Recycling Fees Coming to Plastic Bag Usage

The Mercury news just reported that ‘Two bills scheduled to be considered Monday by the Assembly Natural Resources Committee would authorize fees of 15 cents or 25 cents a bag to discourage supermarkets and large drug stores from using plastic bags. ‘

The measures’ supporters describe them as the inevitable follow-up to a program started last July requiring supermarkets and pharmacy superstores to start recycling plastic bags and selling reusable bags.

But William Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association, says lawmakers should give the recycling programs more time to work before considering fees to discourage plastic bags.

“Consumer awareness and consumer behavior have already begun to change, as more people bring their own reusable bags” to stores, he said in a letter to Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, a Sherman Oaks Democrat who is the author of one of the bills.

Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, an environmental group that helped set up the recycling program, said it has doubled the number of plastic bags being recycled. But recycling of the bags only increased from 2 percent to 4 percent.

“I think it’s inevitable, if we want to make a meaningful dent, that we have to become much more aggressive than we have been so far,” he said.

The 19 billion flimsy plastic bags used in California each year

pose a particular threat to the environment because they can blow out of trash cans and end up as litter on the ground or as debris in streams, lakes and rivers, threatening marine life and adding toxins to the food chain.

The bags also generate 147,000 tons of trash a year in dumps, according to Levine, who wrote the 2006 bill that set up the recycling program.

Levine’s bill would require stores in the recycling program to cut their plastic bag use by 35 percent by the end of 2010 and 70 percent by the end of 2012 or charge customers a 15-cent-per-bag fee.

The money would have to be used to clean up plastic bag litter and promote recycling.

The other bill, by Assemblyman Mike Davis, D-Los Angeles, would impose a 25-cent per-bag fee on plastic starting July 1, 2009. Stores could retain 3 percent of the fee to cover costs associated with collecting it. The rest would go into a state fund for local programs to reduce plastic bag use and combat plastic bag litter.

Davis said the fee would be an “attention grabber” that would encourage shoppers to choose more environmentally friendly ways to haul their merchandise.

Murray’s group is backing the Levine bill and has no objection to the Davis bill. But he says the ultimate solution would be a fee on both plastic and paper bags to encourage the trend toward reusable bags.

“Certainly paper is environmentally superior to plastic,” he said. “It’s not as likely to get littered. It breaks down completely in 30 to 60 days. But it still represents waste—a product whose useful life is the time it takes you to get groceries from the checkout line to home.”

Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Bag News, The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.