Plastic Bag Wars Poised to Continue
In the wake of Seattle voters’ decisive rejection of a proposed 20-cent fee on paper and plastic bags, opponents of disposable shopping bags have vowed to press for an all-out ban on the bags.
“A ban would be the logical next step,” said Brady Montz, the Seattle chairman of the Sierra Club and one of the anti-bag campaign leaders.
San Francisco, he noted, banned non-biodegradable plastic bags in 2007, following consideration of a fee.
Despite losing the Seattle vote (the tally as of this writing is at 58 percent opposed and 42 percent in favor), Mr. Montz also presented the bag campaign as having raised awareness of the problems created by plastic bags. “I’m very happy with all the work we’ve done in elevating the issue,” he said.
Defenders of plastic bags, however — who argue that plastic bag bans drive consumers to paper bags, which come with their own environmental problems — were ecstatic with the Seattle results. “If the people of Seattle don’t go for this, then nobody will,” said Stephen Joseph, the campaign manager for savetheplasticbag.com.
A number of smaller communities, besides San Francisco, have recently enacted bans or fees on bags. The city council of Edmonds, another city in Washington, has approved a provision barring stores from distributing plastic bags. So has a city in Alaska (where one resident told the Anchorage Daily News that the bags “get caught on the willow bushes on the tundra”).
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