Puerto Rico to ban plastic bags through executive order

Published in the AP By DANICA COTO - Oct. 30, 2015


SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico's governor signed an executive order Friday banning the use of plastic bags across the U.S. territory, defying legislators who just days ago rejected a similar bill.

The ban will take effect in mid-2016 and will be preceded by a six-month educational campaign, Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla said.

The announcement surprised many because 25 legislators in the island's House of Representatives recently voted against a measure calling for such a ban. Lawmakers had said they opposed the bill because it would charge people for the use of plastic bags amid an economic crisis.

Garcia said grocery stores across Puerto Rico import tons of plastic bags a year, noting that one small supermarket chain alone annually imports bags that fit in six boxcars that are 42 feet (13 meters) long.

"All that ends up in landfills in the best-case scenario," he said. "They end up on our streets, in our sewage system ... and kill our turtles and coral reefs."

The popular western tourist town of Rincon is the only Puerto Rican municipality that currently bans the use of plastic bags.

Environmental activists praised the move, noting that it is common to double-bag all groceries on the island, no matter how small the purchase. Garcia said he would push for legislation to be approved to help bolster his executive order.

Rep. Carlos Vargas, a member of Garcia's party whose vote helped defeat the initial bill, said he supports the idea of having an educational campaign and will seek to have the funds generated by penalties destined for environmental projects.

Elsewhere in the U.S., plastic bag bans have been implemented in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Austin, Texas. In addition, all counties in Hawaii have approved such a prohibition. There is currently no statewide ban on plastic bags, although California is placing the issue before voters in a November 2016 ballot.

Hawaii Just Became the First State to Ban Plastic Bags

By Shivam Saini.  This post originally appeared in Business Insider.

No longer welcome on our shores.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

Grocery shopping will never be the same—in Hawaii at least. On July 1, the state became the first in the U.S. to ban plastic checkout bags, after Oahu joined the rest of the Hawaiian islands in prohibiting them.

Although California was the first state to pass a law in 2014 prohibiting retailers from handing out plastic bags to customers, the ban was put to a referendum after pro-plastic trade groups opposed the move. The statewide ban in Hawaii requires businesses to stay away from bags made from noncompostable plastic or else pay $100 to $1,000 in penalties.

For a country that threw away 3.4 million tons of plastic bags, sacks, and wraps in 2012, as estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency, the ban in Hawaii is undoubtedly a major step toward sustainable packaging. But the ban is limited in its approach: it applies only to bags made from noncompostable plastic. Retailers are free to use compostable plastic bags, recyclable paper bags, and reusable bags.

Moreover, the list of bags excluded from the ban runs long. Plastic bags used for carrying fruit, vegetables, frozen foods, coffee, meat, and fish inside the store have escaped the ban. Retailers who use plastic bags for carrying takeout food, newspapers, laundry, and prescription drugs have also been spared. Nonetheless, the ban represents what could be the start of a game-changing trend.

Supermarkets use layers and layers of flimsy plastic bags to pack purchases. The average American takes home about 1,500 plastic bags a year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. So it's no surprise that the U.S. figures in the list of top 20 offenders contributing to plastic debris in the oceans, according to a 2015 study. Plastic bags, in fact, are the fourth most commonly littered item on the coasts, as found by Ocean Conservancy.

Plastic bags may trump the eco-friendly paper bags and totes when it comes to cost and convenience, but the Earth suffers. This is because polyethylene—the most common type of plastic seen in supermarkets—doesn't wear down easily. It takes plastic bags ages to decompose, up to an estimated 500 years. A Swedish study found that chemicals used in plastic could increase the risk of diabetes.

All of those bags have helped give the Pacific Ocean a debris monument twice the the size of the continental U.S. The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch is full of plastic, which kills sea turtles and other marine life. If other states follow Hawaii's example, it could turn the tide against plastic in the rest of the country—and the world.

Big Money Suspends California Plastic Bag Ban

Published in Care2.com by Judy Molland February 28, 2015 

 

Plastic bags are terrible for the environment: they choke wildlife, they don’t break down in landfills (or in oceans), they add to our demand for oil, and they aren’t easy to recycle, which is the biggest reason why 90 percent of plastic bags in the U.S. aren’t re-purposed.

In spite of this, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year, 380 billion of those in the U.S., and governments have been slow-moving to do anything about them.

So it made sense when last year it looked like California was set to be the first state to ban single-use plastic bags. Lawmakers sent Governor Jerry Brown a bill, SB270, which prohibited said single-use plastic bags at grocery stores and large pharmacies as of 2015 and at convenience stores as of 2016, all in an effort to reduce litter on our streets and beaches.

The bill allowed grocers to charge 10 cents each for paper and reusable bags. It also included $2 million in loans to help manufacturers shift to the new model.

In fact, about 100 jurisdictions in California have already adopted similar bans. My own county, San Mateo County, requires residents to pay 25 cents for a paper bag. However, opponents of a statewide ban have already succeeded in stopping the measure from going into effect by securing a spot on the 2016 ballot.

Who knew it was possible to reverse a ban that Governor Brown had previously signed into law?

Stopping The Plastic Bag Ban
Approved by California Governor Jerry Brown last September, the first stage of the ban was originally slated to go into effect on July 1. However, on February 24 state election officials confirmed that the national advocacy group American Progressive Bag Alliance had collected the necessary half million signatures to qualify for a November 2016 referendum on the measure. Now, the referendum’s qualification suspends the law until voters weigh in, a year and a half away.

But that’s not all.

A spokesman for the American Progressive Bag Alliance, which spent more than $3 million on the effort to qualify the referendum, said the group’s goals go beyond just keeping the law off the books for 21 more months. Opponents intend to mount an active campaign to scrap the law entirely, he said.
Great. This is just what happened last year with Proposition 37, which would have required retailers and food companies to label products made with genetically modified ingredients.

Had Prop 37 been approved, foods containing GMOs would have been mandated to make the fact clear on the product’s label. The law would have meant most processed foods would need to include notes on their labels that the products were “partially produced with genetic engineering” or “may be partially produced with genetic engineering.” In addition, the words “genetically engineered” would have been required on relevant product packaging.

Huge amounts of money, mostly from outside of California, were poured into campaigns weighing heavily in favor of Prop 37′s opponents.

The Missouri-based Monsanto Company, in particular, dumped millions of dollars into a campaign that opposed the ballot measure, a maneuver that many people believed was singlehandedly responsible for swinging the vote.

A total of $44 million was raised for “No on Prop 37,” while proponents were only able to raise $7.3 million.

Big Money And Plastic Bags
So now Big Money is going after plastic bags.

However, conservationists believe that Californians will uphold the ban on plastic bags. Such bags litter streets and oceans, often killing the marine animals that ingest them, and one impact report states plastic bags could take as long as 1,000 years to biodegrade.

And the good news is that cities and counties across California, and across the nation, already prohibit or charge for the bags, and that number is expected to grow over the coming months.

A spokesman for the mayor of Sacramento, California’s state capital, said this week that there will be a renewed push to make sure Sacramento moves forward with its own plastic bag prohibition.
Plastic bags are ugly, dangerous, and unnecessary. We must keep fighting to ban their use.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/big-money-suspends-california-plastic-bag-ban.html#ixzz3TB85amRV

Makers of plastic bags gather signatures to overturn ban

Published in SFGate.com by Peter Fimrite, Dec. 29, 2014

Carrying his signature collection of plastic bags, Frank Hatfield, 88, makes his rounds through Chinatown on Tuesday Feb. 2, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli,File)

 

FILE-This file photo taken Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2014, plastic single-use bags are carried past the State Capitol in Sacramento, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation on Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2014 imposing the nation's first statewide ban on single-use plastic bags.

 

Plastics manufacturers and their supporters announced Monday that they have collected enough signatures to put California’s plastic-bag ban up for a vote, a move that would extend the saber-rattling over the landmark law for at least another year.

Opponents of the law banning single-use plastic bags — which is supposed to go into effect July 1 — collected more than 800,000 signatures when they needed only 504,760 to qualify for a referendum, according to representatives of the trade group American Progressive Bag Alliance.

“The industry obviously is opposed to this particular piece of legislation because it seeks to ban a 100 percent recyclable product and also put fees on consumers for other bag alternatives,” said Jon Berrier, spokesman for the Progressive Bag Alliance. “It’s all orchestrated as a cash grab by members of the California Grocers Association to scam California consumers out of billions of dollars in bag fees, none of which goes to a public purpose.”

Related Stories

•   Millions poured into effort to bag the plastic-bag ban
•   Brown signs plastic bag ban, dozens more bills
•   California becomes first state to ban plastic bags

Ron Fong, the president and chief executive officer of the California Grocers Association, called the allegations of a cash grab a “tired argument” that plastic bag industry executives keep trying to recycle.

The law, SB270, “clearly states that any monies generated by the sale of paper bags must go toward cost recovery, training and educating the public on reusable bags,” Fong said, adding that there have been 90 percent reductions in the distribution of single-use bags in cities where similar ordinances have been passed. “The state Legislature didn’t buy this desperate argument and neither do Californians.”

The petitions, submitted on the last day of a 90-day signature-gathering deadline, must be checked against the list of registered voters in each county where they were collected before the referendum can be verified. If it qualifies, an outcome many observers believe is inevitable, implementation of the law would be delayed until after the referendum in November 2016.

“They are basically buying themselves a 15-month postponement,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste and the bag-ban campaign treasurer. “Honestly, it’s frustrating that California’s electoral process can be hijacked by out-of-state plastic-bag manufacturers.”

The postponement only affects areas of the state where there aren’t already plastic bag bans, Murray said. San Francisco banned plastic bags in 2007, the first city in the nation to do so. There are now plastic bag bans in 130 California cities, including all of Marin, Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.

The bag backlash has been sweeping across the country mainly because the billion disposable plastic shopping bags a year that are thrown away find their way into storm drains, creeks and rivers that flow into the ocean. Scientists have documented a giant floating patch of plastic and other debris twice the size of Texas that has accumulated in an area of the Pacific Ocean known as the North Pacific Gyre.

The decision by Gov. Jerry Brown to enact the statewide ban, SB270, in September, came after a fierce legislative struggle. Lee Califf, the executive director of the Bag Alliance in Washington, D.C., called SB270, “a terrible piece of job-killing legislation.” The lobbying group has spent $3.1 million to fight the law, most of it from three out-of-state plastics companies led by South Carolina’s Hilex Poly, the largest plastic-bag manufacturer in the country.

The 13 billion plastic bags currently in California grocery stores generate $200 million a year in revenue for the industry, Murray said. The cities that have banned plastic bags generally charge 10 cents per customer for the use of paper or reusable bags, an amount Murray said doesn’t even cover the cost to grocers.

Under the law, grocery stores and pharmacies in California must phase out plastic bags by July, and convenience and liquor stores must get rid of the bags a year later.

“It’s not a scam, and it’s not anything that was orchestrated by the grocers,” Murray said. “This is part of a grassroots movement by hundreds of community organizations that decided it is time to stop using plastic bags.”

He said it is not the first time that out-of-state polluters have attempted to repeal a California environmental law.

“In 2010, out-of-state oil companies, along with the Koch brothers, spent millions on Proposition 23, an initiative that would have suspended AB32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act,” Murray said. “Voters soundly rejected that effort by polluters, and we are confident that, given the opportunity, voters will reject repeal of the plastic bag ban.”

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite

Plastic bags deserve their bad wrap

Posted: 12/31/13 By Doug McIntyre in the Los Angeles Daily News

Of the many new laws making their debut today the one that will be felt by nearly everyone is the ban on single use plastic bags within the city of Los Angeles, making all of L.A. County a bag-free zone.

Unless that bag contains this newspaper.

Or broccoli.

Or the sandwich bag your dealer sells your stash in.

At Ralphs or the corner bodega, you can fill your cart to the brim with boxes of plastic bags; giant black yard bags with pull strings and tiny thin trash can liners, but when you get to the checkout stand you can’t get a plastic bag for your plastic bags.

Nuclear weapons and AR-15s are still legal but plastic bags are verboten.

It’s not the end of the world.

The wife and I live on the edge of Los Angeles and do most of our shopping in stores long subjected to the county ban on bags. I grumbled and adjusted. So will you.

The question is should we be forced by law to do so?

Not that long ago “One for the road” was a way of life in America and every year we lost north of 50,000 on our roads, many to boozed-up drivers.

Along came MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and attitudes changed.

“One for the road” wasn’t so cool anymore. The three-martini lunch became the zero-martini lunch. Laws were toughened and enforcement tightened. We still lose thousands to drunk drivers, but not nearly as many as before.

Not that long ago “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” was a common cry. We smoked ourselves to death.

For 40 years Americans have been warned and lectured about the dangers of smoking. We’ve banned smoking practically everywhere and jacked up the price per pack to astronomical levels through punitive taxes, making smokers in California almost as rare as Republicans.

Unless you smoke pot. Somehow pot is still cool.

Like cigarettes used to be.

We are burying ourselves in our own filth and I’d like to believe we’re smarter than that. We’re also burying freedom under an avalanche of legislation and I’d like to believe we love liberty too much to surrender it out of laziness.

Recycling was once patriotic.

During World War II every man, woman and child happily recycled tin cans, paper, nylon, anything necessary to help beat Hitler and Tojo.

It took 80 tons of scrap metal to make one tank. What we couldn’t get through recycling we saved though rationing; butter, fat, gas, oil, grease, sugar were all proscribed by law. Willingly and not so willingly we changed the way we lived for a cause greater than ourselves.

We need to do the same today.

The hundreds of tons of plastics dumped into the ocean each year is a genuine threat to our health and the health of the planet. This isn’t eco-propaganda, although there’s plenty of that floating around as well. The reality of plastics poisoning the ocean is as real as a tax audit.

But first let’s clear up some nonsense.

We’ve all heard about the trash island in the Pacific the size of Texas? Not true. It’s much worse. There are actually five of them around the globe and they’re more like trash soup than trash islands. They’re called “gyres,” enormous spirals of partially decomposed shopping bags, milk containers, wrappers and the million other things we use once and toss away without a second thought.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

We can voluntarily change our behavior because it makes sense, the way we once recycled to beat Hitler, or we can do nothing and wait until the government mandates change by law.

While L.A.’s plastic bag ban reeks of political feel-goodism, the kind of eco-friendly legislation that’s catnip to politicians, it’s at least something.

If we want to keep government from reaching into yet another aspect of our lives, and I do, we need to once again make recycling a patriotic duty. We need to prosecute the slobs who toss trash out their car windows under existing laws.

But let’s not kid ourselves; doing nothing is not an option. The oceans are becoming giant vats of toxic PCBs. Now is the time for all good Earthlings to come to the aid of their planet.

Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sunday and Wednesday. He can be reached at: Doug@KABC.com.

Another Texas Town Bans Plastic Bags

Surfrider Foundation

Published on ecowatch.com By Bill Hickman - July, 31, 2013

Surfrider chapters typically focus their plastic reduction efforts in coastal cities and towns since that’s where our members are who see the impacts of plastic pollution firsthand and want to take action. You have to start somewhere and as a grassroots organization, that somewhere is our backyard.



But it’s important to remember that everywhere on land is part of a watershed that flows to a river, creek or stream that then outlets in a lake, bay or ocean. So it’s great to see inland cities making efforts to reduce single-use plastic bags and the latest good news comes from the west Texas city of Kermit where a reusable bag ordinance has been enacted.

In addition to marine impacts, plastic bags can be a big nuisance for farmers. I recently spoke with some Surfrider activists in Texas who mentioned that cotton farmers can take a financial hit from plastic bag litter because it can taint their crop as it is processed by mills:

Bags find their way into farmers’ fields and then into modules of cotton. The bags go through the gin and textile mills and have even ended up in finished apparel. One thing that I would really like to emphasize this fall is to watch for those Wal-Mart bags in your fields. It’s almost humorous, but it’s dead serious. One mill in the east quit buying cotton in Georgia and the Carolinas because of it.

Kermit recently passed a type of reusable bag ordinance that eliminates plastic checkout bags at most retailers and puts a small fee on paper bags as an incentive for people to remember their reusable bag or go without a bag for small purchases. The City of Kermit website does a great job to explain the ordinance and why it’s needed:

Q: What kind of plastic bag is banned?
Plastic carryout bags include any bag made of plastic (from any source), which is provided to the customer at the point of sale.

Q: What kind of plastic bag is NOT banned?
Produce bags and product bags are bags without handles used exclusively to carry produce, meats or other food items to the point of sale or to prevent such food items from coming into direct contact with other purchased items.

Q: Why has the City of Kermit banned single-use plastic carryout bags?
The intent of the single-use carryout bag ordinance is to significantly reduce the environmental impacts related to single-use plastic and paper carry out bags and promote a major shift towards the use of reusable bags.

Q: How are single-use plastic carryout bags harmful to the environment?
They are consumed in extremely high volumes. They are produced from non-renewable resources. They are designed to be disposable (rather than reusable). They are difficult to recycle—less than 5 percent of the 19 billion plastic bags used annually in Texas are actually recycled. They are a significant and visible component of litter and do not biodegrade. They remain in the environment as marine, storm drain and beach pollution for decades. A significant hazard to ranch animals and birds, which often mistake plastic bags as food.

Q: Is there any exception to this ban?
The ordinance does NOT prohibit the distribution of plastic product bags such as those distributed within a grocery store for bagging produce or meat.

Q: What stores are required to charge 10 cents for each recycled paper bag?
All grocery stores, convenience stores, minimarts, liquor stores, drug stores and pharmacies are prohibited from providing free distribution of single-use paper and plastic carryout bags. If these stores decide to make paper carryout bags available for their customers, they are required to sell recycled paper carryout bags made from 100 percent total recycled content with 40 percent post-consumer recycled content for not less than 10 cents per bag.

Q: Why is there a $0.10 fee on recycled paper carryout bags?
The fee of $0.10 on recycled paper carryout bags encourages the use of reusable bags. This cost pass-through reimburses retailers for the costs of providing recycled paper carry out bags to their customers. All of the revenue from the cost pass-through remains with the store.

Q: How do I avoid paying 10 cents for each recycled paper bag?
It’s easy—remember to bring your own reusable bags to the store. Some stores will even offer you a credit or gift for bringing your own bag.

Visit EcoWatch’s BIODIVERSITY page for more related news on this topic.

Californians Take Stand in the Sand for Plastic-Free Seas

Posted: 07/03/2013 in the Huffington Post by Lisa Kaas Boyle

It's summer and Californians are at the beach. Surfers and swimmers are enjoying all the classic spots glorified in Beach Boys songs. What's up at the beaches besides the famous waves? Well, the battle to keep the beach and water plastic free is hot as the late afternoon sand.

Outgoing Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa added an environmental feather to his cap by signing legislation to ban single-use plastic bags in the City of Los Angeles. Similar legislation at the state level recently failed by an 18-17 vote in the Senate, 3 votes short of the majority needed for passage. The current number of local ordinances in California now stands at 56 covering 77 cities/counties.

This means 11,461,641 people, or 30 percentage of California's population, is now covered by single use plastic bag bans passed by local jurisdictions. Speaking about the recently enacted Los Angeles City ordinance, Sarah Sikich, Science and Policy Director for Heal the Bay, said,

We congratulate the LA City Council for taking a stand against plastic pollution and making Los Angeles the largest city in the nation to ban plastic bags and charge for paper, driving a transition to the most sustainable alternative, reusable bags. This measure will inspire a shift in mindset from our addiction to single-use convenience to conscious thinking about simple lifestyle changes individuals can make to improve our communities and the environment.

Local California environmental groups have worked hard on passing the bans and will continue their work until the whole state is covered like the State of Hawaii. Kudos go to Heal the Bay, Environment California, Surfrider and Clean Seas Coalition for the many successes on the plastic bag and polystyrene bans (the current number of California Polystyrene Bans stands at 72.)

Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance founded in California, is working hard to spread the message of reducing single use plastics to people around the globe, most recently at a conference on solutions called Think Beyond Plastic and at Bonnaroo music festival where the group worked with artists and the festival to reduce plastic consumption. Country-Punk LA based band Nocona teamed with PPC to share ways to reduce personal consumption of single use plastics during their show on the Rock the Earth curated Solar stage. The band, featuring 5 Gyres board member Elan Glasser on harmonica, showed the crowd how to hydrate responsibly with reusable water bottles. After the show, members of the band posed with a sign that read "Please Stop Plastic Bottles."
The Bonnaroo venue, on a large Tennessee farm owned by the concert producers, has well water hydration stations strategically placed for concert-goers to refill their reusable water containers for free.

In California's Palm Springs, The Coachella Music Festival 2013 had free filtered water available for refilling and a demonstration called The Oasis by Global Inheritance of tap water and even filtered, reclaimed waste water that tested and tasted as clean as any mountain spring. Really. I tried it.

Los Angeles-based We Tap is behind a smartphone application to locate public water fountains in California. Their mission is to help people locate good, fresh water on-the-go for refillable bottles or a quick drink, instead of relying on plastic packaged water.

Santa Monica-based 5 Gyres Institute is a national leader in the battle against plastic microbeads in products that wash straight into our streams, rivers, lakes and ocean the drains in our homes. These plastic micro-beads have become common in cosmetic, toothpaste and cleaning products as exfoliants replacing natural and biodegradable scrubbers. 5 Gyres is publishing groundbreaking research on plastic micro-beads accumulating in the Great Lakes. With the help of partners Plastic Free Seas and Plastic Soup Foundation, 5 Gyres has claimed some major victories in removing plastic beads from products produced by Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson and L'Oreal/The Body Shop. One big target remains: Procter & Gamble. After a massive letter writing and social media blitz, The 5 Gyres Institute received word from Procter & Gamble's Harald Schlatter, that Procter & Gamble will remove plastic micro-beads from their products by 2017. The 5 Gyres site reports,

Though we applaud this move, The 5 Gyres Institute along with core campaign partners The Plastic Soup Foundation, Plastic Free Seas, and a coalition of nearly 100 NGOs worldwide believe this phase-out timeline is far too long. We have made demands with other manufacturers that all beads be removed by no later than January 1st, 2015 and wrote a letter to this effect that went unanswered by Mr. Schlatter.

5 Gyres is leading a campaign to get this giant global corporation to remove plastic micro-beads from its products worldwide by 1/1/2015. You may add your name to the campaign here.

Los Angeles-based sports television personality Angela Sun is on a national tour of film fests with her excellent documentary Plastic Paradise about the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" a collection of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean 1000 miles off the California coast.

And more than 3,500 kids in Los Angeles took a stand in the sand against plastic pollution on the 20th anniversary of Kids Ocean Day in Los Angeles, forming a with their bodies on the beach asking for us to LISTEN to the ocean and stop polluting it with our plastic trash. Similar Kids Ocean Day events were held in San Francisco and San Diego.

California, known for its seemingly endless beautiful coastline, is also a source of endless ingenuity and passion for protecting our natural resources from plastic waste. Way to go, Californians!

Boulder's bag fee goes into effect Monday

Officials, activists hope fee on disposable bags will change behavior

Posted:   06/30/2013

By Erica Meltzer Camera Staff Writer

Violet McKee, of Alfalfa's in Boulder, uses paper bags to bag groceries on Thursday. New grocery store bag fees for paper and plastic will go into effect today. ( CLIFF GRASSMICK )

 

For more information visit BroughtItBoulder.com.

 

Starting Monday, Boulder shoppers will need to pay 10 cents for disposable paper or plastic bags at city grocery stores, convenience stores and big-box retailers like Target.

Boulder has handed out more than 36,000 free reusable bags to area residents and shoppers in preparation for the fee going into effect, and city sustainability workers will be outside area grocery stores distributing whatever remains of the 40,000 bags they bought in May.

"Everyone loves free bags," said Boulder business sustainability specialist Jamie Harkins. "Everyone has been really excited to get the bags, and I've been getting good feedback from the store owners. A lot of the big stores have been training their employees."

The City Council adopted the bag fee back in November, but the city put off implementing the fee to give time for an education campaign and for stores to prepare.

The fee came about after students with the Net Zero Club at Fairview High School argued for a ban on all plastic bags and a fee on paper bags.

The City Council decided to pursue a fee on all disposable bags after representatives of Eco-Cycle said banning plastic would cause people to switch to paper, which has its own environmental problems, rather than to reusable bags.

The bag fee applies at all food retailers. Gas station stores will be exempt if food sales account for less than 2 percent of their business.

Retailers will get to keep 4 cents to cover their costs of administering the program. The county recycling center will get 0.9 cents to cover the costs of retrieving plastic bags from recycling equipment.

The city plans to use the rest of the money collected from the fee to pay for education and outreach about reusable bags and to cover the costs of free bags.

The city projects it will collect $216,000 this year from the bag fee and $325,000 in 2014.

Washington, D.C., which has a similar bag fee, saw a 75 percent decrease in the use of disposable bags within a year of adopting its fee, but Boulder is projecting only a 50 percent decrease because so many shoppers here already bring their own bags.

Sonja Tuitele, a spokeswoman for Alfalfa's Market, said more than 80 percent of shoppers there already bring their own bags, so they expect the impact to be small.

The store is doing away with its bag credit, though, in response to the policy change.
"We hope that everyone will bring their bags, and this is the new reality," she said.

Whole Foods will keep its bag credit program, in part because so many people donate their bag credit to community projects.

"Our 'Your Change Creates Change' program is alive and well in stores and gives customers the opportunity to donate 10 cents per reusable bag to schools and non-profit organizations of their choice," said Heather Larrabee, regional associate marketing coordinator for Whole Foods.

King Soopers spokeswoman Kelli McGannon said Boulder locations of that grocery store are prepared and support the city's efforts.

"We've been able to come up with a plan that should adequately serve our customers and prepare them for the changes," she said. "It's something that has become important to a lot of people, and we're happy to support the desires of the community."

A spokeswoman for Safeway was traveling Friday and couldn't be reached for comment.

Harkins said city officials are aware that the change could affect low-income residents more and they have worked closely with services agencies like Emergency Family Assistance Association, Boulder Housing Partners and Workforce Boulder County to get free bags into the hands of those who most need them.

They also went door-to-door in Boulder's trailer parks and other poorer neighborhoods to hand out bags.

Randy Moorman, community campaigns manager for Eco-Cycle, said the company looks forward to finding fewer plastic bags in the recycling waste stream. The bags get stuck in equipment, forcing EcoCycle to stop work and manually remove them. But the environmental impact should be much greater, he said.

"From a zero-waste perspective, we're looking to see less of the disposable bags, whether that's in the environment, caught in trees and becoming a hazard to wildlife, and we hope to see less of these bags going to our landfill," he said.

Shoppers at local stores last week mostly spoke positively of the fee.

"I don't have an issue with it," Boulder resident Lisa Searchinger said as she grabbed some reusable bags from her car before entering Target on Friday. "It's what's best for the environment and best for our community."

Matt Flournoy shopped at the Sprouts Farmers Market located on Arapahoe Avenue Friday. He said he previously lived in Australia for a time and became accustomed to using reusable bags there. He said he is happy to see Boulder making efforts to curb wasteful disposable bag use.

"I think it will have a positive impact on other people and they habits they might not otherwise change," Flournoy said.

Jan Pringle carried her groceries in reusable bags as she prepared to leave the King Soopers on Arapahoe Friday, but said she does not support the bag fee.

"I don't like it," Pringle said. "I don't use plastic bags but for travelers and visitors to the city -- things like that -- I think it's pretty rotten. I have been a visitor to another city where you buy what you think you're paying for and suddenly they're tacking on taxes and extra fees. It's like a visitors' tax."

Camera Staff Writer Joe Rubino contributed to this report.
Contact Camera Staff Writer Erica Meltzer at 303-473-1355 or meltzere@dailycamera.com.

Read more: Boulder's bag fee goes into effect Monday - The Denver Post http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_23563794/boulders-bag-fee-goes-into-effect-today#ixzz2XphUkp4q

Read The Denver Post's Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse
Follow us: @Denverpost on Twitter | Denverpost on Facebook

Garbage piling up beneath Monterey Bay, says MBARI

Posted:   06/05/2013 By Jason Hoppin in the Santa Cruz Sentinel

Click photo to enlarge

A young rockfish hides in a discarded shoe 1,548 feet deep in San Gabriel... ( (c) 2010 MBARI )

MOSS LANDING -- Look out across Monterey Bay, and one hardly thinks of a junkyard. But below the surface, decades of garbage have been piling up, a new study by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute shows.

Go 1,000 meters down, and it's still there. Go a mile down, it's still there. Go two miles down and beyond -- down to the limits of scientific exploration -- and it's still there. Old boots, tires, fishing gear and especially plastic, litter the ocean floor.

"Once it gets in the ocean, it's not going to get cleaned up," said Susan von Thun, a senior research technician at MBARI. "Especially with plastic or metal, it doesn't really break down. It'll be there for possibly thousands of years."

The study is based on 22 years of deep-sea video accumulated and cataloged by marine researchers. They decided to search their database and came up with more than 1,150 hits for human-produced garbage in the Monterey Bay region alone, much of it within the boundaries of a national marine sanctuary.

While there have been some eye-popping finds -- a shipping container full of 10,000 steel-belted tires lies at the bottom of the bay -- about a third of the findings were plastic, with about half of those being plastic bags.

PLASTIC POLLUTION

That goes to the heart of an ongoing debate about single-use plastic bags, with the plastics industry recently helping defeat a proposed statewide bag ban, as well as a second bill, by Assemblymember Mark Stone, D-Scotts Valley, aimed at getting plastics producers to help cut back on pollution.

When the bag ban was defeated by three votes, the industry group American Progressive Bag Alliance hailed its victory, saying the proposal was based on "unfounded stats, junk science and myths."

Dave Asselin, executive director of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, reiterated the group's position in a statement Wednesday.

"We have not had a chance to review this particular study, but we do know that the rationale behind efforts to ban or tax plastic bags is largely based off of junk science and exaggerations," Asselin said.

The study is far more exhaustive that any prior examination of debris on the ocean floor, with MBARI's submarines routinely plumbing depths rarely seen by human eyes. Whether it makes a difference in the political debate about plastic bags remains to be seen. Wednesday, Stone held a previously scheduled legislative hearing that dealt with plastics and the marine environment.

Laura Kasa, executive director of Santa Cruz-based Save Our Shores, a group that holds beach cleanups throughout the region, said the study is another sign that plastic bags need to be banned.

"This is why it's so important that we prevent trash that people leave on the beach from getting into the ocean," Kasa said. "If one person doesn't think that it makes a difference, if they leave their piece of trash on the beach, they're wrong. It'll end up in the bottom of the ocean."

Von Thun said researchers combed through video for instances where marine life interacted with plastic and found several. They include plastic bags wrapped around deep coral -- which eventually will kill the coral -- and debris serving as habitat for anemonies and other marine life, giving them a home in areas they would not normally settle.

The study also found plastics and metals were more likely to be found in deeper waters, and researchers speculated that because Monterey Bay is a national sanctuary and subject to heightened environmental protections, it is likely that oceans elsewhere have a more significant problem.

"I was surprised that we saw so much trash in deeper water. We don't usually think of our daily activities as affecting life two miles deep in the ocean," said Kyra Schlining, the study's lead author. "I'm sure that there's a lot more debris in the canyon that we're not seeing."

Follow Sentinel reporter Jason Hoppin at Twitter.com/scnewsdude

Read another article about the Monterey Bay Findings in Mother Earth News:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/trash-that-litters-ocean-floor-is-mostly-recyclables

The plastic bag wars

Light, sturdy, amazingly cheap—and banned. How the humble sack became a victim of its own success. 

 

Posted in the Boston Globe By Leon Neyfakh

  November 25, 2012

On Wednesday, Nov. 14, the people of Brookline picked a side in what has become a high-stakes war with fronts around the world. Their allies in the fight: an international movement of activists dedicated to the eradication of a global menace. Their enemy: the plastic bag.

As of December 2013, cashiers at supermarkets and other large retailers in Brookline will no longer be allowed to provide disposable polyethylene bags to their customers at checkout, under threat of a punishing fine. Instead they’ll use bags made from compostable or marine degradable material, including paper, or encourage customers to bring reusable bags from home. The ban puts Brookline at the vanguard of the anti-plastic-bag movement, which has succeeded in getting similar ordinances passed in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as in China, India, and South Africa. It also represents what is arguably the biggest victory the movement has yet seen on the East Coast.

Over the past 30 years, the plastic shopping bag has become a potent symbol of human consumption and carelessness. Flapping from trees, blowing against fences, bobbing squalidly in waterways, bags seem both insignificant and indestructible, an encapsulation of humankind’s fatal attachment to minor conveniences. According to one estimate, Americans use 100 billion plastic bags per year. It’s a number that horrifies environmentalists, who are concerned about the fossil fuels they’re made from and who calculate that each bag will continue to haunt the earth, before decomposing, for hundreds of years.

But there’s another way to see the plastic bag, and a reason to think a little harder about where the problem with it actually lies. To its fans in the plastics industry, and there are many, the supermarket shopping bag—or “T-shirt bag,” as it’s known in the business—is a triumph of cost-effective engineering. Weighing just a fraction of an ounce, it has convenient handles, water-resistant walls, and an astonishing ability to carry up to 2,000 times its own weight. From this point of view, the bag is a runaway success that has simply outpaced our ability to contain it.

“The polyethylene plastic bag is a miracle of technology to me,” said Diana Twede, a professor at the School of Packaging at Michigan State University and the co-editor of the journal Packaging Technology and Science. “I’m a fan of packaging history, and people in history would not be able to believe that you could make such a strong, light, thin type of material that would actually do some work.”

There’s a special irony to the fact that the latest skirmish in the plastic bag wars has erupted in Massachusetts, given that the bags’ origins can be traced to the work of engineers from communities such as Woburn and Gloucester—and that one of the intellectual nerve centers of the plastics industry is located at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

“The state of Massachusetts was like the Silicon Valley of plastics, in a lot of regards,” said Mark Steele, the CEO of Gloucester Engineering, a company that designed some of the earliest plastic-bag-making machines in the 1960s.

For Steele, there is something sad about the people of Brookline launching an attack on a technology so intimately tied to their own local history. But as supporters of the ban prepare to make the case for a statewide ordinance—Marblehead Representative Lori Ehrlich has vowed to raise it on the floor of the Massachusetts Legislature in January—it’s unlikely that an appeal to regional pride is going to give them any pause. The plastic bag is both bigger and smaller than any one place, after all. And in many ways, that is the heart of the problem.

***
There was a time when grocers would pack their customers’ purchases in paper cones, tying them at the bottom with a piece of string. Some took a different route, and spent their evenings gluing bags together out of paper. Everything changed in 1883, when a Philadelphia inventor by the name of Charles Stilwell patented an automatic paper bag machine that not only produced paper bags on its own, but fitted them with a square-shaped bottom that made it possible for baggers to stand them upright, leaving both their hands free for loading. Over time, customers came to expect that when they bought apples, or laundry detergent, or even a few pencils, they’d get a bag as well.

As paper sacks became a fixture at grocery store checkout lines across the United States, the seeds of their downfall were being sown here in Massachusetts, where a formidable plastics industry began to take root in the 1960s. As engineers discovered ways to make plastic thinner, stronger, and easier to produce in bulk, the material started being used to make trash bags, dry-cleaning bags, and packaging for bread. “The phones would be ringing off the hook with people wanting to buy bag-making machines,” said Bill Bode of Gloucester Engineering, which sold the machines to local manufacturers in Salem, Lynn, and Peabody, as well as to out-of-state companies like Union Carbide and Mobil Chemical.

moodboard/Corbis

Plastic bags in a tree.

Grocery bags were the next big market, and plastics makers came up with a design that included handles, giving them a distinct advantage over their paper counterparts. Ironically, plastics advocates like to point out, the introduction of plastic supermarket bags in the late 1970s was initially seen as a boon to the environment because they didn’t require any trees to be cut down. But customers were unimpressed: The material felt flimsy and the bags slumped over when placed in the trunk of a car. Perhaps for this reason, plastic bags first gained a foothold in cities, because the handles made them appealing to people who had to walk home—as opposed to drive—and then climb stairs to get to their apartments. But by the mid 1980s, the tide began to turn all over the country; by 1986, disposable plastic bags were said to account for fully a quarter of the market.

By that time, round one of the bag wars was well underway, with the paper industry waging an aggressive public relations campaign, with representatives giving quotes to newspapers about how the paper bag ought to be seen as a token of American culture, alongside the flag and apple pie. More practical concerns were raised as well. A spokesman for the International Paper Co. said in 1983: “We’ve heard from grocers who say people complained of plastic bags bumping into their legs.”

None of this proved to be enough to hold back the plastic bag, which wove its way into the American household. Though they never came to be seen as classy—high-end retailers mostly stuck with paper—disposable plastic bags became a fact of life. People realized that you could always use a few bags around the house, whether to contain dirty diapers and dog poop, or carry wet swimsuits from the beach, or line wastebaskets, or pack lunch for work.

But perhaps the biggest reason for the success plastic bags have enjoyed in the United States—by 1996, they made up about 80 percent of the market—has been their low cost, with some estimating that paper bags cost four times as much to produce. This is in part because of the minuscule amount of raw material required to make a plastic bag, but it’s also because they take up less space, meaning you need a lot fewer trucks and fuel to transport them. That difference translates to massive savings for retailers: As long as shoppers expect a fresh bag every time they buy something, a big chain of supermarkets can end up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year by supplying them with plastic instead of paper.

Today, environmentalists estimate that the world consumes a trillion disposable plastic bags every year. So extraordinary is the plastic bag’s success that the Guinness Book of World Records has named it “the most ubiquitous consumer item in the world.”

***
The anti-plastic-bag movement scored its first big victory in 2002, when officials in Bangladesh banned them because they were found to be clogging storm drains and causing floods. That same year, Ireland tried to stem its litter problem by imposing a tax on plastic bags, leading to a dramatic reduction in their use. As people began to realize just how many plastic bags were out there—and how uniquely suited they were to fly through the air, float out to sea, and sit in landfills for centuries—the movement gained momentum. Bans and tax programs were implemented around the world over the course of the following decade, including in Asia, Europe, and Africa. In 2007, San Francisco became the first American city to enact a ban; it was followed shortly thereafter by Los Angeles and, earlier this year, by Seattle.

These measures have been met with extreme resistance from the plastics industry, as well as some packaging experts, like Michigan State’s Diana Twede. “People think the paper bag is environmentally friendly because it looks like nature and it comes from a tree,” said Twede. In reality, she added, “You’ve got all kinds of energy that goes into making a tree into a paper bag—lots more energy than it takes to make a plastic bag out of petrochemicals.” The bans we’ve seen passed around the world, and now in Brookline, said Donna Dempsey, a spokeswoman for a trade group called the American Progressive Bag Alliance, are nothing but “feel-good legislation which has not worked to reduce litter.”

It’s perfectly true, as people in the plastics industry remind us, that plastic bags are reusable, recyclable, and take up very little space. But it’s also true that they’re so cheap, and so profuse—think of buying a toothbrush and watching as the cashier double-bags it—that we don’t really treat them as objects we need to think about. “If my household is any indication, probably about 10 percent of them get reused at most,” said Twede. “It’s too bad more of them aren’t recycled....But they’re so cheap and so thin that it feels like they’re not worth recycling.”

Or, as Robert Malloy of UMass Lowell put it, “They’re a problem because people can afford to throw them away.”

The trajectory of the plastic bag, in this light, should perhaps be seen as a cautionary tale: It’s possible to build a tool too ideally suited to our needs. A ban on plastic bags is not an indictment of the bags themselves; as Clint Richmond, one of the Brookline residents who pushed for the new law, said, “This is not a ‘bags are evil’ thing.” Rather, it’s an admission that if an object is sufficiently cheap, effective, and plentiful, we simply cannot resist abusing it.

Tanzania: Pemba Records Success in Purging Plastic Bags

Posted by Issa Yussuf, 17 October 2012 in AllAfrica.com

Pemba — DECLARING war on the use of plastic bags has not been easy in many countries, but Pemba Islands in Indian Ocean can be a model after its admirable success.

Pemba is now taking measures to eliminate plastic bags in a bid to cut waste and conserve environment. Unguja and Pemba form Zanzibar and authorities in the Islands declared ban of use of plastic bags in the islands in February this year.

Pemba residents appear to take the ban seriously by turning to traditional bags and other environmental friendly bags. "If we can stop using plastic bags, then it's good for us and the environment," said a fishmonger Mzee Kombo, who was wrapping fish in a paper bag to his customer at Chakechake market.

Kombo says almost all residents in 'big' towns of Chakechake, Mkoani, and Wete in Pemba are aware of the negative impact of plastic bags and have been cautious in accepting any plastic bag. Under the 'environmental management for sustainable development Act No. 2 of 1996 (amended),' businesses are prohibited from manufacturing, distributing, selling or using all kinds of plastic bags.

Head of department of environment, Pemba Islands Mr Mwalimu Khamis Mwalimu said that ban on use of plastic were imposed on different dates in the past decade with little achievements, "but now administrative regulation and followthrough is carefully monitored."Our success is attributed to commitment and collaboration.

The anti- plastic bags task force includes town council authorities, and police officers, and community leaders," Mwinyi said adding that community-policing was also helping to combat the use of plastic bags. Mwinyi said that awareness campaign was going on well through media, different gathering, and use of signboard located in strategic points such as busy streets, ports, and market.

"We have left no stone unturned in Pemba in our efforts to restrict use of plastic bags in Pemba, and we are heading to declare success," Mwinyi said. However, he said used plastic bottles, and plastic used to wrap clothes and foodstuffs will remain a problem.

He said that his office was now encouraging people to return to traditional bags to abandon the use of plastic bags, "fortunately many people in Pemba have shifted to environmental friendly bags." A quick survey by the daily news in many parts of the busy town of Chakechake shows that use of plastic bags has disappeared in the Pemba busiest town.

The story is different from the main town of Zanzibar where authorities are still fighting to control the bags. The Zanzibar Director of environment Mr Sheha Mjaja says more efforts are still needed to control dishonest members of the business community continuing to import and sale plastic bags. "But another big challenge in Zanzibar town is the influx of people from Dar es Salaam carrying plastic bags.

We try to control the entry by confiscating the bags, but it is still a challenge," Mjaja says. Environmentalists say that people or customers in various places around the globe including Zanzibar started to be given flimsy plastic bags when they buy goods in the past two decades.

The cheap bags were given in retail shops and markets, eliminating the need for shoppers to bring their own bags. "While plastic bags provide convenience to consumers, this has caused a serious environmental concern including pollution because of excessive usage, inappropriate waste disposal, and lack of recycling and other reasons," Mjaja said.

Zanzibar re-launched a nationwide campaign against importation and use of plastics bags in the islands, early this year involving police officers. The ongoing crackdown has led to arrest of hundreds of people including importers and vendors who have either paid fine or served in jail.

Similar crackdown on plastics bags was implemented in 2006 recording great achievement in two years with noticeable reduction of plastics in the islands, before it emerged again in 2008.

The minister of state (environment) Ms Fatma Abdulhabib Fereji has also blamed tourists' hotels close to the sea for pollution mainly mismanagement of liquid and solid wastes including plastic bags poses a great threat to Zanzibar environment.

"We still do not have reliable national data on solid and liquid wastes, but about 260 tons of solid wastes are produced daily in Zanzibar municipality yet only 40 per cent of wastes are collected and disposed, while 2,200 cubic litres of liquid waste is disposed to the sea untreated," she said.

Internationally, legislation to discourage plastic bag use has been going on such as South Africa, Rwanda, Ireland and Taiwan, where authorities either tax shoppers who use them or impose fees on companies that distribute them.

Haiti has been, probably the latest country to ban importation and use of plastic bags. In European Union (EU) some countries have been taking measures in reducing use of plastic bags, including shying away from giving away plastic bags. EU countries have also imposed stiff fees to pay for the mess created by all the plastic trash.

But in the United States, the plastics industry has launched a concerted campaign to derail and defeat anti-bag measures nationwide. The effort includes well-placed political donations, and intensive lobbying at both the state and national levels. It is estimated that the world consumes one million plastic shopping bags every minute - and the industry is fighting hard to keep it that way.

Paper, plastic, or fee?

Posted on Philly.com August 17, 2012 By Tom Johnson, NJ SPOTLIGHT

N.J. activists, lawmakers pushing bag bills.

When you go into a supermarket, you are usually given a choice: paper or plastic bags to cart your groceries home, unless you are carrying your own reusable grocery bag.

In some states, the choice could cost you a few pennies - including New Jersey, if bills pending in the Legislature become law.

In what may be shaping up as a big battle in the fall legislative session, environmental groups and clean-ocean advocates are pushing lawmakers to either ban single-use plastic bags or charge consumers a fee if they opt for them.

The issue emerged during a hearing this week on the decline of Barnegat Bay. Environmental advocates list - among a host of problems - plastic bags as a cause of rising pollution there.

"They clog up storm drains so they don't function," said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

Conservationists argue that the bags and other plastics also are a big source of debris in oceans, posing dangers to marine life and sea birds.

John Weber, Northeast regional manager with the Surfrider Foundation, said the United Nations estimated that 100,000 marine mammals and up to one million sea birds die each year from ingesting or becoming tangled in plastics in various forms.

"Bans and fees work," Weber said. "Bag usage drops significantly whenever either is passed. In Washington, D.C., a five-cent fee curtailed plastic bag use by 60 percent within weeks. This not only reduces unsightly litter, it can also reduce the lethal impact on wildlife."

Representatives of the plastics-manufacturing industry disputed that view, telling legislators Monday in Lavalette that plastic bags were more environmentally friendly than paper bags.

"Paper bags have a lot larger carbon footprint than plastic bags," said Donna Dempsey, a spokeswoman for the American Progressive Bag Alliance.

The American Chemistry Council supports that view. According to its website, using paper bags doubles the amount of carbon dioxide produced compared with paper bags; plastic-bag production requires less than 4 percent of the water needed to make paper bags; and paper bags create almost five times more solid waste than plastic bags.

Nonetheless, several regions in the nation have enacted bans on plastic bags, including 50 jurisdictions in California, according to a memo from the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services prepared for the Senate Environment and Energy Committee.

There are no statewide bans, fees, or taxes on plastic carryout bags, although legislation is pending, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Philadelphia considered an ordinance banning the bags, but the measure failed.

In New Jersey, seven bills now in the Legislature concern recycling or phasing out noncompostable, single-use plastic bags, and offering reusable bags for purchase. Industry lobbyists dispute the allegation that most plastic bags are resigned to a single use, saying many consumers reuse them.

Industry and business lobbyists argued that the sector was making strides in recycling plastic bags and that, instead of banning their use, the state should ramp up education efforts about the need to recycle.

The effort to ban plastic bags could have an economic impact on New Jersey, Dempsey said, since there are 16 plastics-manufacturing facilities in the state, employing more than 700 people.

Barbara McConnell, vice chair of the New Jersey Clean Communities Council, noted that the state already had a tax on litter-generating products.

Victory Veto on Illinois Bag Bill

Victory!

August 26, 2012

---

After more than 170,000 people signed this petition, as well as a petition delivery to Governor Pat Quinn's Chicago office, the governor of Illinois vetoed a piece of legislation that would have prohibited towns in Illinois from enacting bans on single-use plastic bags. 

https://www.change.org/petitions/governor-quinn-don-t-let-big-plastic-bully-me

Here was her petition:

My name is Abby Goldberg, and as a 13-year-old girl who, after seeing the devastation that millions of plastic bags have caused the environment and ocean life, I made my school project this year to be getting a local ban on single-use plastic shopping bags in my home town Grayslake, IL.

My friends and I were making great progress, until the oil and chemical industry pulled a dirty trick to kill my campaign; these lobbyists used the politicians that they bought to pass a bill that would make it illegal for towns across Illinois to create plastic bag bans!  Even worse, they’re trying to make it look like a green environmental bill, by putting in a few ridiculously-low requirements for so-called “recycling” of plastic bags, and are bragging they’re going to make it "a model bill for all states!”

Now it’s in the hands of our Governor to stop them with a veto, but he needs to hear from all of us!

I am heartbroken and so angry, because kids and adults like me are standing up to Big Oil and Big Plastic by creating bans everywhere, including in Los Angeles, Hawaii, Seattle, Toronto, Austin, Mexico City, Mumbai, Italy, Rwanda and more! Why? Because bag bans can be literally 2000% more effective than “bring your own bag” campaigns!

I am not scared – even though I’m just a kid, I care too much about animals, our environment, and our future natural resources to let them beat down my town, just so they can make an extra buck. Now I need your help to stop them, and give hope to other people around the world that they can stand up for their own rights!

The governor could sign at any minute, so we need your voice as soon as possible, or my dream of getting a healthier environment for my town, our environment and our world will be totally crushed.

Thank you!!

 

Ocean Legislators: Impose Fee on Plastic Bags

Legislation is an environmental issue, legislators say

 

Posted on August 15, 2012 on Patch.com by Daniel Nee

   

Upload Photos and Videos

 

Statement on proposed legislation from Ocean County's 10th District Legislators Senator Jim Holzapfel and Assemblymen Dave Wolfe and Greg McGuckin:

10^th District Legislators, Senator Jim Holzapfel and Assemblymen Dave Wolfe and Greg McGuckin are signing on as sponsors of Senator Brian Stack’s (D-33) bill S-675 “Plastic and Paper Bag Reduction Act.”  This legislation would require certain retailers to provide recyclable, compostable or reusable bags instead of plastic or paper carryout bags.

Each year, billions of plastic bags are used in the United States and only a fraction of these bags are returned to the store for proper recycling.  These single-use plastic bags are a major concern of pollution in New Jersey, littering highway medians and waterway shorelines.

“I applaud Senator Stack’s bill which would impose a $0.10 fee for every carryout bag distributed beginning January 1, 2013,” said Senator Holzapfel.  “This fee would encourage customers to bring their own reusable bags when they visit a grocery or convenience store and eliminate our dependence on single-use plastic bags.”

According to the bill, the operator of every convenience store, drugstore, supermarket or retail establishment that provides plastic or paper carry out bags would be required to charge a $0.10 fee for every carryout bag. The fees collected would be used by the Department of Environmental Protection to defray the implementation and enforcement costs of the bill.

 “The pollution generated from plastic bags is growing at an alarming rate and education and recycling programs have only gone so far.  We need to take immediate action to ensure that consumers have an option when going to the grocery store and encourage them to start making a change now,” continued Assemblyman Wolfe.

 Senator Stack’s bill also requires the operator of the store to report quarterly to the DEP on the volume of plastic and paper carryout bags purchased and the total fees collected from the distribution of carry out bags.  A further proposal beginning in January 1, 2015 would require store operators to provide only compostable plastic bags or recyclable paper bags to its customers and would prohibit them from providing any non-compostable or non-recyclable bags to customers.

“This is not a Republican or Democrat issue.  This is an environmental issue that needs to be addressed now.  Jim, Dave and I will be writing to our Republican caucuses urging our fellow legislators to sign on and get this important bill passed in Trenton,” added Assemblyman McGuckin.

The shore legislators have also introduced multiple pieces of legislation in an effort to restore the Barnegat Bay.  In recent years, the waters of the Barnegat Bay have been severely impacted from pollution causing the ecosystems of the bay to diminish.  Restoring the Barnegat Bay is a major concern for the legislators and these bills are to help protect, preserve and remediate the Barnegat Bay estuary and its watershed.

The first bill, S-1250/A-407, is known as the “The Barnegat Bay Protection Act,” which establishes the Barnegat Bay Protection Fund, dedicates a portion of the sales tax on fertilizer, authorizes special license plates, and provides opportunities for donations to the fund.

The legislators have also sponsored S-221/A-393 which prohibits the use of urea for melting and removing ice. Urea is a commonly used nitrogen-producing substance found in fertilizers and other products for the removal of ice on sidewalks, driveways and roadways. The bill targets the problems caused by excess nitrogen from urea which can cause a chemical imbalance and endanger the ecosystem through water runoff and storm drain systems.

The final bill introduced by the legislators is S-218/A-406, which gives tax credits to residents who live within 1,000 feet of Barnegat Bay and its tributaries who replace grass lawns with stone, crushed shells or other similar materials.  Property owners who either replace their lawns or already have lawns with existing stone or crushed shell lawns would be eligible for a recurring annual tax credit of $250 against the State income tax.

12-Year-Old Takes on ‘Big Plastic’ With Petition

Posted by Ted Duboise on Plastic Bag Ban Report.com

Abby Goldberg. Photo courtesy of Environment Illinois.

CHICAGO, Illinois, July 10, 2012 (ENS) – People are still signing Abby Goldberg’s petition asking the governor of Illinois to veto a bill on his desk that would make it illegal for Illinois cities and towns to enact plastic bag bans.

When the 12-year-old Grayslake, Illinois student presented Governor Pat Quinn with her petition on July 3 it had 150,000 signatures. Today, a week later, there are 157,530 signatures on the petition at change.org. People are signing up at the rate of more than 1,000 per day.

“After seeing the devastation that millions of plastic bags have caused the environment and ocean life, I made my school project this year to be getting a local ban on single-use plastic shopping bags in my home town of Grayslake, IL,” writes Goldberg in the introduction to her petition.

“My friends and I were making great progress, until the oil and chemical industry pulled a dirty trick to kill my campaign; these lobbyists used the politicians that they bought to pass a bill that would make it illegal for towns across Illinois to create plastic bag bans!” she writes.

“Even worse, they’re trying to make it look like a green environmental bill, by putting in a few ridiculously-low requirements for so-called ‘recycling’ of plastic bags, and are bragging they’re going to make it ‘a model bill for all states!’” writes Goldberg.

The bill, the Plastic Bag & Film Recycling Act, SB 3442, requires the recycling of plastic bags. It passed the Illinois House and Senate June 1. Governor Quinn has 60 days from that date to either veto the bill or sign it into law.

The bill is backed by the American Progressive Bag Alliance, which represents the plastic bag manufacturing and recycling industry.

The Alliance argues that recycling used plastic bags provides business opportunities for for Illinois consumers and the environment without added costs.

“Businesses will benefit from being able to sell used plastic bags, sacks and wraps to recyclers so that they can be turned into new products – like backyard decking, plumbing pipes, playground equipment, and even new plastic bags,” the Alliance wrote in a May 1 open letter to the lawmakers in Springfield.

“S.B. 3442 provides an easier means for more consumers to recycle their used plastic bags, sacks and wraps by requiring bag manufacturers to supply more recycling bin locations and setting minimum recycling rate requirements,” the Alliance wrote. “By setting a statewide standard for recycling, Illinois will avoid having a patchwork of local laws that burden consumers and businesses.”

Plastic bags are 100 percent recyclable and are re-used by nine out of ten Americans, the Alliance argues. “They are made primarily from clean natural gas, and plastic bag manufacturing and recycling supports more than 30,000 manufacturing jobs across the nation – with 3,000 workers in Illinois alone.” “…we hope this legislation becomes a model bill for legislatures across the nation,” the Alliance wrote.

But the 12-year-old has set her sights on the defeat of S.B. 3442. Her petition is called “Gov. Quinn: Don’t Let Big Plastic Bully Me!”

Goldberg wrote that she is “especially angry” that the American Progressive Bag Alliance has said that SB 3442 could be “a model bill” for all states.

“That means that they could push their corporate interests all over America, preventing kids like me and towns like mine from taking action to stop pollution,” Goldberg wrote.

“Well, the corporations may be afraid of me, but I’m not afraid of them. I know that if thousands of people sign my petition, Governor Quinn will see that the public doesn’t want these big corporations telling our towns what we can and cannot do,” wrote Goldberg. “And when we win, that veto will be a signal to Big Plastic that they had better not expect to take their bill to other states without a fight.”

Goldberg has some powerful backers on her side too.

With her at Governor Quinn’s office to deliver the petition were Champaign, Illinois Mayor Don Gerard, whose City Council supported charging a fee for bags; Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno, the sponsor of a Chicago bag ban ordinance; Chicago Recycling Coalition President Mike Nowak and Environment Illinois’s Max Muller; along with Sierra Club Illinois Director Jack Darin, and Jared Teutsch of the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

Governor Quinn has not said whether he will veto S.B. 3442 or not.

Goldberg is hopeful. “I had no idea it was going to get that many signatures,” she told the “Chicago Tribune” on Sunday. “It’s so amazing.”

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2012. All rights reserved.
PHOTO: Abby Goldberg speaks to the media after delivering 150,000 signatures to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, July 3, 2012 (Photo courtesy Environment Illinois)

Veto the Big-Plastic-Lobbied Plastic Bag and Film Recycling Act

Once again, big corporations are trying to use big government to control the rights of citizens in towns all over America, but this time you can help me stop it!

"My name is Abby Goldberg, and as a 12-year-old girl who, after seeing the devastation that millions of plastic bags have caused the environment and ocean life, I made my school project this year to be getting a local ban on single-use plastic shopping bags in my home town Grayslake, IL.

My friends and I were making great progress, until the oil and chemical industry pulled a dirty trick to kill my campaign; these lobbyists passed a bill that would make it illegal for towns across Illinois to create plastic bag bans!  Even worse, they’re trying to make it look like a green environmental bill, by putting in a few ridiculously-low requirements for so-called “recycling” of plastic bags, and are bragging they’re going to make it "a model bill for all states!”

Now it’s in the hands of our Governor to stop them, but he needs to hear from all of us!

I am heartbroken and so angry, because kids and adults like me are standing up to Big Oil and Big Plastic by creating bans everywhere, including in Los Angeles, Hawaii, Seattle, Toronto, Austin, Mexico City, Mumbai, Italy, Rwanda and more! Why? Because bag bans can be literally 2000% more effective than “bring your own bag” campaigns!

I am not scared – even though I’m just a kid, I care too much about animals, our environment, and our future natural resources to let them beat down my town, just so they can make an extra buck. Now I need your help to stop them, and give hope to other people around the world that they can stand up for their own rights!

The governor could sign at any minute, so we need your voice as soon as possible, or my dream of getting a healthier environment for my town, our environment and our world will be totally crushed.

Thank you!!"

Letter to the Governor of Illinois:

Dear Governor Quinn,

I urge you not to let and plastic-industry corporations use government to eliminate the right of citizens to determine their own local policies.

I stand with 12-year-old Illinois resident Abby Goldberg in asking you to veto a dangerous bill before you that would prevent communities across the entire state of Illinois from taking action to care for their local environments. The so-called "Plastic Bag and Film Recycling Act," while noble in name, is actually a plastic-bag-lobby bill designed to strip communities of the right to find alternatives to single-use plastic bags.

Abby is working hard in her community to try and pass a plastic bag ban -- a measure we know is extremely effective in curbing the pollution caused by rampant plastic bag use. Plastic bags litter our farm lands, hang from our trees, choke up our waterways, hurt our wildlife, and their production wastes oil and natural gas that we need to help us bridge to a renewable-energy economy. That's why communities all around the country -- from Seattle to Austin to Los Angeles, and even the entire state of Hawaii – have successfully banned the distribution of plastic bags.

But the legislation before you would rob Illinois communities of the right to do the same, including Grayslake, Illinois, Abby's hometown, where she's worked extremely hard to get a local bag-ban.

Gov. Quinn, I urge you not to cave in to Big Oil and the plastics industry, and instead stand with Abby Goldberg and thousands of others by vetoing this dangerous bill. Local communities should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to ban plastic bags. Passing this bill would set an extremely harmful precedent that could very well have national implications – an industry spokesman claims they are trying to make this “a model bill for all states.”

Don't allow Illinois to undo the work of Abby and concerned citizens around the country, who want to take care of and preserve their environment. Please veto the "Plastic Bag and Film Recycling Act," IL SB3442.

As Abby Goldberg says, this bill is a wolf in sheep's clothing, and will only serve to harm communities across the state.

Thank you for your time.

[Your name]

At the time of this posting, Abby had 8,600 signatures out of a 10,000 goal.   Here is a link to the petition on Change.org:
https://www.change.org/petitions/governor-quinn-don-t-let-big-plastic-bully-me