Styrofoam food containers might be gone from Seattle by 2009, and grocery bags from drug, food, and convenience stores will cost shoppers 20 cents a piece. That's the proposal by Mayor Greg Nickels and Councilmember Richard Conlin after a months-long examination by Seattle Public Utilities on whether to ban or discourage -- through taxation -- shopping bags and polystyrene boxes.
The 20-cent tax -- designed to recoup the environmental costs of using less-renewable or non-renewable resources and termed an advance recovery fee -- and the styrofoam ban is part of the "Zero Waste Strategy" that the city adopted in July 2007.
Public awareness of the negative aspects of plastic and polystyrene products has increased lately as several American cities have passed laws regulating thin plastic bags in different ways. Not only do they waste valuable oil and release toxins when burned, they also kill sea turtles and other marine animals that mistake them for food. As the price of oil has shot up, conscientious alternatives to plastic flatware and foam takeout containers are beginning to compete, says Brad Price of Simply Biodegradable, a Moses Lake company that makes and sells them.
"In 2008 you can get a biodegradable utensil of exceptional quality at nearly the same price," he says, of the conventional plastic knife, fork, or spoon.
An estimated 110 billion plastic shopping bags are used each year in North America, according to the program Bring Your Own Bag, which promotes and sells reusable totes. And while San Francisco singled out plastic bags for a ban, higher manufacturing and pulp costs mean that paper bags weigh just as heavy on the environment, said Mayor Greg Nickels at an April 2 press conference announcing the decision.
That hasn't stopped retailers from following San Francisco's lead.
PCC, a local grocery chain, voluntarily banned plastic bags in October. Customers now face the choice of a free paper bag, buying a cloth bag, or bringing their own -- and 48 percent more shoppers chose the last option in the first month of the ban. "It has been an overwhelming response," says PCC communications manager Diana Crane. "Our shoppers have been very responsible."
Though the store pays four times as much for a paper bag than a plastic bag, Crane says that store prices are not affected by the higher cost of paper. "A paper bag holds two to three times as much as a plastic," said Crane. "And shoppers that have forgotten their reusable bags ask [the clerks] to fill them as much as they can."
Whole Foods announced in January that it will end the use of plastic grocery bags in all of its 270 stores in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. by Earth Day, April 22. Other stores, such as QFC, have instead voluntarily installed in-store bins where customers can recycle the bags the store provides, while Ikea, since last March, charges five cents per plastic bag and sends the proceeds to the non-profit conservation organization American Forests.
American cities where plastic bags in one or another way have been regulated are San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. San Francisco was the first American city to outlaw non-recyclable plastic bags from use in supermarkets, drugstores and other large retailers last March. The move was vigorously opposed by the California Grocers Association, which said that the ban would frustrate current recycling efforts and cost consumers, who would end up paying for the higher-priced bags.
Los Angeles was a year ago planning on following San Francisco's lead to ban plastic bags, but after grocers and retailers weighed in and the California Grocers Association hired a lobbying firm, the final product in January was a scaled-down voluntary effort. Weaker legislation was passed in New York in January 2008; it requires stores of 5,000 feet or larger to provide recycling bins in prominent places and to contract to have them removed. The bill in this case was supported by The Food Industry Alliance, representing 750 supermarkets in the city, and Progressive Bag Affiliates, a trade group that represents plastic bag manufacturers.