Sacramento - January 23 - You won't have to pay for local Sacramento groceries to bag your food. For further information, see the January 23, 2010 Sacramento Bee article by Jim Sanders, "Fee for shopping bags rejected by Assembly committee." And you won't be required by law to bring your own tote bags for shopping, even though the landfills are brimming with plastic bags. Can you reduce disposable bag usage?
If so, where are you going to put your kitchen garbage when you can't get free paper bags and your garbage disposal can't handle all the solid waste like cooked bones, orange skins, potato peels, nut shells, and apricot pits? Composting it in your garden? But what if you live in a small apartment?
Legislation in Sacramento has been derailed. which would have required grocery and convenience stores to charge you for paper or plastic bags was turned down by the Assembly Appropriations Committee. In Europe people bring their own baskets to buy groceries and produce.
Californians use 600 plastic bags per second, but of the 12 billion produced, they recycle just 1 to 4 percent of them, according to the California Integrated Waste Management Board. Each year, at least 12 billion plastic bags are manufactured and sold in California, according to an industry group. If you leave plastic food bags near water, seagulls rip open the bags to get at the food. Some countries wrap food bought from vendors and farmers' markets in newspapers that are eventually recycled. But you can't do that with packaged groceries.
Sacramento has to find a solution to the bag problem by providing low-cost alternatives to bags. With the high unemployment rate, people can't afford bags when every quarter is saved to make a food budget stretch to the end of the month. Perhaps the solution is to find ways for each family to make its own sturdy, reusable grocery bags.
This litter has to stop, but shoppers aren't interested in paying a quarter for a paper bag or a bag of recycled material. The bags on sale made from recycled plastic bottles are a little to small to hold as many groceries as the old paper backs.
On the other hand, with a heavy melon inside a paper bag or juice bottles, the handles rip off as you're carrying the bags home. In 2007, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 to make the city the first in the nation to prohibit petroleum-based plastic checkout bags in large markets and pharmacies.
What's the solution in Sacramento? Bring your own baskets or tote bags? Or make your own sized to your usual grocery load using material that will stand up to the weight of your usual grocery bag? With more shoppers walking home, senior nondrivers, and bus riders with grocery bags, the problem has to be solved by what's convenient and affordable for most shoppers in working-class neighborhoods.
If the vote had gone the other way, as a food shopper, you would have been required to pay a quarter for each bag. The bill was called Assembly Bills 68 and 87. It was introduced to reduce the cost of waste and promote the sale of reusable bags (that sometimes were given free at food market grand openings or anniversaries).
Otherwise you'd have to bring your own bag. Or sew it yourself from canvas or some other durable material. The problem is somehow, society needs to decrease the volume of plastic bags that pose a danger to animals and clog the natural waters in any area.
The issue isn't over yet. Assemblyman Mike Davis, Los Angeles (D) crafted AB 87. It will be revived again later. The problem is the cost of cleaning up litter. Notice all those plastic bags and food cups all along the light rail station recently? People are not holding it 'till they get to the can. They're dumping plastic bags anywhere they travel by local transit.
The 25 cent fee on grocery and convenience store bags would have cost California around $300,000 to put it into action and a million dollars annually to collect. The idea is, of course, that the money would have been raised to pay for cleanup of the plastic bag littering the state, let alone the city.
Donations of reusable bags to groups might have helped. If the public service announcement did any good, the people continuing to throw plastic grocery or food carryout bags, plastic cups, and other litter in the light rail tracks, on the seats, and anywhere you can sit to wait for a bus, didn't hear the announcements. There is an organization that lobbies on recycling called Californians Against Waste.
Every second, 400 light and aerodynamic plastic bags are distributed in the State of California, according to the website of Californians Against Waste. That's 14 billion bags per year. Plastic bags are a principal component of the litter that clogs our urban creeks, streams and bays.
And plastic bags are a major component of the plastic litter that becomes marine debris. Marine debris kills thousands of marine animals every year, and the problem is getting worse. In the North Pacific Gyre there is already 46 times more plastic particles than plankton. Check out the site of Californians Against Waste, and learn what you can do to reduce this dangerous, litter-prone, and difficult-to-recycle component of marine debris pollution.
The big problem is the 25 cent fee for each grocery bag. Most people's tote bags that they buy for two or three dollars are too small for the amount of groceries that currently fit in a large paper shopping bag given for free by local supermarkets. The paper bags often are used at home to fill with kitchen garbage such as fruit and vegetable peels or garbage that usually clogs up garbage disposals in older homes. Unlike plastic bags, paper bags stand up straight without having to buy a contraption that holds up plastic bags to throw garbage in that can't be flushed away, such as wet paper towels or avocado pits.
Most people are taking a financial hit and struggling just to buy food and pay rent or mortgage fees. They don't need a high fee for single-use grocery bags. It would be great if students could sew tote bags out of a heavy material, canvas, denim, upholstery fabric, in elementary or middle-school classes in their art, craft, or consumer science classes.
Policy makers are not eager to pass a bill requiring people to pay a quarter for each bag. But the issue will keep going to the Assembly Appropriations Committee later this year or in the near future.
The issue isn't over yet. Unfortunately for low-income seniors on a three-figure a month fixed income, paying fifty cents for two paper bags that they get now for free each time they go shopping is expensive. That means for non-drivers that carry bags on buses or walk home with their own shopping carts would pay for each bag to wheel home or lug on public transit in personal wagons or carts. If you ride the light rail in the afternoon, you'll see many shoppers with food-filled personal shopping carts filled with three or four paper bags of groceries.
If you're shopping daily because you can't lug heavy packages weekly and have to buy a few things at a time, the expense of bags will add up. That's why sewing large tote bags may be the answer, but try to get male shoppers to craft their own canvas or denim bags. Most shopping bags made to sell for two or three dollars or more in stores are made from recycled plastic bottles. They almost, but not quite, have the feel of canvas fabric, but wear out pretty quick.
What's the answer? Some feel charging a nickel for a bag is much more fair, and lower-income shoppers won't feel that they're being nickel and dimed. The danger, though of a five cent proposal is that each year the fee will be increased. Shoppers are already charged a ten cent fee on glass juice bottles.
When they lug the bottles to the recycling kiosk in shopping centers, sometimes they're told the recycling place isn't taking glass juice bottles not marked with the five cent deposit sign on the label. That leaves out the bottles without labels due to washing or reuse to store beans or grain. Where else can you store food when you don't want to store food in plastic? You store it in juice bottles.
If you want to charge a fee on plastic or paper bags, it's better to make sure the average shopper can afford the fee when several bags are needed each week. And instead of using trees for paper bags, recycled materials will cut down on waste because many people use the paper bags to seal their daily kitchen garbage instead of buying more expensive plastic garbage bags that you have to smell every day of the week as you add more garbage to it, stored in smaller paper bags.
Resources in Sacramento Regarding Plastic Bags
Additional Resources:
Ocean Protection Council on Marine Debris
Plastic Litter and Waste Reduction Campaign
Plastic Bags: Local Ordinances
Comments
The backdoor proposal that Democrats have laid out is to reintroduce bills with a $0.05 / bag tax. This new approach is based on two points.
1-Seattle voters repealed via referendum a Seattle city council ordinance that established a $0.25/bag tax that many considered oppressive.
2-The Washington DC counsel passed and implemented a $0.05/bag tax. So Democrats are assuming this is acceptable with the public.
Here is what they have over looked…the Irish bag tax that was the genesis of the whole tax model was raised twice since its introduction.
Please don’t think that any tax levied would remain at its initial rate. If they bring in a five cent tax it will simply be to raise it later on after it is on the books.
The fee is not meant to collect revenue, it's meant to discourage the use of disposable plastic. All you have to do is buy one set of reusable bags. A family of 4 might need, say, 8 bags. They usually go for $1 each. So spend $8 once, and your set of bags will last you for at least 5-10 years. These things don't wear out.
Also, remember that the cost of "free" plastic bags is included in the cost of your groceries. So if stores didn't have to hand them out, grocery prices would go down. This would more than cover the $8 you spent.
This should have passed. It benefits everyone except the plastics industry.
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