Monday, December 19, 2011

Socialist Plot to Take Away Your Plastic Bags!

Thank you for checking back in.  Here is some recent news from the "Zero Waste" front.  StopWaste.Org recently proposed two new ordinances for Alameda County: 1) a "Mandatory Recycling Ordinance" and a 2) a "Single Use Bag Reduction Ordinance."  I will give some information on both proposals.  The information in this post is mostly obtained from the project EIR, posted on stopwaste.org.  An article appeared in the Yodeler online this past summer, written by Debra Kaufman (I think) from Stopwaste.org reporting on the general intentions of StopWaste to put these proposals forward.

In case you wanted to know, StopWaste is a hybrid of the Alameda County Waste Management Authority (ACWMA), an independent agency, and the Source Reduction and Recycling Board, approved by Alameda County voters in 1990 as part of Alameda Cty Measure D.  Its offices are at 1537 Webster St., only blocks from my office at Kaiser, and I know some of the staff who work there through my past non-profit activities.  I have had generally good interaction with StopWaste, and am impressed they are able to carry on their work despite the uncertain financial situation facing area cities, and the complicated politics of being a hybrid "agency" / voter approved board.

Getting back to the proposals, the proposed county wide mandatory recycling program (CWMRP) would charge a fine "for putting things like newspapers, aluminum cans and food scraps in the garbage instead of recycle and compost bins."  The Oakland Tribune recently reported on the program.  The goal is to divert 90 percent of materials that could be recycled or composted, such as paper, plant debris and food, from city dumps by 2020. Right now 69 percent gets composted or recycled.  Phase 1 would begin in July with businesses, haulers and the owners or managers of multifamily buildings such as apartments.  As the project EIR puts it, the CWMRP is supposed to "maximize recovery of recyclable and organic materials and reduce the disposal of recoverable materials."  This goal is tied to the effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through needless trucking of waste to landfill.  If  more waste that can be separated and recycled, the less waste needs to be trucked from Oakland to Altamont Land Fill (40 miles away) and from other East Bay cities, as well.

The plan begins with paper, cardboard, food and beverage containers and a variety of similar materials. Phase 2 would start July 2014 and expand to mandatory composting. San Diego, San Carlos, San Francisco and Sacramento are among other California cities that have put mandatory commercial recycling rules on the books.  Though there is a long list of suggested rules to apply to different properties, including single family, multi-unit, commercial / business and retail tenants, the basic gist of it is that everyone will be required to separate their waste, for instance newspaper and carboard, from the regular trash, in case they were not doing so already. The EIR states on page 10: "The difference will be that the garbage containers will not be as large or as full, and the recyclables and organics containers will be more completely filled, more often."

The second proposed ordinance is the very benign sounding Single Use Bag Reduction Ordinance.  This ordinance would "ban" single use plastic bags and force county stores that sell packaged food to charge a .10 fee for each paper bag, incentivizing customers to bring their own, reusable, bags.  If adopted, the "bag ban" *(ban on plastic, fee for paper) would begin January 1, 2013 and affect about 1,900 stores in the county.  These stores include drug stores, supermarkets, pharmacies, grocery stores, convenience food stores and liquor stores. Restaurants, take-out food establishments, charitable thrift stores and retail stores that don’t sell packaged food would be exempt from the ordinance.

While you might think this ordinance would not attract as much opposition as the first one, in fact it's just the opposite.  The plastic bag fee proposal got the retailers and plastics manufacturers, under the umbrella of an organization named "Save the Plastic Bag Coalition," to write a 27 page EIR comment letter (check the  EIR document linked above if you want to read the letter).  This letter, signed by the coaliltion's legal counsel, makes the case that a) plastic bags aren't as big a problem as we think they are, b) banning plastic bags while charging a fee for paper bags will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, because the paper bags, which require more energy to create than plastic, will not be recycled as the author of the proposal assumes, and c) the proposal is unfair to plastics manufacturers because it bans plastic bags while only charging a low fee for paper.  Or so I understood.  I may be misinterpreting this letter.  It's so very long and full of spurious claims doubting the findings of the EIR.  I basically see this letter as an attempt to threaten the county with a lawsuit - which occurred before when other CA municipalities tried to ban plastic bags (including Oakland).  The pasticbaglaws.org website in fact points to one of the culprits of the current predicament: AB2449, passed in 2006 under then Gov. Schwarzennegger, which, while requiring stores over a certain size to provide plastic bag recycling bins, bans these same stores from charging a fee for plastic bags:

"The bill would declare that certain matters regarding plastic carryout
bags are matters of statewide interest and concern. The bill would prohibit
a city, county, or other public agency from adopting, implementing, or
enforcing an ordinance, resolution, regulation, or rule that requires a store
to collect, transport, or recycle plastic carryout bags or conduct additional
auditing or reporting, or imposing a plastic carryout bag fee upon a store,
except as specified."

In the absence of the ability to charge a fee for plastic, municipalities and counties across the state are instead opting to go the more strict route of banning plastic bags altogether.  And manufacturers and retailers are predictably protesting.  However, they have no right to protest - they should have allowed cities and stores to charge a plastic fee back in 2006, but instead it was their influence that led to AB2449 being written (or flawed, in my opinion) so as to forbid this common-sense practice.

By the way: the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition has an interesting web page that disputes the size and scope of the "Pacific Garbage Patch" in the Pacific Ocean.

In summary, I am glad that StopWaste.org has come forward with these 2 ordinances despite the challenge it will be to implement it, to educate the public and then enforce the terms.  I wish we could do what other nations have done - like Canada, Australia and Europe, where they charge a fee for both paper and plastic bags.  The essential problem appears to be, as usual, our own political culture.