Top UN Official Calls for Global Ban on Plastic Bags
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/9/headlines#15
In environmental news, a top UN official is urging a global ban on plastic bags, in part because plastic is the most pervasive form of ocean litter. Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Program, said, "Single-use plastic bags, which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere.
There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere.” The campaign to ban plastic bags is gaining steam internationally.
China banned free plastic bags last year, saving the country an estimated 40 billion plastic bags. Here in this country, San Francisco is the only large city to have banned plastic bags.
Portland may ban plastic bags or charge for them
by Mark Larabee, The Oregonian Thursday July 24, 2008, 4:45 PM
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2008/07/portland_ban_plastic_bags.html
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2008/07/portland_ban_plastic_bags.html
The next thing you might hear at the cash register is: "Paper or plastic? That'll be extra."
On the heels of San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles, Portland may impose a fee on grocery bags by next year to reduce waste and encourage people to shop with reusable sacks.
"It's a simple behavioral change that we have to ingrain in ourselves," said City Commissioner Sam Adams.
He first brought up the idea more than a year ago and now is pushing for a City Council vote, but hasn't decided how much to charge: He's discussing anywhere from 5 cents to 20 cents per bag.
The switch would represent a big lifestyle change for consumers, Adams acknowledged. They'll have to remember to bring their own bags or risk the fee, but he said many people already carry cloth bags in keeping with Portland's "green values."
"This is a totally avoidable fee," he said.
Part of the money raised from the fee would help provide free cloth bags to low-income people. Some would go toward city recycling programs and some would go to stores for administration and programs to educate consumers about the fee.
Adams hopes the fee will be in place by the time he takes over as Portland's mayor in January.
Even though both paper and plastic bags are recyclable, both present environmental problems.
Only 52 percent of the paper and 5 percent of plastic grocery bags given out in the United States are recycled, said Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resources Foundation in Costa Mesa, Calif.
Plastic bags are made from oil. They don't biodegrade and are considered a serious litter problem because they're lightweight and blow around. They also kill marine mammals who mistake them for food.
Grocery stores collect the bags and send them to be made into plastic "lumber" or flower pots -- Portland doesn't allow them in the city's new blue recycling carts because they gum up the machinery used to sort recycling.
Paper bags easily decompose, but it takes trees to make them. They're also heavier than plastic, so for every truckload of plastic bags shipped to a grocery store, it takes three trucks to ship the same number of paper bags, said Joe Gilliam, president of the Northwest Grocery Association, a lobbying group working on the issue.
"It's consumption without thinking of the resources we're taking and the impact we're having on our planet and our future," Barger said. "If you have a reusable bag, you've eliminated that waste of energy in transporting that bag all over the place."
Gilliam, who represents most major and some smaller grocery chains, said they'll support some kind of bag fee program as long as they can help shape it because they'll have to enforce it.
It's important that the city notifies shoppers about the fee before they're asked to pay, Gilliam said, so clerks can offer the cloth bags instead. Most of the stores in the region have been selling cloth bags for more than two years, he noted.
"Making our customers angry does not motivate them to work with you," Gilliam said. "Our clerks don't need to be the referees of tax policy."
Other U.S. cities are ahead of Portland. In March 2007, San Francisco became the first city to ban the use of plastic shopping bags, allowing grocery stores to give out paper bags or biodegradable film bags that look like plastic but are made of corn. Those bags caused their own trouble.
Gilliam said the compostable bags are too thin, so stores were triple bagging. That promoted the use of paper bags, he said. And he said the corn bags look and feel like plastic, so they were getting mixed in with plastic recycling. But the corn ruins the plastic during recycling, so contaminated loads of recycled plastic ended up going to the landfill.
Los Angeles voted Tuesday to ban plastic shopping bags from stores beginning in July 2010. Shoppers can either bring their own bags or pay 25 cents for a paper or biodegradable bag.
On Monday, the Seattle City Council will vote on a proposal to ban the use of foam containers by restaurants and implement a 20-cent fee at grocery stores on plastic bags. Portland has already banned foam containers.
With the high price of oil, grocers are bracing for a three-fold increase in the cost of plastic bags next year, Gilliam said. "Grocers are already thinking about the bagless store," he said.
Still, it's not as if Adams' proposal will sail through without opposition. Bag manufacturers are gearing up to make sure their interests are protected. Both paper and plastic bag makers stress that their products are recyclable and that the most appropriate government policy would push more recycling.
Paul Cosgrove of the American Forest and Paper Association, a national trade association for forest product companies, said the group is ready to discuss the fee idea. He's concerned about local job losses tied to a possible declining demand for paper bags.
"Our position is that paper bags are highly recyclable and made with recycled content as well," he said. "There are paper bag plants as well as recycling facilities in Oregon. We would like to have them not adversely affected by what the city is thinking."
Tim Shestek, state affairs director for the American Chemistry Council in Sacramento, said his industry is urging cities to increase plastic bag recycling rather than "unnecessarily taxing or prohibiting the use of carryout bags."
"The city's idea is to push reusable bags," he said. "We don't oppose the idea. I don't know if that's an option for everybody."
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UN calls for global ban on plastic bags to save oceans
Jeremy Hance mongabay.com June 09, 2009
http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0609-hance_plasticban.html
The UN’s top environmental official called for a global ban on plastic bags yesterday. "Single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere. There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program.
Steiner’s call comes after the U.N. Environment Program released a comprehensive report on litter in the world’s ocean, which identified plastic as the most common form of ocean litter. When plastic enters the marine food -chain it can devastate marine life and even affect humans when they consume seafood that have eaten plastic debris.
The plastic problem is so bad that a floating island of plastic debris has been discovered in the northern Pacific which is double the size of the United States.
China and Bangladesh have both banned plastic bags, while Ireland has reduced plastic bag consumption by 90 percent by levying a fee on each bag. Such measures have only just reached the United States: San Francisco is the only city to ban plastic bags, although Los Angeles will have a ban in place next year. New York City rejected such a fee on bags last year, but Washington D.C. is considering a 5-cent-fee this week.
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News - May 23, 2008
China Sacks Plastic Bags
Ban could save 37 million barrels of oil and alleviate "white pollution"
By David Biello
SHANGHAI—Thin plastic bags are used for everything in China and the Chinese use up to three billion of them a day--an environmentally costly habit picked up by shopkeepers and consumers in the late 1980s for convenience over traditional cloth bags. Fruit mongers weigh produce in them, tailors stuff shirts into them, even street food vendors plunk their piping hot wares directly into see-through plastic bags that do nothing to protect one's hands from being burned or coated in hot grease. They even have a special name for the plastic bags found blowing, hanging and floating everywhere from trees to rivers: bai se wu ran, or "white pollution," for the bags' most common color.
Yet, the Chinese government is set to ban the manufacture and force shopkeepers to charge for the distribution of bags thinner than 0.025 millimeters thick as of June 1—and no one seems prepared. "I don't know what we'll do," Zhang Gui Lin, a tailor at Shanghai's famous fabric market, tells me through a translator. "I guess our shopping complex will figure it out and tell us what to buy to use as bags."
His wife adds: "Maybe it will be like this," tugging a thicker mesh orange plastic bag she is using to carry some shoes. Such thicker bags may prove one replacement for the ubiquitous thinner versions.
The clothes makers are not alone. "I don't know actually," says a vendor of Chinese tamales, known as zong zi, who declined to give her name. "I'm sure the government will come up with a solution. Maybe people will just eat it [the zong zi directly.]"
The Chinese government is banning production and distribution of the thinnest plastic bags in a bid to curb the white pollution that is taking over the countryside. The bags are also banned from all forms of public transportation and "scenic locations." The move may save as much as 37 million barrels of oil currently used to produce the plastic totes, according to China Trade News. Already, the nation's largest producer of such thin plastic bags, Huaqiang, has shut down its operations.
The effort comes amid growing environmental awareness among the Chinese people and mimics similar efforts in countries like Bangladesh and Ireland as well as the city of San Francisco, though efforts to replicate that ban in other U.S. municipalities have foundered in the face of opposition from plastic manufacturers.
More than one million reusable cloth bags have already been sold on various Chinese merchandising Web sites, according to Taobao.com, and local environmental groups, such as Shanghai Roots & Shoots, are promoting and giving away cloth bags in schools.
"Too many plastic bags is a great waste of natural resources," retired Communist Party cadre Liu Zhidong says through a translator. "When burnt, they produce poisoning smoke, and if buried underneath the ground they need more than 300 years to be degraded."
But it remains to be seen how strong enforcement will be. Specific penalties have not been set but will include fines. Other environmental efforts—such as a similar ban on disposable wooden chopsticks (a waster of trees) and so-called "green GDP," or gross domestic product, an effort to account for environmental costs when calculating overall economic development— fell by the wayside because they proved too difficult to implement and created significant opposition at the local level. It also remains to be seen whether some of the possible replacements—thicker or biodegradable plastic bags—will be any better.
"This is a very good measure to protect the environment. However, whether it can last long is still very doubting," chemistry graduate student Oliver says. "And another problem is [that] the so-called biodegradable plastic bags, it seems, cannot be totally degraded. Whether or not they are really good for environment protection in the long run remains unknown."
Yet, the ban enjoys enthusiastic support from many residents here, particularly students, who may not even recall the more traditional practice of cloth bags or baskets. "I will just carry the things by my hands," one young man told me on the campus of Shanghai International Studies University. "I will never use the plastic bags supplied in supermarkets and I'll ask my friends not to use them, too."
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