Sending shopping bags packing

Can San Francisco catch up with Bangladesh?

When you accept a shopping bag at a store, how guilty should you feel?

One bag isn't much, after all - but when you add up all the bags used, they are a significant contributor to a remarkable range of environmental problems.

• Plastic bags are made primarily from dwindling petroleum and natural gas; paper bags from trees.
• Their production is energy-intensive.
• They create pollution during both production and distribution.
• Plastic bags form a significant and persistent portion of litter.
• Plastic bags disrupt drainage and sewer systems.
• Plastics that enter the ocean are a hazard for aquatic life.
• Plastic bags are difficult to recycle or compost, and are a major contaminant in San Francisco's recycling and composting programs. Even when they are collected by stores for "recycling" (less than 1% of those distributed), a large portion of them end up being landfilled.

In addition, discarded bags create substantial costs for collection and disposal. It is estimated that 2% of the waste stream is paper and plastic bags; the annual cost to San Francisco alone to collect and dispose of bags is $3,600,000. There are additional costs for street cleaning. These costs estimates were prepared by the Department of the Environment in 2004 and 2005. After that, the city commissioned an independent study, which has been completed, but not released.

For all these reasons the Sierra Club's San Francisco Group and many other local environmentalists are working to help San Francisco draft a shopping-bag ordinance, which can hopefully be a model for other cities and states around the country and world. Back many months ago a draft ordinance was discussed which would have required a 17-cent fee to be placed on all shopping bags. The purpose of the new study was in fact to determine the real costs of the bags - to enable the city to set a fair amount for the fee that would approximate the costs it actually incurs from primarily plastic bags.

Since then, what has happened to the proposed ordinance?

We know that even shopping bags have some powerful friends, particularly the National Plastics Council, which has committed millions of dollars to stopping this legislation. We believe that it is they who may have bottled up the independent study of bag costs in Mayor Newsom's office for months.

They claim to be advocating a voluntary compliance system for grocers to reduce bag use and recycle bags. That might be a good start, but not even that plan has emerged. Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who was an early champion of the bag fee, has also been curiously silent on this issue in the last few months.

Other countries are ahead of the U.S. in dealing with plastic bags. For example, in much of Europe stores charge for bags, and one sees most shoppers bringing their own.

The Australian Retailers Association (ARA) in 2003 agreed to a voluntary code aiming to cut plastic-bag use in half by the end of 2005. If the targets are not achieved the ARA says, "it is highly likely that a ban or tax of 25 cents [about $.19 U.S.] per plastic bag will be applied."

When officials in Dhaka, Bangladesh, realized that polyethylene bags were clogging drains and worsening floods, the officials banned use of the bags and now want to extend the ban nationwide.

San Francisco needs to address the problems plastic bags are causing. As Yodeler readers, we can easily commit to taking our own bags with us when we go shopping. Perhaps the next step is for us to suggest to the stores where we shop that they - the stores themselves - push the city to set a fee for plastic bags.

Jim Rhoads, boardmember, Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council