The Bag Ban Comes Home (Again)

Sweet home San Diego is an interesting place — never before have I lived in a place so equally split between raging conservatives and diehard beachy nature people. Most times, this dichotomy lays dormant as each party chooses to ignore the other, but from every now and then something happens to bring the underlying resentment to a head: gentrification in the Gaslamp Quarter, for example, and now the Great Plastic Bag Debate. Already a hot topic in such neighboring towns as Encinitas and Leucadia, the subject was finally formally broached to San Diego’s City Council yesterday.

An environmental group asked a City Council committee Wednesday to pursue legislation to ban the use of plastic carryout shopping bags in San Diego.

The Natural Resources and Culture Committee took no vote, but agreed to seek a legal analysis from the City Attorney’s Office before the issue is brought back in September for further consideration.

Well, okay, no swift changes. But we’re looking into it! That’s something, at least! Not that everyone is pleased with even the decision to “analyze” it. In fact, the American Chemistry Council seems to be feeling very left out and irritated by even the promise to look into things.

The American Chemistry Council’s Jennifer Forkish called on the panel to delay moving forward with any proposal seeking to ban the use of plastic carry-out shopping bags.

Forkish complained that the ACC and its members only heard about the proposed ban at the “11th hour.”

“We ask that we be afforded the same opportunity as other stakeholders to prepare our presentation on some of the many unintended negative consequences of bans on plastic carryout bags,” she said.

As much as I want to roll my eyes at chemical companies, this is actually, if true, an extremely fair complaint. The proposal for phasing out plastic bags has so much going for it, that its proponents shouldn’t have to resort to being sneaky to get their case out there. In fact, keeping opponents in on the case may actually spark more intellectual debate on the subject and lead to even better solutions — like, say, the small-fee on bags idea. Obviously in a perfect world we could ban plastics outright, but maybe a compromise might be more likely to actually happen. Just a thought.

But at least it’s under discussion now. Lord knows we need something better to talk about than yet another new ball park.

Photo via GraniteGrok! Speaking of San Diego being a study in contradictions. I’ve never seen a coastal town so frequently ablaze…

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 10:24 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.