It is well known that the city of San Jose is on its way to banning single-use plastic bags starting in Jan 2011. An ordinance will come back to Council in 2010 for final adoption which will contain different options. The most problematic option I could see is a fee put on single-use bags.
The 25-cent fee would be charged for each bag and would not go towards libraries or police but rather to hire new people to administer the program and regulate retail stores. The store owner would have to collect the fee, record it, give it to the city and then possibly have to undergo audits. This is a painful process that a business does not want to take on. For the resident who pays the fee there is little value in paying for salaries of people to manage this program. It seems to me that most residents would rather have fees or taxes go towards neighborhood services that would enhance their daily lives.
If plastic bags are so bad, then let’s ban plastic bags altogether rather than create a plastic bag fee bureaucracy.
However, I believe the plastic bag debate is the beginning of discussions regarding the environment. Americans use more resources per person than all other countries. American consumers’ choices have an impact on the environment. Banning products that are not environmentally friendly will also have an effect on those who are employed in those industries. But are plastic bags the number one problem for San Jose? No. The City of San Jose needs to avoid bankruptcy and switch to a two-tier pension system for new city employees.
However, staying on topic, the plastic bag issue does speak to the impacts of consumption. Certainly plastic water bottles are menace to society with the plastic bottle island in the Pacific Ocean. (Sidenote: Did you know there is less then one person in the US government regulating bottled water for health and safety?) How about banning Styrofoam? Or all that packaging to protect our consumer electronics that could certainly be done in a more environmentally friendly away. Or maybe banning beef, as it takes 500 quarts of water to produce one pound of beef while the same amount in grain takes 2-20 quarts. Or banning incandescent light bulbs since new CFL bulbs use 75 percent less energy, produce 75 percent less heat and last 10 times as long.
If we really want to divert waste from our landfills to implement the San Jose Green Vision then perhaps we look at disposable diapers. Disposable diapers take up the most non organic space in land fills. Back before the days of convenience and mass consumption people used cloth diapers that were washable. Having changed a diaper in my life, I can definitely see the value of getting rid of that smelly diaper but it has its impact.
Eighty percent of the diaper changes in this nation are done with disposables. That comes to 18 billion diapers a year which is a $3 billion industry in the USA. Each diaper has an outer layer of waterproof polypropylene and an inner layer of fluff made from wood pulp plus super-slurper sodium polyacrylate that can hold a hundred times its weight in water.
Those 18 billion diapers add up to 82,000 tons of plastic a year and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp—250,000 trees. After a bowel movement these diapers are trucked away to landfills, where they sit as neatly wrapped packages of excrement, it is estimated to take 250-500 years to decompose, long after your children, grandchildren and great, great, grandchildren will be gone.
The instructions on a disposable diaper package advise that all fecal matter should be deposited in the toilet before discarding, yet less than one half of one percent of all waste from single-use diapers goes into the sewage system. Cloth diapers are reused 50 to 200 times before being turned into rags. Disposable diapers generate sixty times more solid waste and use twenty times more raw materials, like crude oil and wood pulp then cloth diapers. In 1991, an attempt towards recycling disposable diapers was made in the city of Seattle, involving 800 families, 30 day care centers, a hospital and a Seattle-based recycle for a period of one year. The conclusion was that recycling disposable diapers was not economically feasible on any scale.
I believe consumers and different levels of government will be dealing with these choices in perpetuity and there will be many debates and long council meetings across the country.
Thank you to the more than 100 people that turned out to City Hall last Monday to watch the film about water scarcity called FLOW.
The next event is discussion with the San Jose Redevelopment Agency at the Willow Glen Library on Saturday Oct 3 at 10:30am.
Instead of a bag ban, why not try to enforce the existing laws against littering?
I don’t have a problem with stores like Costco that elect not to give free bags to customers, but I strongly object when the government butts in and passes a law against it.
I’ve heard arguments that we all “pay” hidden costs of free bags to justify this stupid policy. Does anybody think that if bags are actually banned that prices will go down as a result?
Californians are being over-regulated to death. By itself, each little fee, tax, special assessment etc won’t kill us, but add them up and we’re being nickel and dimed to death. We need less intrusive government, not more. “NO” on the bag ban.
Pierluigi,
Thanks for the treatise on paper diapers. It saved me eating breakfast
this morning.
Pierluigi,I see you are stirring the pot. Water bottles should be next or at least ban the smaller ones.
Ban plastic bags, make the stores use recycled paper bags, and pass whatever costs to the consumer. End of story. Then the city council can get back to work on what is should be doing, which is not spending thousands of hours of taxpayer manpower on plastic bags.
Steve: they can’t solve the big problems; so they look for time-wasting diversions to divert our attention from the fact that they cannot provide us the basics.
Fix our roads without ObamaBucks.
Enforce anti-litter laws with heavy fines and a requirement that offenders spend lots of hours in the hot sun, or in the rain during winter, picking up litter.
“The store owner would have to collect the fee, record it, give it to the city and then possibly have to undergo audits. This is a painful process that a business does not want to take on.”
And the Mayor and Council wonder why businesses want no part of SJ…..
K—right on! Another burden on business owners that does little more than establish another useless, but probably highly paid, govt. bureaucracy. Soon we’ll have auditors, managers, directors, asst. managers, asst. directors counting plastic bag fee money….and all getting great pensions, and lifetime medical with some teeny-weeny co-pay..
OOOPs, sorry—P.O., Chuckie—where do I apply for one of those chushy bullshit jobs that will result from the plan as currently proposed? I need the perks.
Is the problem the bags themselves, or what some inconsiderate people do with those bags?
Today I came from Valley Fair to S/B 280. The cloverleaf onramp from 880 to 280 was littered profusely with plastic bags and paper products, and cans, and everything else imaginable.
Is there something in the air here in California that entices folks to litter? Whenever I travel to another state or country, I see almost no litter; yet here in California, litter is everywhere, plastic or otherwise.
OR, god forbid, and defintely not PC, could it be the demographics in CA that makes it so litter intensive? Of course it is—only people make litter, so it IS the demographic. SO, what is different about CA that makes it so litter intense, versus most other states? Let’s commission a STUDY.
The Feds give out all sorts of $$$ for BS projects, so how about a good one. So, better than a study of the reasons people litter, how about we solicit some ObamaBucks for a six month program of enforcing anti-litter laws? Surely he’ll authorize printing a couple of MIL to help answer this burning question.
AND, lets Pop the first offenders with the highest fine set forth in the anti-litter signs we see on many highways, AND add 40 hours of litter clean-up duty to every first offender; 80 hours for every second offender, with a little jail time for good measure.
Well, since a tax on things we disapprove of as a culture seems to be de riguer these days, how about we put in place a disposable diaper tax on each box of Huggies, etc.; but pay 100% of it back to everyone who turns in a soiled disposable…with the contents emptied into their toilet, of course.
Be good to the planet. Be a vegetarian!
Thank you for bringing up how much water beef production uses/wastes.
Bottled water is a joke. I remember the copper pitcher of water at boards meetings back in the day and that was just fine. Now we go through cases of bottled water each day for meetings.
Pierluigi,
You really do expose SJ bureaucrats as being a bunch of bottom-feeders when it comes to issues like this. I must agree that plastic bags are an environmental nuisance, yet imposing a fee on paper bags is absolute nonsense!
As I pass through other cities adjacent to SJ on a daily basis, I for one will buy my groceries in other locales as a protest against the paper bag fee.
Regarding the nine Council Members who voted affirmatively on this matter, I think they should be required to wear tight-fitting plastic bags on their heads for an hour each day.
I couldn’t help but laugh at this comment. Penalize your local grocers to make a statement about paying for begs? Sounds unbelievably petty to me. Go in almost any market on the Peninsula and you’ll find people embarrassed when they forget their recycled bags. It’s only a few bucks for a few bags. Mine have lasted 2-plus years already. It’s nice to know the price you place on doing the right thing is so “steep.”
Marco,
First of all, I would never be embarrassed for not using a recyled bag. I do my part, I place all platic bags in the City owned recylce bin every trash day. And you want to open up Pandora’s box by adding another process for collecting monies from store owners? You think a .25 cents collected for each plastic bag will pay for the new offices/equipment to collect all those monies, salaries for those new employees, benifits for those new employees and lastly a retirement system for those employees? The consumer will be the only one paying the price.
Secondly, I think it’s crazy for any of the Council member to insist we pay a fine for opting to use a plastic bag. They were voted in ,, they can be voted out. It’s just that easy
Lastly,, go live in the Peninsula,, I’m sure you feel better at night that your new neighbors are doing the right thing, using a recycled bag!
Pier Luigi failed to say that he voted FOR this policy wich included the TAX on paper bags!!!! He made no mention during the meeting of trying to stop that.
Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!
“An ordinance will come back to Council in 2010 for final adoption which will contain different options. The most problematic option I could see is a fee put on single-use bags”
I said on the dais the day the Council voted that I could not support a fee when the ordinance comes back for final adoption.
“Say it ain’t so, Joe!” Pier, did you really vote to levy taxes on paper and plastic bags?! I can easily understand the plastic bag issue, but I cannot fathom why we should be taxed for paper bags made from recycled material.
The fee isn’t the problem. The problem is creating a whole new bureaucracy. Just let the stores keep the fee and you won’t need to enforce it.
Most stores will be happy to implement a law that requires them to sell 2 cent bags for 25 cents each. This solves 80% of the problem. You can worry about the other 20% after you fix the budget.
I have noticed styrofoam less and less from coffee cups to take out containers. Is it already banned?
John Galt,
Though I often find myself in agreement with you, I don’t agree that diversity necessarily equals restriction of freedoms. For instance, absent the cultural enrichment that came with the demographic changes you acknowledged in your post, it is very unlikely that we Californians would ever have won the right to legally discard our newborn children, let alone enjoy the convenience of drive-thru/drop-off at the local firehouse. I mean, who could have imagined that in a state with so many restrictions about refuse—where bold political trailblazers are now waging war against plastic grocery bags, that we would ever win the right to dump-off our unwanted babies—no questions asked, at no charge!
Consequence-free breeding, right here in America. That is undeniable progress, for which we have to thank those many newcomers who, staying true to their wonderful, foreign cultural values (of which we have been so welcoming!), previously tossed so many newborn babies into dumpsters and alleyways that they were crowding out the feral cats.
From what I’ve observed in my travels about our own city, if our government continues to accommodate diverse cultural practices we should soon expect to be able to drop-off refuse of all kinds at our local firehouses, as there doesn’t seem to be anything these interesting newcomers won’t throw on the street.
plastic or paper bags?
spare the air days?
suburban sprawl?
litter, polluted oceans, salmon shortage?
water shortage?
mr. obama, use the junkie old nuclear weapons left over from the cold war to thin out the population.
limit families to only two children.
if they have more than two children, then sit them down in an electric chair or stand them up in front of a firing squad.
there are 6,800,000,000 people in the world and it increases by 80,000,000 per year.
enough already, abstain from sex or use a condom, you horny, filthy, greedy slobs.
p.s. thank you obama, bush and clinton for having no more than 2 children each. what a refreshing example of leadership.
Just what we need…government worrying about things that are full of $h!+….
Try these:
http://www.gdiapers.com/gdiapers101/flush-compost-or-toss?gclid=CNn_7s-MmJ0CFSYoawodi3au_g
And, oh yeah, another bureaucracy to manage the bag tax? Get a grip, people!
You said it, Pierluigi. “If plastic bags are so bad then ban them altogether rather than create a plastic bag fee bureaucracy”.
I kind of think that most Americans would eventually come around to the reusable bags even without a ban. I have. But those who are making the effort aren’t the ones who are doing the littering in the first place, are they. Those who will breed fighting pit bulls or spit on the sidewalk or buy powdered rhinoceros horn as an aphrodisiac aren’t too likely to be voluntarily eco-friendly with regard to plastic bags.
Unfortunately, the demographics we’ve encouraged here in enlightened Silicon Valley with our worship of diversity, our addiction to cheap labor, our subsidized housing, and our “sanctuary city” rules, are coming back to bite us in the butt so we’ll all have to pay the price by enduring yet another restriction on our freedom.
But that’s ok. Ban them. Don’t use them as an excuse to add to the City payroll. Just ban them. Period. The City will probably win an award and it’ll save the planet.
BAN what we don’t like. If only it were that easy. Ban public drunkenness at downtown clubs. Ban lane changes without using a turn signal. Ban back-room deals at City Hall.
If we outlaw styrofoam, only outlaws will have styrofoam.
I do agree with Rob Walsh’s comment. Ban (disposable)bottled water!
I see what you mean, finfan. I tend to be a “glass is half empty” sort of person but by viewing this baby drop-off center thing through a different “prism” I see that it really is an expansion of our freedom.
Maybe we could take it a step further and put a redemption value on discarded babies- kind of like we do with bottles and cans. Say $200 for 12 lbs. and under and $300 for the larger sizes?
This would be an added convenience to the working poor with unwanted children and would help to ensure that somebody will pick them up pretty much wherever they’re left.
Plastic water bottles are an obscenity.
The most egregious example is Fiji Water. This is water that is bottled from a spring in Fiji. The native people who live in that area have no access to any source of unpolluted water. Yet a big company comes in from outside, buys control of the only pure water spring in the area and bottles it up to be shipped to the other side of the world to sell to people who already have access to the highest standard tap water in the world at a cost much lower than what people in Fiji have to pay for their polluted water.
Locally bottled water is not required to meet the most basic health standards that our tap water does. At best it is the same water that comes out of your tap then sold to you at a 1000% markup.
Our local water doesn’t taste that great, so we put a filter on our tap. I fill up my reusable bottle every day and I am set to go.
Some municipalities in Australia have already banned the sale of bottled water, and if people don’t stop buying it voluntarily then I think this concept is going to spread.
If you had told people 30 years ago that in the future people would pay ridiculous prices for a product you could get almost for free, they would have thought you were crazy. Yet it appears that rational thinking is no match for the combination of marketing and gullibility.
I totally agree that we need to be more conscious about what we are using and how we are using it. I am actually excited to see that there will be a change on the use of plastic bags. For a long while I have been stressed out watching as people use and abuse the environment. Rather than using reusable Tupperware people use a plastic bag and throw it away without thinking about it. The tax thing is at least making a conscious effort in the right direction. I do agree how silly the tax is however. What a silly thing, seems like its just to create jobs, and if anything that is good, but what a silly process to have store owners have to go through. I agree that if there is a tax then it should go towards the community or something more productive like environmental clean-up. And I am all for getting rid of plastic bags!
Let’s see if the Mercury News editorial board will support a ban on single use plastic bags containing newspapers. My newspaper comes everyday (rain or shine) wrapped in a blue plastic bag.
Pierluigi, could you add blue plastic newspaper bags used on sunny days to the list of banned items in the city of San Jose and maybe a fee when used on rainy days?
That is funny! Why not add it to the list, what the heck. Maybe we can have a condom recycling tax too for those who aren’t evironmentally friendly enough to wash and reuse their condoms or aren’t willing to use reusable cloth condoms. Seriously, with all the condoms being flushed into the bay doesn’t this pose some serious health risks? What if a seaman falls into some semen and gets swallowed while at sea. Are the waste rubbers finding their way onto and suffocating sea cucumbers? Tax them all. Create a new city Czar to over see wasteful condom criminal activity and have surprise inspections to see if used condoms are being put in the dishwasher to be used again.