California has long considered itself to be a global beacon on environmentalism. But the state is now going on four straight years with a poor record on one of the core environmental practices: recycling.

The problem began in January 2016, when the California Department of Resources Recycling (CalRecycle) lowered the reimbursement rates that it paid recycling centers that took in single-use glass, plastic and metal bottles from consumers. Recycling center operators immediately complained and warned they already had razor-thin profit margins before the rates were cut. There were also signs that the government of China – long the world’s biggest buyer of plastic recyclable goods – was beginning to see accepting the waste of other nations as problematic, adding to recycling centers’ bottom-line headaches.

But the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown appeared indifferent to the warnings and opposed efforts in the Legislature that sought to keep recycling centers in business. The recycling industry began a slow-motion collapse that led to 560 recycling centers closing by May 2017.

“The reduced recycling means that every day 2 million additional containers are littered or landfilled, including more than 1 million plastic bottles every day,” Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, wrote that month. “For consumers who try to supplement family income by redeeming containers, the loss of buy-back recycling locations has reduced total redemption payback by more than $3 million per month.”

Consumers losing $25 million a month on deposits

In February of this year, Associated Press reported that consumers’ loss of money because of a lack of access to redemption centers paying back 5-cent deposits on cans and bottles had soared to $308 million in 2018 – about $25 million a month.

The AP report was based on a Consumer Watchdog analysis that called on California to begin charging a minimum of a 10-cent deposit on cans and bottles, as is done in Oregon and Michigan, which report recycling rates of 90 percent – far better than California’s 75 percent rate.

Those states have accepted that with China’s 2018 decision that it would no longer accept the world’s waste, the basic economics of recycling had to change to prevent recyclables from ending up in landfills. But the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom has so far not pushed for higher deposits.

In February, the California State Association of Counties wrote Newsom a letter requesting that he form a state commission to come up with new recycling policies.

“Significant market disruptions for recyclable materials have a direct impact on California’s local governments and our ability to meet state-mandated recycling goals,” the association told the governor. “The commission should examine potential solutions including, the development of international and domestic markets, updated compliance standards in this new economic environment, ways to increase source reduction, and any other means that will alleviate this growing public health and environmental crisis.”

Public pressure on Newsom and state lawmakers to respond to recycling headaches could build soon because of pocketbook issues. The Southern California News Group reported last week that many local governments were steadily increasing monthly trash/recycling collection rates because of the changing economics of recycling.

Legislature may add bans on single-use plastics

The report also noted that the state Legislature was responding to recycling woes by considering bills that would discourage or ban single-use plastics, following up on measures banning plastic bags and limiting the use of plastic straws in California.

One of the measures – Assembly Bill 1080, by Assemblyman Henry Stern, D-Canoga Park – would require “single-use plastic packaging and products sold or distributed in California to be reduced, recycled or composted by 75 percent by 2030, and require all single-use packaging and products to be recyclable or compostable on and after 2030,” according to a legislative analysis.

It passed the Assembly Natural Resources Committee and the Assembly Appropriations Committee on party-line votes on March 25 and May 16, respectively.

That is happening in Huntington Beach, where, reported the Orange County Register:

the council took the first step to repeal the ban on single-use plastic bags, saying there’s no evidence that it helps the environment and that voters should decide whether to ban the bags.

The council voted 6-1, with Mayor Jill Hardy dissenting, to have city staff draft an ordinance repealing the ban and get a $5,000 environmental impact report on what the repercussions could be, if any, without the ban.

That could be a good omen for the effort to repeal a statewide ban enacted by the Legislature, but currently held up pending the initiative’s fate.

I live in Huntington Beach and went to the local grocery store Thursday and asked for plastic bags. “I’ve been asked that 19 times today,” the checkout clerk replied. “But No. We don’t have them yet.”

I’m looking forward to that day. Then I’ll see fewer cases of an enviro-person bringing in a germ-laden “reusable” bag and contaminating the whole store.

I’m pretty resistant to colds and hadn’t had one for two years until last fall. Then I got three in a row. Was it from the contaminated enviro-bags? It’s impossible to tell.

But…

Sick bags

USA Today reported:

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Jamie Norton considered himself an early adopter of reusable shopping bag, keeping them in the trunk of his car so they’re on hand whenever he stops for groceries.

But washing the bags wasn’t part of the routine.

“If it gets too dirty, I just toss it out,” Norton, 61, said as he walked out of Jensen’s grocery store here with one of his bags full of food. “I have never washed a reusable bag.”

Research shows the vast majority of shoppers are like Norton. A 2011 study from scientists at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University found only 3% of shoppers with multi-use bags said they regularly washed them. The same study found bacteria in 99% of bags tested; half carried coliform bacteria while 8% carried E. coli, an indicator of fecal contamination.

“I classify them as pretty dirty things, like the bottom of your shoes,” said Ryan Sinclair of the Loma Linda University School of Public Health, a co-author of the study.

He is finalizing another study he hopes to publish soon looking at how pathogens spread through grocery stores with the help of reusable bags. The study, conducted at a central California grocery store in early 2013, involved spraying bags with a bacteria not harmful to humans but transported in a similar way to norovirus, a leading cause of gastrointestinal disease linked to more than 19 million illnesses each year in the United States.

The tracer bacteria was detected in high concentrations on shopping carts, at the checkout counter and on food items shoppers had touched but kept on the shelf.

Sinclair said the contamination cycle often began right after shoppers entered the store and placed their bags in the bottom or the baby carrier of a shopping cart, two places notorious for germs.

As my heavily accented Russian teacher used to say back at the Defense Language School in Monterey when an obnoxious Navy student acted up, “That’s dsggguzting!”

SACRAMENTO — Plastic bag manufacturers have poured $2.7 million into efforts to overturn California’s statewide ban on plastic bags in the seven weeks since Gov. Jerry Brown signed the historic legislation.

With signature gatherers posted outside grocery and retail stores across the state, opponents of the plastic bag ban are attempting to gather the more than 500,000 signatures needed to put the referendum on the November 2016 ballot.

The ban supposedly helps the “environment.” Actually, it doesn’t. The Wall Street Journal reported:

In 2011, the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency released a study that evaluated nine categories of environmental impacts caused by different types of supermarket bags. The study found that paper bags have a worse effect on the environment than plastic bags in all nine impact categories, which include global warming potential, abiotic depletion, acidification, eutrophication, human toxicity, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity, marine aquatic ecotoxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and photochemical oxidation.

Furthermore, the study found that the average supermarket shopper would have to reuse the same cotton tote from 94 up to 1,899 times before it had less environmental impact than the disposable plastic bags needed to carry the same amount of groceries. This wide-varying amount of reuse that is required until the breakeven point is reached depends upon the type of environmental impact, but the median is 314 times, and it is more 179 times for all but one of the 9 impact categories.

For example, a shopper would need to reuse the same cotton tote 350 times before it caused less fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity than all of the plastic bags that it would replace over this period. Given the improbability that the same cotton tote would last that long (its expected life is 52 reuses), in most cases plastic bags will have less environmental impact.

It’s typical of California’s Limousine Liberals that they have a knee-jerk reaction to plastic bags, failing to do even the most rudimentary research. Their attitude: “If it’s even remotely possible that something is bad for the environment, ban it. And don’t tell us anything to the contrary, you filthy polluter who is a blight on the planet!”

Assuming banning the bag ban makes the 2016 ballot, it’ll be interesting to see if Brown uses any of his bloated campaign war chest to fight it — assuming he isn’t using the money for a presidential run.

But not when it comes to efforts to roll back the newly enacted ban on single-use plastic bags:

The Attorney General of California has prepared the following title and summary of the chief purpose and points of the proposed measure:

REFERENDUM TO OVERTURN BAN ON SINGLE-USE PLASTIC BAGS. If signed by the required number of registered voters and timely filed with the Secretary of State, this petition will place on the statewide ballot a challenge to a state law previously approved by the Legislature and the Governor. The challenged law must then be approved by a majority of voters at the next statewide election to go into effect. The law prohibits grocery and certain other retail stores from providing single-use bags but permits sale of recycled paper bags and reusable bags.

That looks pretty neutral to me. Good for Kamala Harris.

Sac Bee spreads the green religion

Meanwhile, the propagandists are at it again, pretending that the case is overwhelming for the ban, instead of extremely mixed. This is from a sneering Sac Bee editorial:

It’s a true if gruesome fact that chickens that have been relieved of their heads sometimes run around for a while before they quite realize their irreversible predicament.

That appears to be happening to the plastic bag industry. It would explain why it hasn’t figured out that the ubiquitous single-use plastic grocery bag has just suffered a killing blow. Its days are numbered.

The very day the governor signed a statewide ban on single-use grocery bags, Sept. 30, the industry filed papers to start the process for a referendum. If it qualifies by gathering enough signatures, it will delay the July 2015 implementation of the ban until it can be decided by voters during the November 2016 election.

Then, the industry will spend many millions of dollars to try to trick Californians into thinking that it’s a good thing that billions of single-use plastic bags are clogging up our storm drains and rivers, tangling up in our native flora, filling up the oceans and doing God only knows what other environmental mischief.

The truth is not what Californians have been told

I defer to Jay Beeber’s assault on this green propaganda. This is from Reason’s website in 2012, when a bag ban was being considered in Los Angeles:

Proponents give three reasons for the bag ban. They claim it will reduce the amount of waste entering landfills, reduce litter on streets, and “help protect the environment.”

But banning free grocery bags will not achieve those lofty goals.

First, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t reduce waste. California’s Statewide Waste Characterization Study [pdf] shows that “Plastic Grocery and Other Merchandise Bags” consistently make up just 0.3 percent of the waste stream in the state. That’s three-tenths of 1 percent. In comparison, organic waste such as food and yard clippings makes up 32 percent while construction debris comprises about 30 percent. The effect of eliminating free grocery bags on the amount of waste generated in the city would be insignificant.

Second, despite misleading claims from environmental groups and the L.A. Bureau of Sanitation, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t do much to reduce litter in the public commons. Litter studies from across the country demonstrate that, on average, plastic retail bags make up about 1 percent to 2 percent of all litter.

Even that small amount of litter doesn’t decline when bans are enacted. In San Francisco, plastic bags comprised 0.6 percent of litter before the city banned plastic bags and 0.64 percent a year after the ban took effect [pdf, pg. 35]. Since plastic grocery bags make up less than 2 percent of roadside trash, banning them will affect neither the total amount of litter nor the cost of cleaning it up.

Third, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t reduce our consumption of foreign (or domestic) oil. L.A.’s Bureau of Sanitation claims [pdf] that “approximately 12 million barrels of oil go into the US supply of plastic bags.” But plastic bags made in the U.S. are not derived from oil; they’re made from a byproduct of domestic natural gas refinement. Manufacturing plastic grocery bags does not increase our need to import oil, and banning them in Los Angeles or anywhere else will not reduce US oil consumption.

Despite claims that plastics threaten our oceans and sea life, there is no evidence that free plastic grocery bags make up any significant portion of the plastic waste found on beaches or in the ocean. In fact, reports from environmental groups doing beach and ocean clean-ups show that plastic bags make up only about 2 percent of the debris.

The Bee acknowledges none of this. When you have a deep commitment to your faith, you don’t sweat the details. And, in the Bee’s case, you mock and taunt the heretics.

A measure to make California the first state in the nation to ban single-use plastic bags. SB270 passed despite fierce opposition from plastic bag manufacturers and after initially failing an Assembly vote last week. Brown has until Sept. 30 to act on the bill.

Many cities and counties already have local bag ordinances, including San Francisco. The bill by Senate Democrats phases out the use of plastic bags, beginning at grocery stores and pharmacies in July 2015 and the following year at convenience stores and liquor stores.

“A throw-away society is not sustainable,” Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima, one of the bill’s authors, said in a statement. “SB270 will greatly reduce the flow of billions of single-use plastic bags that are discarded throughout our state. This is good for California and reflects our values as a state that cares about the environment, sea life and wildlife.”

That’s from the San Francisco Chronicle. Note the Chron reporter’s POV is plain in the first sentence, which accepts the premise that they really are “single-use” bags.

British regulators dismiss theory driving state legislation

Now let’s go somewhere far from California to get a sober take on the plastic bag argument: the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency, which has a very liberal reputation on issues like global warming and water pollution. Here’s a short list of some of what it’s concluded over the years:

1. Any decision to ban traditional polyethylene plastic grocery bags in favor of bags made from alternative materials (compostable plastic or recycled paper) will be counterproductive and result in a significant increase in environmental impacts across a number of categories from global warming effects to the use of precious potable water resources.  … other mitigating circumstances …  may lead to even greater differentials between plastic grocery bags and those made from either paper or compostable plastics.  … the standard polyethylene grocery bag has significantly lower environmental impacts than a 30% recycled content paper bag and a compostable plastic bag.

2. A cotton bag has a greater [adverse environmental] impact than the conventional HDPE [plastic] bag in seven of the nine impact categories even when used 173 times … The impact was considerably larger in categories such as acidification and aquatic & terrestrial ecotoxicity due to the energy used to produce cotton yarn and the fertilisers used during the growth of the cotton.

3. Starch-polyester blend bags have a higher global warming potential and abiotic depletion than conventional polymer bags, due both to the increased weight of material in a bag and higher material production impacts.

Feel-good lawmaking devoid of evidence

So why is California on the bring of enacting a dumb law? Because it is the nature of the environmental movement to constantly look for ways to demonstrate its moral superiority. This is a prime opportunity — forcing people to change a minor part of their everyday life in service of the Green Cause.

They do so even though their main arguments have been debunked. Plastic bags are less than 1 percent of the municipal waste stream. And, no, those alleged plastic flotillas in the ocean don’t come from “single-use plastic bags.”

Says who? Says the scientists who work for the Obama administration at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here’s the NOAA fact check page.

What’s particularly enlightening about the page is that it casually debunks another claim of anti-plastic bag crowd: Plastic debris’ ” impacts on marine life mostly remain a big unknown.”

Not to California greens. They know what their religion says is true. Whether or not it’s, yunno, true.

“Senate Bill 270 passed the Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee on a 5-3 vote following the failure of similar bans on single-use grocery bags in recent years. The latest legislation won support from grocers for including a 10-cent fee on paper bags and from a handful of local plastic bag makers for including $2 million for worker training and assistance to shift to production of reusable bags.”

So it’s yet another tax increase that especially will slam poor people, who tend to have larger families and shop more for groceries. If a family needs, say, two bags of groceries a day, that’s 20 cents a day, or $73 a year. Not chump change if you’re poor and pinching pennies, which pretty much describes life in Taxifornia if you make <$150,000 a year.

Yet SB 270 is sponsored by two state senators with a lot of poor people in their districts, Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, the incoming Senate president pro tem; and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles.

The plastic bags ban also supported by such celebrities as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the wealthy TV comedy star, whose father is multi-billionaire Gerard Louis-Dreyfus.

But according to James Agresti of Just Facts Daily:

In 2011, the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency released a study that evaluated nine categories of environmental impacts caused by different types of supermarket bags. The study found that paper bags have a worse effect on the environment than plastic bags in all nine impact categories, which include global warming potential, abiotic depletion, acidification, eutrophication, human toxicity, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity, marine aquatic ecotoxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and photochemical oxidation.

Furthermore, the study found that the average supermarket shopper would have to reuse the same cotton tote from 94 up to 1,899 times before it had less environmental impact than the disposable plastic bags needed to carry the same amount of groceries. This wide-varying amount of reuse that is required until the breakeven point is reached depends upon the type of environmental impact, but the median is 314 times, and it is more than 170 times for all but one of the 9 impact categories.

For example, a shopper would need to reuse the same cotton tote 350 times before it caused less fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity than all of the plastic bags that it would replace over this period. Given the improbability that the same cotton tote would last that long (its expected life is 52 reuses), in most cases plastic bags will have less environmental impact.

Why is this? Because the environmental impacts of supermarket bags are dominated by the energy and raw materials needed to manufacture them. Plastic bags are inexpensive because relatively small amounts of energy and raw materials are needed to make them. These same attributes that make plastic bags affordable and light also make them easier on the environment than alternatives like paper bags and reusable cotton totes.

So the new legislation is perfect for California: It does the opposite of what’s intended, hurts poor people to make rich leftists feel good, and raises taxes.

By Chris Reed

The California Legislature has been such a redoubt of hardcore liberal lunacy for so long that I can’t believe I’m writing this, but May may have been the most moderate month I’ve seen in Sacramento since Pete Wilson departed the governor’s office 14 years ago.

That this happened even when Democrats had their biggest margins in the Assembly and Senate in many years makes it even more striking.

On Friday, bills banning hydraulic fracturing — the radically improved energy exploration technology that has triggered a brown energy revolution — died in the Assembly. Sen. Fran Pavley, author of a bill that passed the Senate and imposed a fracking moratorium until at least Jan. 1, 2015, indicated to reporters that she would be willing to remove the moratorium as her bill establishing fracking rules advanced over the summer.

There is still a very good chance that Pavley pushes for a regulatory framework so hostile to fracking that it will delay its expanded use in California for years. However, considering that a ban on fracking is an overriding goal of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, the demise of the moratorium push so early in the session is stunning.

On Thursday, the plastic bag ban died in the Assembly after several Democratic lawmakers offered the sort of sarcastic and common-sense takes on its silliness that Republicans have long used for nanny-state measures. Other Democratic lawmakers said they cared about jobs in their districts more than the environmentalist agenda.

Earlier in May, proposed tax hikes on oil extraction, cigarettes, soda, strip clubs and plastic bags all died.

What’s behind outbreak of sanity?

Why is this happening? Several theories come to mind.

1. Jerry Brown’s interest in fracking and his and Senate President Darrell Steinberg’s opposition to more tax hikes so soon after Proposition 30 inspired unusual pragmatism in enough Democratic lawmakers to kill measures that normally would only have died with a gubernatorial veto, if then.

2. On the plastic bag ban, minority Democrats finally have figured out that west Los Angeles/Beverly Hills/San Francisco/Marin County white Democrats have a different definition of “social justice” than they do.

3. The open primary law pushed by former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado is having the moderating impact it was supposed to, at least on Democrats.

It could be a mix of all these factors. I also think there are more independent-minded Senate Democrats than at any time in years, including several elected before the open primary took effect.

The net result: This doesn’t feel at all like the Sacramento of the Karen Bass years, when no one blinked when the Assembly speaker likened foes of higher taxes to terrorists.

We still are a terribly run state headed for ruin without major changes. But that doesn’t mean a sliver of good news shouldn’t be acknowledged.

April 19, 2013

By Josephine Djuhana

The war on plastic bags has returned with a vengeance, as legislators introduce new regulations that dictate what kinds of bags California shoppers are allowed to use when out shopping for groceries.

SB 405, authored by state Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles, would effectively prohibit stores from providing a single-use carryout plastic bag to customers. According to a press release on Sen. Padilla’s website:

* “Beginning January 1, 2015, grocery stores and pharmacies would be prohibited from making available single-use plastic bags. If paper bags are offered to customers, they would have to include recycled content and customers would have to be charged the actual cost of providing the recycled paper bags.

* “Beginning July 1, 2016, convenience stores and liquor stores would be required to meet the same standard.

* “The bill would not pre-empt local ordinances already in place.”

“SB 405 will help protect our environment by phasing out single-use plastic bags in California,” said Padilla. “Single-use plastic bags fill our landfills, clog inland waterways, litter our coastline, and kill thousands of fish, marine mammals and seabirds.”

Hearing

The hearing for the bill occurred on Wednesday, and SB 405 has since passed the Senate environmental quality committee on a 5-3 vote. The bag ban, however, has been met with some bipartisan opposition, and many members of the business community have come against it.

Cathy Browne, general manager at plastic bag maker Crown Poly Inc., called SB 405 “misguided legislation” that was not fact-based. In a press conference call on Tuesday, she warned that 300 Angelenos would be put out of manufacturing jobs if the bill was made law. “Our employees … work very hard at their jobs, and they shouldn’t lose their jobs just because politicians are listening to environmental rhetoric,” she said.

“Plastic bag bans are simply bad public policy,” said Mark Daniels, chairman of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, during the call. “To date, the debate on plastic bags has been supported by unfounded stats, junk science and myths. The reality is that American made plastic bags are a better choice for the environment and banning them will cause more harm to the environment. If California wants to lead in the fight against global warming, banning plastic bags will have the exact opposite effect.”

More than 72 California cities and counties have adopted ordinances to ban the use of plastic bags, among them a number of beach cities, including Huntington Beach.

“As a conservationist and local surfer in Huntington Beach, I’ve heard from my district that these bag bans are not the appropriate approach,” Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach, told me. “While these bans are addressing less than .5 percent of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream, we are exposing people to serious health risks and stressing Southern California water conservation efforts. There is a far bigger picture that needs to be considered and not just settle on a single issue when voting on these bans.”

Environmental concerns

Bag bans are largely introduced as a measure to preserve the environment and prevent plastics from clogging inland waterways, filling up landfills and becoming floating marine debris. But there are many devils in the details, and banning plastic bags actually may be more costly to the environment, and result in more waste and energy expenditure.

The American Progressive Bag Alliance made the following findings on plastic bags:

* Plastic bags produce fewer greenhouse gases than paper or cotton bags.

* Plastic grocery bags require 70 percent less energy to manufacture than paper bags.

* The production of plastic bags consumes less than 4 percent of the water needed to make paper bags.

* Plastic bags generate 80 percent less waste than paper bags.

* For every seven trucks needed to deliver paper bags, only one truck is needed for the same number of plastic bags.

* American plastic bags are made from natural gas, not oil. In the U.S., 85 percent of the raw material used to make plastic bags is produced from natural gas.

APBA Chairman Mark Daniels also highlighted the fallacies in using reusable bags. He said the reusable bags are often “made to look like cotton” but are, in actuality, made of nonwoven poly-propylene, which is essentially a plastic. Additionally, many reusable bags cannot be recycled and “are mostly shipped from overseas and are made from foreign oil.”

Health concerns

The science behind reusable bags belies a more insidious impact that plastic bag bans have brought. Not only are reusable bags less energy-efficient to produce and more harmful to the environment, multiple reports have shown that reusable bags spread disease. And Californians need not look further than San Francisco to see the potential health hazards caused by contaminated reusable bags.

Research by Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright showed that reusable bags “contain potentially harmful bacteria, especially coliform bacteria such as E. coli.” In fact, since San Francisco County banned plastic bags in 2007, the researchers found that “both deaths and ER visits spiked as soon as the ban went into effect” and that, relative to other counties, “deaths in San Francisco increase by 50-100 percent, and ER visits increase by a comparable amount.”

Then, consider a case in Oregon, where a girl on a soccer team got sick and “spent six hours in a chaperone’s bathroom” suffering from “vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps”:

“The soccer team of 13- and 14-year-olds traveled to Seattle for a weekend tournament in October 2010.

“At the tournament, one girl got sick on Saturday and spent six hours in a chaperone’s bathroom. Symptoms of the bug, often called “stomach flu,” include vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps. The chaperone took the girl back to Oregon.

“On Sunday, team members had lunch in a hotel room, passing around the bag and eating cookies it held. On Monday, six girls got sick.”

A 2011 study did show that washing reusable bags would reduce bacteria by 99.9 percent, but considering that only 3 percent of people actually wash their bags, health problems still abound.

Rise of regulations

Despite mounting concerns on banning plastic bags, California legislators continue on this quest. From foie gras to frisbees, state lawmakers see no area of private life where government does not have a place even in spite of Governor Jerry Brown’s public admonishment that not every human condition is deserving of a new law. We don’t yet have to worry about California regulating Big Gulps like Mayor Bloomberg  did in New York, but if the State Legislature can justify banning plastic bags in the interest of the public good, so too could it justify soda next.

By John Seiler

Government always tells us that its laws and edicts make our lives better. That we’ll be healthier, happier and wiser. Now this:

“SAN FRANCISCO — Is your tote bag making you sick?

“A research paper published last year by professors at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University found San Francisco’s ban on plastic bags has had significant negative repercussions on public health.

“The study, released in August, found a spike in San Francisco hospital emergency room treatment due to E. coli infections and a 46 percent increase in deaths from foodborne illness in the three months after the bag ban went into effect in 2007. E. coli bacteria, common in the human intestine and frequent suspects in food poisoning, can range from harmless to lethal.

“Laws against plastic bags often encourage the use of reusable totes to transport groceries. But as people tend to neglect washing those bags, increased food contamination becomes likely.

“‘Using standard estimates of the statistical value of life,'” the study’s authors point out dryly, “‘we show that the health costs associated with the San Francisco ban swamp any budgetary savings from reduced litter.'”

This is a microcosm of what government generally does. It intends one thing but the opposite happens.

Katy Grimes: The plastic bag activists are at it again, and they are nothing, if not persistent. With the eleventh bill regulating plastic bags in less than 10 years, grocery stores don’t have a chance in California.

Passed today by the Assembly, SB 1219, the latest plastic bag regulation bill, by Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, will require grocery stores to implement, manage, and report on the “At-Store Recycling Program” to the Cal Recycle state agency.

Besides imposing more rules and regulations on privately-owned grocery stores, SB 1219 which appears to be aimed at large grocers like WalMart, Target and other large supermarket chains, will require that stores “place recycling bins in a readily accessible location for consumers, assure the collected bags are recycled, and provide reusable bags. Additionally, stores track the collection, transport, and recycling of plastic carryout bags and regulated manufacturers provide educational materials to assist in recycling (see requirements).”

This could be the work of a full-time employee in some large stores.

“This bill is a really, really bad idea,” Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia, said on the Assembly floor during debate Tuesday. “Plastics manufacturers are leaving the state. And we’re telling grocery stores, ‘you must take back this product.'”

Assemblyman Brian Jones found irony in a bill specifying what stores must do to recycle, given that much of the purchased food and products put inside of the bags is packaged in plastic. “Is this the best use of our time?” Jones asked.

Specifically, SB 1219 will:

1)Requires stores, defined as supermarkets and stores over 10,000 square feet that include a pharmacy, to establish an at-store recycling program for plastic carryout bags. The
Program requires that:

a) Plastic bags provided by the store must have a label that encourages customers to return the bag for recycling;

b) Stores provide clearly labeled and easily accessible recycling bins;

c) All bags collected be recycled in a manner consistent with the local jurisdiction’s recycling plan;

d) Stores must maintain records relating to the Program for at least three years and make the records available to the local jurisdiction or the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) upon request; and,

e) Stores must make reusable bags available.

2)Requires bag manufacturers to develop educational materials to encourage source reduction and recycling and to make the materials available to stores.

3)Preempts local governments from requiring stores that are complying with the Program to implement separate bag recycling programs, additional auditing or reporting requirements, or
imposing a bag fee.

4)Authorizes a local government or the state to levy fines for stores that violate these requirements.

All of this was set to sunset on January 1, 2013, but SB 1219 will extend that sunset date until 2020.

This is the eleventh bill regulating plastic bags since passage of the first plastic bag law in California in 2006.

Should I reuse or litter?

The rap on plastic bags is that they end up lining street gutters, or in the oceans, rivers and lakes, or just flying around neighborhoods on windy days. The bill analysis states that 60-80 percent of all marine debris and 90 percent of floating debris is plastic. But several studies I’ve read say that while plastic shopping bags entering the marine environment represent a threat  to marine life along with other packaging and other littered items, it has not been quantified.

Who litters?

Who throws their garbage into rivers, lakes, oceans or on the street? I don’t know anyone who tosses the bags onto the street. But when I visit my neighborhood park, there are always plastic bags, food containers, wrappers, and plastic bottles discarded on the grass and around seating areas. In many of Sacramento’s low-income neighborhoods, and public schools, trash is strewn about, including plastic bags and bottles.

So who does the littering? Why go after the plastic bag manufacturers instead of the litterers?

My friends, neighbors and I reuse our plastic bags for garbage, changing kitty litter, for doggie-do bags, or a second time at the store. I used to use them as diaper discard bags when my son was a baby. There are numerous reuses for plastic bags, which most people take advantage of.

Donnelly said that he and his wife reuse plastic bags as garbage bags at home. The fact is that most consumers reuse the bags for something.

While numerous studies focus almost entirely on the cost to the consumer, they forget about the cost to the business, which is significant.

Jones was right when he said, “We should ask ourselves, are we really being efficient by forcing grocery stores to recycle plastic bags?”

“I think we ought to allow the free market to finally be free!” Donnelly said. “Grocery stores run on a thin margin, and can’t afford any more regulations.”