Once again, San Franciscans are hoping to see a nationwide, environmental change domino effect through passing an ordinance that will ban the petroleum-based, ubiquitous plastic shopping bags from usage in the large supermarkets and pharmacies in the city. The change is scheduled to take effect in six months for grocery stores and in one year for pharmacies.
The ordinance—introduced by San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and supported by the mayor and a majority of supervisors—will require grocery stores and pharmacies with more than $2 million in annual retail sales to use biodegradable checkout plastic bags.
Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city's Department of the Environment said, "After two years of public and political deliberation we are at the stage of introducing an ordinance that will require that any given out bags are compostable."
Approximately fifty-four of the largest supermarkets throughout San Francisco, such as Safeway, Cala Foods, CalMart, Bell Markets, and Mollie Stone's, will be affected by the new legislation.
The distributed plastic bags amount to 1,400 tons of plastic waste, according to a study which spanned more than 18 months. The plastic waste is also blamed for littering neighborhoods and beaches, causing deaths of marine animals from plastic entanglement, and for cluttering the city's landfills. The estimated 100-150 million plastic bags distributed annually at the biggest local supermarkets alone "form a universe" of litter, said Mirkarimi.
"Each ton of plastic bags that goes into our landfill is equal to 11 barrels of oil. I believe that this legislation is a measured response as we are trying to reverse the environmental degradation by sending a large alarm to the scourge of global worming," he said.
The idea to decrease the distribution of plastic bags cropped up in 2005 when San Francisco's Department of the Environment proposed a 17-cent charge per plastic shopping bag. The proposal was put aside when the largest supermarkets in the city agreed to voluntarily reduce the number of plastic bag given out by 10 million. However, the stores failed to provide verifiable data of the reduction in bag use, Mirkarimi said.
"We are dealing with industries that are extremely resistant, meaning the grocer industry and plastics are very resistant and repel the idea of the new legislation."
The California Grocer's Association has opposed the ordinance, saying that consumers will be in a dilemma because of the different plastic shopping bags and they will mix them together degrading the quality of the recycled material.
President Peter Larkin of the California Grocer's Association said in a statement for BCN, "Singling out one segment of the retail stores and mandating the use of one type of bag is not the solution to a more global issue," he said. "It simply trades one environmental concern for others and pits one type of store against another."
Some nations have passed similar laws. In Belgium and Britain, for example, retailers offer biodegradable bags made of vegetable starch which turn into water vapor and CO2 after a month in a compost heap and cost no more than petroleum-based plastic bags. Ireland imposed a 25-cent tax on plastic bags and saw usage fall 95 percent.
The president of the city's chapter of the Sierra Club, John Rizzo, said that laws such as this might proliferate.
"[The] ban on smoking in restaurants was thought as a crazy idea, but one city after another gave it, and now it's hard to find a restaurant in this country that has smoking in it. We see a domino effect not only throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, but in California and in the U.S."
Feeds