The passage of the ban makes San Diego the 150th municipality in California to institute a ban on single-use plastic bags. Photo: Shutterstock
“Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind,” sings Katy Perry, “wanting to start again?” The visual is cliché, but spot on. Single-use plastic bags are the light little petroleum-based sacks given to you at grocery stores, convenience stores, and take-out joints the world over. The lightest breeze tends to fill them up and lift them into oblivion, and by oblivion I mean the ocean, trees, all over the place.
Single-use bags are the little nuisance that environmental activists across the United States have been seeking to ban for years. San Francisco became the first municipality to institute a ban in 2007, and other cities across the country have since caught on.
On Tuesday, the City of San Diego jumped on board. In a 6-3 vote, the city council affirmed San Diego would become the 150th municipality in California to ban single-use plastic bags, reports the San Diego Union Tribune.
City Council President Sherri Lightner said of the ban, “Citizens across the state have demonstrated the ability to transition to more sustainable, reusable bags, and I’m confident that the citizens of San Diego will quickly adopt this beneficial practice.”
But others were less optimistic. Councilman Scott Sherman, who voted against the ban, argued that to have a serious environmental impact focus should be shifted toward polluters, and developing harsher penalties. “All this trash, all this litter was put there by somebody or carelessly left behind because they were too lazy to haul this stuff home,” said Sherman.
Proponents of the ban contend that locally, nearly 700 million plastic bags are handed out each year. Of these, only about 3-percent are recycled. The ban hopes to alleviate the plastic waste by encouraging consumers to instead utilize reusable shopping bags, and by charging 10-cents for paper bags.
The passage of the bag ban in San Diego comes in anticipation of a November 8 vote that will decide whether or not California will ban single-use plastic bags statewide. After California state legislators passed a ban that would have impacted the entire state in 2014, the American Progressive Bag Alliance spent more than $3 million to qualify a referendum. Once the threshold for signatures was reached, the ban was put on hold until the results of the referendum in November are known. The San Diego Union Tribune reports the American Progressive Bag Alliance has since raised $6.4 million in an effort to overturn the ban come November.
Opponents like the American Progressive Bag Alliance hold fast to the idea that paying for bags will negatively impact consumers – especially those of lesser economic means – and will eliminate much needed jobs. They also contend that there is limited evidence to suggest a bag ban will have a significant environmental impact.
Still, perhaps the most cogent opposition argument is one few opponents have leveraged. According to one Portland Herald Press columnist, the city of Austin, Texas has experienced increased levels of heavy duty reusable plastic bags following the institution of a single-use plastic bag ban, suggesting that a complete ban may create more plastic waste if the public fails to reuse hardier bags.
Ultimately, to be effective a plastic bag ban like that in San Diego requires a change in consumer attitude and behavior. In cities like Los Angeles, which banned plastic bags in 2010, about 65-percent of grocery store purchases use a reusable bag, and distribution of plastic bags has been reduced by 95-percent. Whether this trend in bag banning will successfully propel a statewide ban in November remains to be seen. But, it will certainly be one of the more contentious issues on the ballot this year.
