Bag Ban Rejected by Baltimore City Council

You can’t win them all, right? In the face of heavy opposition from unions and grocery chains, not to mention a lack of support from politicians, a plastic bag ban proposal was shot down in Baltimore yesterday.

First District Councilman Jim Kraft proposed the plastic bag ban. He says most bags are not recycled, and end up taking space in landfills. ‘There are other ways to package what we need to package, and to transport what we need to transport,’ he said.

Kraft said Mayor Sheila Dixon told him she would sign the proposal if it passed city council, but that didn’t happen. ‘I really felt that her support was going to be stronger in terms of moving it forward, but that’s her position and I understand it,’ he said.

Grocery merchants cited reasons such as that the ban would have cost them more money, which they would have had to pass down to their consumers, ultimately hiking up already-troubling food prices still further. Also cited were concerns about costs leading to lay-offs, and an interesting take on a popular NRA slogan:

The grocers got strong support from union leaders, who felt the ban might threaten jobs. They say bags don’t litter, people do. People will litter if a bill had been passed, and they will litter tomorrow now that it was defeated,’ Santoni said.

Emphasis added for hilarity. So now it’s back to the drawing board. Perhaps Kraft will come back with a bag tax proposal instead? It seems to go over a bit better, and if nothing else, at least he’s got Baltimore talking about the possibility of change. Sometimes it just takes a little more time to get somewhere.

Photo via Flickr!

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 8:57 am and is filed under 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.