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 ...
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.
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