Posted on 01/30/2008 12:43:36 PM PST by SmithL
OAKLAND — An attorney representing a group of plastic bag manufacturers and recyclers challenged Oakland's plastic-bag ban in court Tuesday, saying the city failed to properly study the negative environmental impacts of increased use of paper bags.
In the closely watched dispute, the Sacramento-based Coalition to Support Plastic Bag Recycling is arguing that the ban should be scrapped because Oakland officials did not prepare an environmental impact report, or EIR, before outlawing non-biodegradable plastic bags at retail outlets that do more than $1 million a year in business.
The City Council gave final approval to the ban in July, arguing it was sound environmental policy. But the plastic-bag coalition said if customers switch to paper, that will have negative environmental effects of its own.
"It's not speculation," said Michael Mills, an attorney for the coalition. "Everyone knowsthat paper-bag use is going to increase, but no one knows by how much. That's the exact reason, your honor, to do the EIR."
Not so, the city argued in court. Oakland officials maintain that use of reusable bags would increase with the ban on oil-based plastic, as would the use of biodegradable plastic, they say.
"There's no evidence that more paper bags will be used," said Kevin Siegel, the attorney who represented the city in court. "There are only arguments that more paper bags will be used."
Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch said he would rule within the next week or two.
"I think it looks hopeful," said City Councilmember Jean Quan (Montclair-Laurel), who co-wrote Oakland's ordinance with Councilmember Nancy Nadel (Downtown-West Oakland), and attended part of Tuesday's hearing. "The judge seemed very open."
Should the courts rule against the city, officials would likely go ahead and complete the EIR, at the cost of $100,000 or even more, Quan said, before moving once again to adopt the ban.
The situation in Oakland is being watched by cities across the nation and comes as part of a widespread push to curtail the use of petroleum-based plastic bags, which, critics say, are killing wildlife around the world.
Environmentalists are sounding the alarms about a massive vortex of swirling trash, most of it plastic — called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex — in the Pacific Ocean. The patch is said to be twice the size of Texas.
China recently moved to ban production of certain plastic bags ahead of this year's Summer Olympics in Beijing. Ireland and South Africa are among other countries to curb plastic-bag use. And, in the United States, after San Francisco and Oakland passed their bans, other cities are considering doing the same.
Whole Foods Market earlier this month said that by April 22 — Earth Day — plastic will not be an option at checkout lines in any of its 270 stores. Oakland's Whole Foods is already plastic-bag-free.
A brief the city filed in the case said Californians use 19 billion disposable plastic bags a year, adding 147,000 tons of waste to landfills annually. Somewhere between 1 percent and 5 percent of bags are recycled, the city says, compared with 45 percent of paper bags.
In court Tuesday, however, Mills stressed that the immediate legal question is not whether plastic is better than paper, but only whether the city adequately studied the adverse environmental effects of its ban on plastic.
"I'm hopeful we will win," Mills said after Tuesday's hearing.
I liked the car commercial a couple of years back that starts with a grocery store clerk asking the customer, “Paper? Or plastic?”
Then we see the customer nearly go into brain-lock as he imagines the competing horrors: clear-cut forests...oil-soaked birds...mudslides on barren hillsides...oil refinery coughing up smoke...paper mill effluent going into the river...etc. The tagline was something like “well your decision on what car to buy is a lot easier than that, introducing the Honda Sedan, blah blah”
One thing an engineer learns almost immediately in his career is that everything has tradeoffs. I hope the plastic-bag people get a fair shake.
They’ve got it “in the bag”.........
Urban legend, anyone?
Without going to Snopes’s site, do they say it is true or false?
Everything is biodegradable.
hmmm, so many choices. Kill a tree or clog a landfill. What to do??
A few months ago I visited Hungary and noticed most stores
charged for a bag and it appeared the majority of the
shoppers brought their own canvas or cloth bags.
It’s an old urban legend from the 1990s. The Tribune reporterette didn’t do her homework.
If true, why no photos?
Although it's fun to laugh at overboard environmentalists, this swirling pile of trash in the Pacific is pretty disgusting. Somebody cataloged some of it, and it comes from all over the world. Garbage dumped from ships seems to be a huge contributor.
They're out there somewhere. I saw something about this on Discovery.
In my real world, where I've reused the damned things to store things I want to keep dry in the back yard, they begin disintegrating after a few months, and totally disappear within a year.
Follow the nutcase money...
Forgive me if I remain skeptical about a story that has been debunked on Snopes. David Brower taught the Sierra Club and fellow greenies how to lie, and they have perfected the practice to an art!
Anyway, it's not something I'm going to try to "prove." I do believe that people should stop letting plastic bags fly away in the wind and get caught up in the trees and along the shorelines (where they get washed out to sea). On windy days the trees in my neighborhood look like they're flying flags, and the dang things take about six months before they shred enough to blow away.
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