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Growing Call among Californians to Sack Plastic Grocery Bags--Sacramento Bee

(July 29, 2005)

The Sacramento Bee
By Deb Kollars

In Los Angeles, in San Francisco and in Sacramento, one of the most commonplace innovations to come along for consumers -- the plastic grocery bag -- is under attack.

What would our world be like without these wisps of handiness? How would we get our groceries home? Or our homegrown tomatoes into the office? Or dog droppings off a stranger's lawn?

Across California, a growing collection of political leaders, environmentalists and trash experts wish they could find out.

Plastic grocery bags are filling landfills, clogging storm drains and waterways, jamming recycling machines, harming marine animals and littering roadsides.

Close to 90 billion are used in the United States (population 300 million) every year, while just 5 percent or so ever get recycled into another useful plastic product.

"They're a big, big problem," said Doug Kobold, a solid waste planner with the county of Sacramento who is among those working to reduce the bags' presence on the planet.

The efforts are heating up like a well-tended compost pile, setting California apart as the nation's hot spot for anti-bag fever.

Within a few weeks, San Francisco is expected to resume discussions -- which began last winter, then were put on hold -- on a proposal to place a 17-cent fee on plastic grocery bags to discourage their use.

Los Angeles, meanwhile, is under orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up its rivers. The city views plastic bags as a key offender and is exploring aggressive steps to encourage recycling and to get manufacturers to put more recycled content into bags.

If those efforts fail, a Los Angeles city councilman leading the push, Ed Reyes, plans to start talking bag fees.

Locally, Sacramento County's Waste Management and Recycling Division is planning a different step.

The county, like the city of Sacramento, sends to the landfill plastic grocery bags, dry cleaning bags and other types of flexible wrap, known as plastic film. Come spring, the county plans to add bundled plastic bags and film to its curbside recycling program, along with shredded paper and plastic toys, Kobold said.

Several California cities, such as San Juan Capistrano and San Jose, are doing the same. Twenty years ago, few could have imagined the need for such crusades.

But once plastic bags were introduced in the early 1980s, the lighter, cheaper alternative to paper caught on fast. Today, the making of plastic bags in the U.S. is a $1-billion-a-year