Santa Clara County (Calif) supervisors vote to ban plastic and paper bags

[alp227]

Source: San Jose Mercury News

Declaring that the "plastic bag age is over," Santa Clara County supervisors voted Tuesday to ban the distribution of plastic and paper carryout bags at retail stores in unincorporated areas.

The move remains mostly symbolic for now, with a final vote scheduled for October. But the board's intention to begin a ban on "single-use" bags by autumn adds momentum to a statewide campaign to reduce litter and improve the health of marine life.

Similar bans now exist in San Francisco and Palo Alto. The San Jose City Council has approved a ban, which is expected to launch in January, and statewide legislation is pending. And just Tuesday, Santa Cruz County supervisors agreed to move ahead with an ordinance that would eventually ban the use of plastic bags at retail shops and impose a surcharge on paper bags.

Read more: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_14877449

[FrenchieCat]

1. Silicon valley bans Plastic!

LOL!

[Skittles]

2. what will I use for my cats' litter?

:o

[happygoluckytoyou]

3. IN A RELATED STORY humans realize that single-use items are not always a good thing

[kentauros]

6. I buy the cheapo 88-cents-a-roll small garbage bags.

I don't remember how many are on a roll, but that's affordable and just the right size for my furry-boy's litter :)

[customerserviceguy]

10. That might be fine for something the size of a litter box

but if they did that here, I wonder what my dog poop scooping neighbors will use? I guess they'll just buy boxes of plastic bags rather than get them free. Same plastic still ends up in the landfill.

[unabelladonna]

12. absurd....

i use my plastic bags for all kinds of garbage...so now they're going to be forced to buy a product they used to get for free...... wasting more money.

[EFerrari]

19. These bans usually are only for big stores. Little ones

are exempt in San Francisco, for example. I use these bags to scoop, too, but in the absence, newspaper works. It's not as easy to carry but it's possible.

[EFerrari]

18. I don't use liners but only baking soda under the litter. On weekends, they both get

washed and set out in the sun to dry. Of course, this works better when there is sun. lol

[chollybocker]

4. This has been the policy in Montreal for about a year or so.

It's a great system. One never forgets to bring 'their bag' to the grocery store now; if you do; you pay five cents for a plastic one.

It works perfectly, as intended.

[MattBaggins]

15. And as people have already pointed out

what about all the second use of those bags such as dog doo doo, kitty litter, lining my small bathroom waste baskets? I use all of my bags twice and would just buy small bags and still have the same amount of trash going out.

[chollybocker]

16. If your lifestyle requires that you need plastic bags...

...no one is preventing you from buying them. Or you adapt new enviro-friendly ways to do things. The goal is to eliminate unneccesary plastics from my/your grandkids' landfills.

Hardly a huge sacrifice.

[Trillo]

5. Does this mean purchased food will no longer be wrapped in plastic?

I'm thinking of items such as cheese which are typically cut from a large "wheel" (of cheese). Will such and similar items no longer be wrapped in "one use plastic" bags, often hermetically sealed?

Or is this one of those highly specific laws that is only meant to affect the end user for their "carry out" bags from the store to home or the car?

edit: rephrasing

[kentauros]

7. I'd like to see the end of blister packs in hardware stores, too.

Loose-item bins used to work just fine :)

[RC]

8. What 'Single Use'?

I reuse my plastic bags.

[zipplewrath]

11. Yup

The plastic bags in our house get re-used.

Really, depending upon the goal, this is fussing about the chairs on the foredeck of the Titanic. The packaging of the products in the bags is a much larger issue. The bags often get "reused", but the packaging around the products rarely does. The bag weighs practically nothing, and consumes precious little space in a land fill. The packaging is far more likely to end up in a bush, on the side of the road, in a ditch, or in a body of water. The bag tends to make it all the way home, products often get opened immediately outside of the store.

Quite honestly, I'd prefer an regulation that required trash cans outside of stores (and maintained BY the store), and for parking lots larger than a certain size, they should have trash cans at major pedestrian exit points, as well as the perimeter of those lots. But as someone else has suggested, in the end, packaging of "single" items is silly, loose bins works just as well.

[marshall]

14. I use those plastic bags for all kinds of things

Every room in my house has a small trash can with one of those bags as a liner. I use them for carrying my lunch to work, I carry several in the car for trash, I carry several in my diaper bag for dirty diapers and soiled clothes, I carry several with me on every trip to separate items like socks and underwear in my luggage and to use to sort dirty clothes, I have several throw pillows I have stuffed with plastic bags, I use them to wrap and protect glass items when I store them in a box, I have used them as emergency boots in a rainstorm, the list goes on and on.

Anyone who thinks those bags are single use items isn't being creative or imaginative enough.

[bemildred]

9. About F**king time. nt

[SemperEadem]

13. DC has started a .05 fee for plastic bags at stores

so now, when you go to a convenience store, you have to ask for the bag and you pay for it.

inconvenient in the moment? perhaps. But the alternative to it winding up in the ocean, waterways, and as litter blowing across the state demands that a change be made.

From what I understand, the funds will go towards the clean up of these nuisances not finding their way into a trash recepticle, since many folks are so triflin' that they can't find a damn trash can.

[Trillo]

17. Automated trash pickup trucks often seems to be the cause of much litter.

As the mechanical arm picks up the newer style trash cans and dumps its contents into the truck, some of the garbage occasionally misses, or perhaps the wind catches it, and those few items miss going into the truck, and can end up blowing around the landscape for some time.

While it doesn't seem a frequent occurrence, the sheer number of stops and pickups that are made daily means that even a small amount that misses the trash truck on mechanical arm pickup can cumulatively add up to a lot of trash which becomes apparent "litter", but which was originally put in a trash receptacle by folks.

I only mention this as this didn't seem to be such a large issue until the automated trash pickup trucks.

FYI, if I see that stuff on the street in front of our house, I will pick it up and put it back into our trashcan, for pickup on the next scheduled pickup. But I don't inspect immediately after each pickup, which means the wind can blow this stuff around.

Our local trash company has said loose items, such as paper, particularly shredded paper, should be put in a bag of some kind, paper or plastic, before the bag and contents are put into the trashcan.

Waxing sarcastic, perhaps we need everyone to have a PhD in proper packing of the pickup bins to reduce such spillage, because it's always the little guy's fault, even when it's really the big guy's fault.