Environment Committee Urges Council to Consider Plastic Bag Ban

The citizen Environmental Quality Committee voted 9-0 Tuesday night to recommend that El Cerrito join with neighboring cities in studying the feasibility of a "single-use bag" law that would ban plastic shopping bags.

Obliged by state requirements to reduce waste sent to landfills and seeking to eliminate plastic bags that clog waterways and endanger marine life, a number of local governments in California and elsewhere have adopted bans or fees for disposable bags.

Plastic bags account for more than 10 percent of the debris washed up on American coastlines, according to a presentation to the Environmental Quality Committee by Vince Ferro, recycling coordinator for RecycleMore, known more formally as the West Contra Costa Integrated Waste Management Authority.

If just one in five Americans were to switch to reusable bags, we could save over 1.33 trillion bags in our lifetime, according to RecycleMore.

RecycleMore is a joint government agency charged with reducing landfill waste and represents five West Contra Costa County cities: El Cerrito, Hercules, Pinole, Richmond and San Pablo. It was created because of a 1989 state law (Assembly Bill 939) mandating a 50-percent reduction in trash.

The agency is asking its member cities to join in a feasibility study of a regional single-use bag ordinance and to consider sharing the legal, research and environmental-study costs of such a measure.

"We're going to each city in West Contra Costa to ask for their support for this regional ordinance," Ferro told El Cerrito Patch.

A model ordinance, patterned after a failed state proposed law (AB 1998) and a local ordinance adopted in San Jose, would ban plastic bags and impose a fee on use of paper bags, Ferro said. Fees in cities that charge for paper bags range between five and 25 cents, he said.

The San Pablo City Council voted unanimously to support the resolution for a  feasibility study and possible cost-sharing, and the Pinole City Council approved it on a 3-2 vote. Richmond is pursuing its own, stricter ordinance, though it might be willing to share the costs of an environmental study, Ferro said.

Several local government attempts to implement plastic bag bans or restrictions have encountered demands for environmental impact studies. A lawsuit by the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition is now pending before the state Supreme Court. The coalition sued the City of Manhattan Beach, saying it didn't properly assess the environment impact before it banned plastic bags in July 2008.

The coalition also threatened to sue the Marin County Board of Supervisors before its vote on a plastic bag ban. In January the supervisors nevertheless on plastic bags in unincorporated Marin.

The first U.S. city to ban plastic bags was San Francisco, which approved a ban on nonbiodegradable plastic bags at supermarkets and chain drugstores in 2007.