Plastic bags are pretty deplorable by any environmental measure. I have to hold my tongue every time I go to the grocery store because in my native South Carolina, the bags are still handed out a few at a time.

In terms of consumption and pollution, they’re the symbol of what we’re doing wrong–made from oil, clogging up waterways and oceans, and choking turtles, birds and all sorts of sea creatures along the way. Yet, the U.S. has been slow to act. Maybe now we can take some cues from the European Union.

The EU is aiming to reduce use of plastic bags by 80 percent in the next decade. EU governments have unanimously approved the plan though bag use varies widely across the continent. In Denmark, for example, people use an average of four plastic bags per year but in Portugal they use about 100 times more. The plan was downgraded from an outright ban to appease the U.K.

According to The Guardian:

Under the new proposal, EU states can opt for mandatory pricing of bags by 2019, or binding targets to reduce the number of plastic bags used annually per person from 191 now to 90 by 2019 and 40 in 2025. Measures such as bag taxes could also be considered as equivalent.

“The significance of this package is enormous,” the Dutch Liberal MEP Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy told the Guardian. “It is a huge victory for not only the European environment but also globally as most of these single-use bags end up in the world’s oceans and are one of the big causes of the ‘plastic soup’ phenomenon.”

Now how can we get a plastic bag reduction plan like this in place on the other side of the Atlantic?

Related on EcoSalon

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Banning Plastic Bags: It Works

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Nothing Short of a Plastic Paradise

Image : Michael Coghlan

The post Plastic Bags Be Gone: EU Passes Historic Reduction Plan appeared first on EcoSalon.

Finally, plastic bags are so over.

Residents all over the San Francisco Bay area are stepping up and bringing their own reusable bags, elected officials around the country (and the world) are waking up to the problem of plastic pollution in our communities and waterways. And they’re passing comprehensive bans on single use plastic shopping bags. The only group that doesn’t get that plastic bags are done is the plastics industry.

Plastics industry lobbyists continue to pour millions of dollars into their anti-ban lobbying efforts, but smart communities aren’t buying their arguments. The facts speak for themselves and the industry’s fear tactics no longer scare us.

Anti-Litter Campaigns Don’t Work

The only way to eliminate the harm that plastic bags do to the environment is to ban them. The very characteristic that makes them convenient and cheap (their weight) ensures that they blow into our storm drains, across highways, into trees, and wash up on the banks of our local waterways. Plastic bags are consistently one of the most common litter items collected during creek and shoreline cleanups because they are extremely difficult to manage. No amount of public education will change that. According to a local solid waste professional, plastic bags are known in the industry as “Landfill Angels,” as they descend upon our earth and sea by the millions.

Plastic Bags Kill Wildlife

Do plastic bags comprise a large portion of weight or volume of the total litter in our creeks? No. But don’t be fooled – plastic bags have a disproportionate impact on the environment despite their innocuous appearance. They entangle wildlife, kill birds and animals that mistake the plastic bags for food, and suffocate our wetland habitat that, ironically, we depend on to naturally filter pollutants out of our creeks before they flow into the Bay.

Plastic Bag Recycling is a Joke

The plastic industry has offered its version of a solution – recycling.  Although Save The Bay supports recycling as a step toward creating “zero waste” communities, recycling is not a solution for litter. And, frankly, recycling plastic bags is a joke. Ask any Bay Area recycler. Recycled plastic bag film is not a hot commodity on the market, meaning recyclers lose money. If you place a plastic bag in a recycling bin in the Bay Area, it will end up in the landfill. Period.

Reusable Bags Don’t Kill People

The latest attempt by the plastics industry to generate panic is to convince us all that reusable bags are hotbeds of bacterial contamination. I’m personally insulted by the notion that I don’t know how to keep my food clean. That aside, the “studies” making these assertions fail to show any connection between increased use of reusable bags and food poisoning.  Furthermore, they were torn to shreds by people who actually have expertise in these areas, including San Francisco’s Department of Public Health. Were these studies peer reviewed? No. Did they consult an epidemiologist to make sure they were using sound science to draw their conclusions? No. Do they hold water? Absolutely not.

The story of plastic bags is in its final chapter. Our parents and grandparents clearly remember the days – not long ago – when these and other single-use plastic products were not commonplace. They are unnecessary, unsustainable, and unpleasant – three strong reasons to continue on the path toward plastic bag-free communities. And we will continue, despite the plastic industry’s last-ditch efforts.

About Allison Chan, Save The Bay’s Clean Bay Campaign Manager
Allison works on Save The Bay’s pollution prevention program, the Clean Bay Project, which focuses on helping cities pass bans on commonly littered products such as plastic bags and Styrofoam take-out containers. When she’s not attending city council meetings or researching plastic pollution, Allison loves to try new restaurants, hike, and seek sunny spots in San Francisco.

Image: jonathan.youngblood

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Mayor, mayor, on the wall: Who is the greenest of them all?

My neighboring hometown across the Bay, San Francisco, makes all the greenest cities lists, with its mayor, Gavin Newsom, regularly billed as “America’s Greenest Mayor.” But behind the glossy Priuses, how green is SF?

Google “country’s greenest mayor” and you get some interesting results. Rocky Anderson, former mayor of Salt Lake City, comes up first. Greg Nickels, former mayor of Seattle, also gets some hits. Then there’s Chicago’s Richard Daly, New York’s Bloomberg, Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, and Bill White of Houston, along with Gavin and others mentioned in this article. L.A.’s chief executive, Villaraigosa, just loses out to Newsom in this article about the two mayors’ dueling plans to cut greenhouse gases.

San Francisco definitely stacks up among the greenest of the green and deservedly so, but is San Francisco all about the shiny green PR-driven gestures, neglecting the concrete hard daily work that nobody notices? Let’s find out.

What San Francisco Does Right

1. Curbside recycling and composting

San Francisco was one of the first (if not the first) large cities to institute curbside composting and recycling. As of late last year, San Francisco made composting mandatory for houses, apartment buildings, businesses and restaurants.

2. Plastic Bag Ban

San Francisco was the first American city to ban plastic bags.

3. Green Building

San Francisco has some of the strictest green building codes in the nation.

Mayor Newsom clearly enjoys being the first to do anything, but what about the everyday, not-so-flashy actions he could take to green the city and set an example for its citizens?

If I were mayor for a year, here are five things I’d do.

1. Spread the composting bug to the airport.

If they can do it in El Salvador, they can certainly do it in San Francisco. The above picture is one I took  about a year ago in El Salvador, yet on that same trip, in the San Francisco International Airport, I couldn’t find a place to recycle my water bottle (I  know, I know) or compost my apple core. A green airport is a great way to show the world that San Francisco walks its talk.

2. Leave the SUV in the garage and ride that bike once in awhile.

Ok, so the mayor’s ride is a hybrid, but a $58,000 SUV paid for with tax dollars and driven to Montana by a staffer while the mayor took a private jet? Come on. When he was mayor, Rocky Anderson’s personal car was a compressed natural gas Honda. The plan to revitalize Market Street and make it more bicycle and pedestrian-friendly is a good one but is only happening now after years of lobbying by bicycle and pedestrian groups. The Mayor could lead on this.

3. Want to leave the SUV in the garage and rub shoulders with a few strangers on Muni? Get ready for a mess.

Fare hikes, service cuts and allegations of misplaced public funds have riders fuming. The mayor should see what it feels like to be packed onto the N Judah at rush hour. Or have his local bus line cut out completely.

4. Support Clean Public Power.

One of the city’s oldest and most heavily polluting power plants, The Potrero Power Plant needs to be shut down. It is scheduled for closure, but unfortunately, the city wants to replace it with another polluting fossil fuel burning plant. Also, the fight for public power is heating up again in San Francisco. Advocates say public power would open the way for more green technologies. The mayor doesn’t necessarily agree and PG&E is shelling out gigantic, steaming piles of money to put a measure on ballot seeking to require 2/3 majority to pass public power.

5. Speaking of gigantic, steaming piles, stop selling toxic sludge – we know it’s not good for us. That high-quality, nutrient rich “compost” you’re giving away to gardeners? No thanks. It’s just the toxic sludge industry’s way of gaining public acceptance.

How does your city stack up? Is it all bells and whistles, or is it like Portland, with a unified green front at all levels?

Images: Dave Minogue, Vanessa Barrington

The post Dear San Francisco: 5 Ways You Can Go Green appeared first on EcoSalon.

Plastic bags are the curse of modern society. Made from petroleum or natural gas based products, they can take up to a hundred years and more to decompose. Meanwhile, they become serial killers, clogging drains and waterways, and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of birds and marine animals who become entangled in or eat the plastic bags.

Plastic bags, however, have also become the icon of convenience shopping and trying to pry this icon from a shopper’s grasp is one of the major issues confronting officials and politicians around the world. Some countries and cities have opted for bag bans, others for bag tax.

But officials in Delhi, where the streets are not lined in gold but littered with plastic bags, have taken a giant leap forward and announced that plastic bags will be outlawed altogether. New guidelines were released earlier this month declaring that the “use, storage, and sale” of plastic bags of any kind or thickness will be banned in Dehli.

Those who ignore these guidelines will a severe fine and risk five years jail time. Draconian, perhaps. But in a city where – by conservative estimates – over 10 million plastic bags are used every day, city officials have decided enough is enough.

They say that they will go soft on everyone initially, giving them time to switch to alternative bags such as jute, paper, and cotton bags. But how they are going to enforce this in the long run is unclear.

As you can imagine, environmentalists are applauding the move while shopkeepers and retailers say it will simply end up costing the consumer.

Image: eflon

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