Article
California set to vote on plastic bag ban
Proponents of the bill point to environmental benefits, while detractors decry possible loss of jobs.
August 29, 2010 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance
In 2007, San Francisco became the first city in the United States to ban the use of plastic shopping bags. This week, a battle rages on within the California Senate over bill AB 1998, which would outlaw their use state-wide.
Nearly 150 groups have officially voiced their support for the bill, including numerous cities and counties within the state, as well as many environmental agencies and non-profits. The list of opponents is much shorter — just 18 — and consists mainly of industry associations and chambers of commerce.
The bill is currently on the Senate floor and both sides are "lobbying like crazy," according to Colleen Bednarz, ocean awareness coordinator for the non-profit Save Our Shores. "AB 1998 has a huge amount of support from grocers, the public, and of course, the environmental community. It is being dubbed the most important environmental bill in California this year." A vote on the bill could come tonight.
Bednarz points out that China banned plastic bags a year ago, and in the time since, that country has decreased petroleum consumption by about 100 million barrels and eliminated millions of pounds of litter.
"California uses 19 billion plastic bags a year and only one to five percent of them are recycled," she added. "You do the math. The rest end up littering and polluting our waterways and land."
"We all agree that plastic bags do not belong in our oceans or on our sidewalks, but this bill threatens several hundred family-wage manufacturing jobs and increasingly successful programs to recycle plastic bags," said Allyson Wilson, manager of public relations for the American Chemistry Council, which opposes the bill. "Plastic bag makers believe that enhanced programs to recycle plastic bags are a more effective solution than taxes or bans."
As the countdown continues on the bill's life-or-death — if it doesn't pass by the end of August, it gets back-burnered for two years — the dialogue has turned at times into invective.
"The American Chemistry Council is trying their damnedest to kill this bill with false information and press releases that are actually getting published, and so some of the public is most likely buying the ACC load of propaganda crap," Bednarz said. "The ACC is calling it a job-killing, bag tax, and they couldn't be more wrong."
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The ACC does, in fact, point to a number of California-based plastic bag manufacturers, such as Command Packaging, Crown Poly and Omega Plastics, which employ several hundred people and would be impacted by the bill's passage. Wilson also points out that AB 1998 would negatively impact many recycling jobs in the state.
If plastic bags were gone from groceries tomorrow, that would leave shoppers with two remaining options, paper or reusable — and an increase in the use of reusable is also a sticking point for the ACC.
"Suggestions that there will be an increase in the U.S. production of reusable bags are purely hypothetical and not supported by existing practices," Wilson said. "It appears that most reusable bags are manufactured overseas and imported into the United States. This point is further underscored by the fact that tariffs on imported reusable bags were just eliminated, making significant increases in U.S. production of reusable bags less likely."
(Photo by EvelynGiggles.)
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