San Luis Obispo Says “Ney” to Plastic Bags

Those dreaded plastic bags will soon no longer be tolerated in San Luis Obispo says their city board. In a 3.5 hour testimony and hour long board comment section the board voted to outlaw plastic bags in San Luis Obispo. It’s official, plastic bags will be banned in San Luis Obispo County effective October 1st! This comes in after a controversial vote by the county’s Integrated Waste Management Authority board Wednesday night.

The board, comprised of 13 people, made up of the county’s Board of Supervisors, representatives from seven cities and one representative of the community service districts.

A super-majority vote was called, which translated means that eight board members had to vote in favor of the proposal, instead of the usual seven; the final vote was eight to five, the least amount of votes necessary to pass the ban.

The ban will apply to single-use plastic bags at supermarkets, pharmacies, convenience stores and big-box stores as part of an effort to get shoppers to start bringing in reusable bags.

A group called “Save the Plastic Bag,” based in San Francisco, says it will now file a lawsuit against the county within thirty days to overturn the vote.

San Luis Obispo County is now the 15th community in the state of California to pass a ban on single use plastic bags! In San Louis Obispo approximately 130 million plastic bags are used each year and this measure will help them clean up considerably.

As with bans in other California cities, if a shopper forgets their reusable bags, they will have the option to buy a paper bag for $ .10 cents.

Way to go SLO TOWN!

Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 11:55 am and is filed under It's Funky. 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.