Posted on 09/22/2009 10:45:11 PM PDT by CounterCounterCulture
The San Jose City Council on Tuesday voted to make the city the largest in the nation to ban most plastic and paper shopping bags and took steps to bring other Santa Clara County cities along with them.
Although the ban approved Tuesday won't take effect until 2011 and still must go through an environmental impact study that will require the council's final signoff it's a major new front in the war on plastic bags, which environmentalists say foul waterways, clog landfills and threaten wildlife.
Banding together as a region, top elected officials from Morgan Hill to Palo Alto joined Mayor Chuck Reed on Tuesday in support of San Jose's ordinance, which would ban the distribution of free plastic shopping bags at all retailers.
"I'll step out and take the lead in the South Bay to eliminate the scourge of plastic bags," said Reed, who was also flanked by officials from Milpitas, Campbell and Santa Clara. The mayor has made "green" business the core of his economic development plan. Palo Alto's ban on single-use plastic bags went into effect last week, and San Francisco's ban has been in place since 2007. A ban in Oakland was shelved in the face of a lawsuit that claimed the city failed to adequately study its effects; the plastics industry has aggressively challenged bag bans in court.
(snip)
"Legal work needs to be done," Reed told the council. "Many other cities went ahead and got sued because they didn't do it right."
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
So what’s the problem with paper bags?
Charging for bags is a good way to get customers to reuse their old ones.
Plastic bags also cause global warming!
Paper or plastic? Sorry, that question is no longer valid.
Because nothing is safer than a pack of bloody chicken legs siting in a cloth sack. These cloth sacks that are all the rage are stupid and do nothing to save on energy and are an excellent way of spreading disease and can become a breeding ground for deadly mold.
Okay...All in favor of lobbing off Kali at the state lines and letting it float away into the Pacific?
Yeah... most of them biodegrade just fine, or can be recycled together with other recyclable paper products.
I wonder if anyone ever thought of making these “council” member submit to a drug test.
You have to cut down tress of course. The fact that fabric either comes from plants or man made chemical processes is lost on the loony left.
What about condoms?
I suppose people could launder these sacks between uses, but who bothers? Yes it is an excellent way of spreading foodborne illness.
Seeing as how no plastic bag we get is "single-use" (they are all reused as lunch bags, tote bags, garbage bags, etc.) does that mean we're exempt?
You got it.
Well, I bought a lifetime supply of incandescent bulbs last year, looks like I'll be buying a big supply of plastic bags tomorrow.
I can’t believe that I have to move back to this crap.
I’m so going to miss GA.
*Sigh*
The problem with that is these sacks are cheaply made and probably would start falling apart after a couple of times in the spin cycle. Also do you want your groceries smelling like Tide and Downy?
Absolutely nothing at all except they were effectively banned about 20 years ago to save the Earth or whatever.
I remember people complained about Styrofoam Big Mac containers until they switched to wax paper or cardboard.
Tide and Downy? You have to use environmentally friendly soap and beat them against a rock.
Perhaps people are not supposed to eat meat?/sarc of course
Mmmm
I particularly enjoy carrying paper bags in the rain /s
Also, living in SF, where I don’t get plastic bags anymore, it should come as no surprise that I now buy plastic bags, with the net result that:
- I have more (wasted) paper bags than I need
- Fewer plastic bags get reused, which means more get made since I buy them and
- I am out more money.
is there a state law in CA requiring paper toilet seat covers be available in all public toilets? just curious as they were on my last visit. the ti/daughter is here from San Jose and she is complaining that we don’t have them in NY.
you guys certainly have your nanny staters in full force out there.
Nobody regulated away paper bags to my knowledge. Plastic bags were simply much cheaper and easier.
I could not imagine living in San Francisco, it amazes me how plastic bags are top on their to do list, while there are certain fault zones which are decades or even centuries overdo for the next 7.0+ quake, not to mention terrorism and the terrible state of California’s economy.
I use my cloth bag and recycled plastic bags as much but sometimes I still need paper bags which I use again for trash.
McDonald’s paper is very biodegradable, almost too much so. If you order parfaits or something else very cold that sweats, be careful because the bottom can easily fall out of the damp sack.
The city should ban throw-away condoms.
But if your buy a CD or even a tiny flash memory card it comes packaged in a pound of plastic.
Not really.
Power hungry despots abound at home and abroad.
The proper term is “single-use” condoms. ;-)
Yesterday I had to open up those insanely packaged HP printer multi-cartridge packages. Scissors are mandatory to cut through all that plastic. Medication is far easier to open.
It is quite surreal here. Yet there are some very good people here, too.
Most of the packaging seems to be an anti-theft device. You have seen how tiny those flash cards are?
Great, freaking enviromentalists are putting more people out of jobs.
The plastic bags are already being recycled. What’s the problem with plastic shopping bags? What about the plastic garbage bags? What about the plastic packaging for such things as refrigerators, computers, and sacks of dog food? Are they going to ban sandwich bags we uses for our lunch?
This is a method to attack the distribution system of food. Next they will attack other parts of the system. Screw them!
What about the miles of shrink wrapping and plastic banding of the millions of pallets of products being transported by trucks to the loading docks of our stores? The distribution system will be attacked by these anti-capitalists as sure as my peanut butter sandwich.
Plastic bags I can see....I guess. But paper bags??? WTH?
Well, then they should ban newspapers and books. And cardboard boxes of all types.
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As long as you reverse everything Reagan did.
Will it soon be a crime for a citizen to possess a paper bag?
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