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Plastic Bag Ban
Statewide plastic bag ban fails again
9/19/12
In the final day of the legislative session, the State Senate failed yet again to act on legislation to ban single-use plastic bags statewide.
Humboldt Waste Management Authority’s Programs Manager, Brent Whitener, said, "We are saddened to see Assembly Bill 298, the statewide ban on single-use bags, die in the Senate Appropriations Committee. It met its fate along with other pro-environmental legislation during eleventh hour bargaining, seemingly with the film plastic industry claiming job loss and other economic impacts."
Humboldt Waste Management Authority will continue working toward local bag bans. In June, the HWMA Board directed staff to conduct the required environmental review for local bag bans. The environmental review is expected to move forward this fall, after which local jurisdictions will be able to proceed by adopting bag ban ordinances.
In the past 2 years, over 50 cities and counties in the state have voted to ban single-use plastic bags. When all of these ordinances go into affect, almost one-third of Californians will live in bag-free communities.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a plastic bag ban November 2010, marking the largest bag ban in California, covering more than 1 million residents. Other cities and counties have passed similar bans in California, and Humboldt County may be next on the growing list.
Several local grocers, including Ray’s McKinleyville and several Murphy’s Market locations, have chosen to eliminate plastic bags in the past few months.
The flimsy bags used at checkout counters are light and can be blown easily by the wind. They often find their way to the beach and ocean, where they are swallowed by sea turtles, birds, and other marine life.
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Ray's Food Place to Stop Offering Plastic Bags |
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Written by KIEM - Channel 3 News
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1/9/13
Paper or plastic? It’s the age-old question customers prepare for when stepping up to the cash register. But come Monday, customers at Ray’s Food Place will have to use paper or bring their own bag.
It’s a change C&K Market Inc. made to its retailers. Locally, that’s Ray’s Food Place.
"We’ve been testing this for the past 6 months or so in this store," Robert Parker said.
Parker is the Store Manager at the Ray’s Food Place in McKinleyville and says Fortuna was also a test site.
"We’ve actually found that our cost has gone down," he said.
He said the brown bags not only hold more items, but it’s also been encouraging shoppers to bring their own reusable ones.
"Since we've went away from plastic, we've seen the amount of reusable bags coming into the store increase dramatically," Parker said.
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Two More Cities Ban Plastic Bags |
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Written by EcoWatch
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1/16/13
In California, the Cupertino City Council and Glendale City Council each voted unanimously last night to bar stores from distributing single-use plastic bags within their respective city limits. The vote came after lengthy comment from residents, activists and public officials in enthusiastic support of the ban.
“This important step forward for Cupertino and Glendale shows yet again that local communities can achieve lasting victories for ocean and environmental health,” said Nathan Weaver of Environment California. “We continue to build more and more momentum to keep plastic out of the Pacific. Every week cities, town, counties and others are working to ban single use plastic bags, Styrofoam food packaging, and other unnecessary throwaway plastics polluting our oceans.”
Nearly 60 cities and counties in California have voted to ban single-use plastic bags in recent years. Plastic bags are a direct threat to wildlife, like the pacific leatherback sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish, and they are thought to be a major source of marine plastic pollution.
The new ordinances will take effect on Oct. 1 for Cupertino and by January 2014 for Glendale. While Glendale’s ordinance applies only to large grocery stores, large pharmacies and certain convenience stores, Cupertino’s ban covers stores of all sizes, including retail. Neither ban would apply to restaurants.
Both cities adopted $.10 fees, to be retained by the merchant, for each paper bag that a shopper requests. Shoppers who receive benefits under the California Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children will be exempt from paying the fee.
Cupertino will also adopt an anti-littering ordinance and ordered city staff to draft a Styrofoam food packaging ban.
About plastic bag pollution
Vast amounts of plastic litter have accumulated in the Pacific Ocean, threatening fish, birds, and other wildlife that too frequently mistakes floating plastic for food. This plastic soup will never bio-degrade. At best, it brittles in the sun, breaking into flakes and scraps that can be swallowed by smaller animals.
Plastic bags are a major source of marine plastic pollution and a direct threat to wildlife. Sea turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, filling their stomachs with indigestible blockage that can eventually starve the animal to death. Birds and fish can become tangled in plastic, impeding their ability, to feed or escape predators. As plastic bags breaks down at sea, they add to the soup of floating fragments swallowed by birds, fish and filter feeding organisms.
Plastic bags are one of the most common garbage items found in annual beach cleanups by Ocean Conservancy and other groups. Catch basin cleanouts along the Los Angeles River have found that plastic bags and film constituted up to 43 percent of litter collected, according to a report prepared for the California Coastal Commission.
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Seaside activist tracks waves of 'microplastic' washed onto Oregon beaches |
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Written by Scott Learn, The Oregonian
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9/25/12
Crescent Beach is a majestic place, bounded by thick forest and rocky headlands that jut from the sea, rounded and bird-covered to the south, sharp like sails to the north.
It's also, as Marc Ward has discovered, a "plastic sink," one of the spots along Oregon's coast where thousands upon thousands of plastic fragments spin out of the North Pacific Gyre and settle into high-tideline sands.
Ward, a 54-year-old Seaside native, splits his year dashing between protecting sea turtles in Costa Rica and tracking an increase of toxic-laden "microplastics" on Oregon beaches. Those two vocations are closely related, given the plastic found in the stomachs of sea turtles, seabirds and other ocean creatures.
In rubber boots, cargo shorts and a safety mask, he scoops sand from Crescent Beach onto a homemade filter -- a fiberglass net tacked between wooden dowels.
Ward and a volunteer rock it up and down, sifting sand. Left behind: bits of wood, hundreds of polystyrene flakes, industrial polymer pellets and brittle plastic fragments, tinkling like wind chimes in the swaying net.
Tossed at sea
Scientists estimate -- very roughly -- about 100 million tons of garbage in two patches within the North Pacific Gyre. Much is weathered plastic pieces floating beneath the surface, broken down consumer products and marine castoffs.

The patches sit within the gyre, which rotates clockwise off the West Coast. The north and central Oregon coast sits near a prime escape hatch: roughly 2 o'clock as the current curves down the coast.
"You guys are almost at the bullseye of a shotgun blast of debris," says Chris Pincetich, a California marine biologist and advisor to Ward's non-profit, Sea Turtles Forever.
The landfall zone extends from northern Oregon to Cape Blanco, south of Coos Bay, Ward says. In three years of beachcombing, he's found microplastic buried at every beach he's scouted from Cape Blanco north -- typically in a 15-foot-wide band near high tide lines.
He's found particularly high concentrations, or sinks, at Bandon, Manzanita, Rockaway, Oswald West, Cannon Beach and Crescent Beach. Sinks tend to form south of geological formations, Ward says, including headlands, jetties and points that create a back eddy, as Tillamook Head does at Crescent Beach. The same characteristics attract seabirds -- and beachgoers.
The plastic, from nickel to sand-grain size, has likely been at sea for years, breaking down under ultraviolet rays but not biodegrading.
At the sinks, Ward marks off square meters for sampling. He digs 5 centimeters down, sifts, then counts and weighs the plastic in his garage lab.
Ward first noticed microplastics on Oregon beaches four years ago. Three years ago, he saw the biggest surge, and figures a combination of critical plastic mass in the ocean and changing currents fueled the deluge. Plastic in his highest-density samples has increased 30 percent a year since in spots he'd already cleaned, including a big boost in polystyrene after the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
Ward tallied more than a half-pound of plastic in one square meter at Crescent Beach this summer, including 739 styrene flakes and 861 industrial pellets. About 10 percent is visible, he says, the rest buried under drifts.
"People walk by and they think, 'Oh, we have a little problem here,'" Ward says. "They don't realize 90 percent of it is out of sight."
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Ban on Plastic Grocery Bags Fails to Pass the California State Senate |
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Written by Contra Costa Times Blog
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9/2/12
In the final day of the legislative session on Friday, the State Senate failed to act on AB 298, a bill to ban single-use plastic bags statewide. This bill would have been a major step forward in protecting the Pacific Ocean from plastic pollution, according to EnvironmentCalifornia.org.
The following information is from EnvironmentCalifornia.org:
“Nothing that we use for a few minutes should pollute the ocean for hundreds of years” said Dan Jacobson, Legislative Director for Environment California. “Californians understand this and are taking action in their communities to protect the Pacific.”
Plastic pollution from single-use bags affects 267 species every year. One of those animals is the Pacific Leatherback Sea Turtle. These species consume hundreds of jellyfish each day and easily mistake plastic bags for their favorite food. In fact, one third of adult turtles have ingested plastic, according to a recent report by the Turtle Island Restoration Network. Pacific Leatherback Sea Turtles have declined 95% in the last two decades.
In the past 2 years, over 50 cities or counties have voted to ban single-use plastic bags. When all of these ordinances go into affect, almost one-third of Californian’s will live in bag-free communities.
“Going reusable is not a revolutionary concept,” said Dan Jacobson, “More cities are banning bags each month, but unfortunately our state legislators are getting left behind on this issue.”
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California plastic bag ban: Will it get there this year? |
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Written by Karin Klein, L.A. Times
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8/31/12
Every year, it seems, the California Legislature can't bring itself to pass meaningful legislation to reduce the number of plastic carryout bags in the state. On year, in fact, the Legislature bowed to the industry and instead of allowing a small fee on the bags, banned cities from imposing fees on them.
That's too bad because, as the Times editorial board has pointed out numerous times, a small fee on the bags is the better way to go, as fees in such diverse places as Ireland and IKEA have shown. That way, people still have the convenience of the plastic bag if they really want it; at the same time, the prospect of paying even a few cents cuts down hugely on their use; at IKEA, the number of such bags used dropped by about 90% within the first year.
Those flimsy handled bags are a particular strain on the environment because so many of them find their way to the beach and ocean and become part of that gigantic soupy plastic mix called the Great Floating Garbage Patch or the Pacific Gyre (there's also one in the Atlantic). They're also swallowed, but not digested, by marine life, which can make it hard for animals to eat the food they actually need. And because the bags are so light and can be blown so easily by the wind, they're also a problem in various wilderness areas, where they can choke animals. The state tried upping the recycling of the bags, but it didn't work.
Other plastic bags, like the ones you put your vegetables in or get the newspaper delivered in, aren't targeted. Perhaps because they're not convenient for carrying things around in, they aren't found much on the beach, while the handled kind are the second most common trash item there.
In the absence of anything resembling real action at the state level, many cities have moved ahead anyway. Since they cannot impose a fee on plastic, they ban it altogether. Most of them then place a small fee on paper bags, so that consumers still have that option. Others ban all kinds of single-use bags, as do many places in Europe. Most notably, the city of Los Angeles passed a ban this year. Supermarkets would prefer to see a standard rule everywhere rather than this growing patchwork.
It has to happen today if this is to be the year. AB 298 would ban most carryout plastic bags and allow a fee on paper equal to the stores' cost. It would cost consumers very little, and they're already paying for the bags now in the form of costs rolled into the price of food. It's a pretty small way to make an important difference; the question is whether the Legislature has gotten the message that the anti-ban movement in this state isn't going away. Yes, it would be better to make it a fee on both, but more important is to move ahead.
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Plastic Bag Ban
