction they admitted that the original Canadian study had referred to fishing tackle, not plastic debris, as the threat to the marine environment. Regardless, the erroneous claim has become the keystone of a widening campaign to demonise plastic bags.
David Santillo, a marine biologist at Greenpeace, told the Times that bad science was undermining the government’s case for banning the bags. “It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags,” he said. “The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags.
“It doesn’t do the government’s case any favours if you’ve got statements being made that aren’t supported by the scientific literature that’s out there. With larger mammals it’s fishing gear that’s the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren’t an issue. It would be great if statements like these weren’t made.”
Source: FOX “News”
Many cities in California have enacted, or are proposing to enact, plastic bag bans. However, there is no statewide initiative. That is about to change. AB 1998 was introduced Feb 18. If passed it will reduce dangerous plastic bag litter pollution by banning plastic bags at large retail outlets. Plastic bags are a primary component of urban litter pollution. And urban litter pollution is the primary component of marine litter pollution.
Plastic already outweighs plankton in the North Pacific Gyre. Plastic pollution costs California families hundreds of dollars annually in hidden litter clean-up costs. Current retailer practices result in the distribution of approximately 19 billion plastic carryout bags annually. Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica, has introduced legislation to ban single-use plastic bags in the state of California. On February 17, 2010, Assemblywoman Brownley introduced Assembly Bill 1998 (AB1998).
Project GreenBag Strongly Supports.
AB1998, if passed, would take effect on July 1, 2011. AB1998 specifically:
Assemblywoman Brownley has been a leader in environmental issues in the state of California. She states,
” AB1998 would ban plastic bags and impose a fee on paper bags to wean Californians off their nasty bag habit. We’ve cut other nasty habits, we can cut this habit, too.”
