Plastic bag backers may bypass Seattle to seek legislature's help
The chemical industry people who beat Seattle's last attempt to limit waste look ready to go straight to the state. City Council, meanwhile, seems united on a ban.
Seattle City Council
As the Seattle City Council moves to follow Bellingham's lead and ban single-use plastic bags, the American Chemistry Council affiliates that defeated Seattle’s 2009 plastic bag fee are organizing to defeat or fend off municipal bans at the state level in the upcoming legislative session.
Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien is the primary sponsor of Seattle’s proposed ban and was joined by a council majority at the Seattle Aquarium Nov. 21 to launch the proposed new law, which also includes a mandate to charge a 5-cent fee for paper bags. With at least seven supporters on the Council and the support of Mayor Mike McGinn, the ban is expected to pass without difficulty in the coming weeks.
The draft legislation had its first hearing for public comment last week. All of the public comments were in support of the ban. During that meeting of the Utilities and Neighborhoods committee, which O’Brien chairs, Bellingham City Councilmember Seth Fleetwood noted that Bellingham's bag ban grew out of the larger “Bag It” movement that works to mobilize municipalities to stop the use of plastic bags.
For its part, the bag industry, which defeated an earlier measure requiring a 20-cent charge for disposable plastic and paper bags, appears to be punting on the matter at the city level while preparing to take it on aggressively at the state level. On Nov. 21, Seattle council members received a letter from Mark Daniels, an executive at South Carolina-based Hilex Poly Co., a manufacturer of plastic bags, opposing the ban but conceding on Seattle’s ban, saying, “we expect the proposed ban to unfortunately be approved.”
But Daniels’ and Hilex Poly’s role in the bag debate doesn’t stop there. Not mentioned in his letter is the fact that Daniels is also the chairman of The Progressive Bag Affiliates, which is “an entity within the American Chemistry Council that is dedicated to promoting the recycling of plastic bags and to advocating on behalf of plastic bags,” according to Jennifer Killinger of the Chemistry Council. The members of the affiliate group include Advance Polybag, Inc., The Dow Chemical Company, ExxonMobil Corporation, Superbag Corporation, Total Petrochemicals USA, Inc., and others.
The bag industry group is preparing to take the issue to the state level in the upcoming legislative session. According to Daniels, “We believe it would be better if there were a state solution for Washington, and we would rather see all stakeholders focus resources on fighting litter and increasing recycling in reasonable ways.”
It’s clear that from New York to South Carolina to Seattle, major resources are being marshaled and coordinated. At the Aquarium press conference, a representative from the Seattle office of Gallatin Public Affairs gathered press contacts and passed them to the giant New York PR firm Edelman, which then provided unsolicited media quotes to reporters from Daniels of Hilex Poly Co. The American Chemistry Council also referred inquiries to Daniels, as did Bruce Gryniewski of Gallatin Public Affairs's Seattle office. Gryniewski said that Gallatin is “doing work in the plastic bags area” and later added that “we are going to represent” Hilex Poly Co. “I think there is interest in a statewide recycling program”, said Gryniewski, presumably as an alternative to bag bans. That is the central framing that bag-ban opponents will take at the state level: get ahead of bag bans and focus on industry sponsored recycling and educational efforts in order to block bag bans.
“What they’re trying to do is the same thing they did in Oregon and California, which is a voluntary recycling approach,” says Heather Trim of the People for Puget Sound, one of the coalition groups working to enact bag bans. She says that industry groups in those states “were supposed to put a whole bunch of effort into it and very little of that has occurred. Our argument is: don’t generate the waste in the first place.” The city’s most recent estimate is that 82 percent of paper bags are recycled now while only 13 percent of plastic bags are recycled.
The strategies of both pro- and anti- camps have evolved since the last time the issue was center stage in Seattle. In 2009 the American Chemistry Council spent nearly $1.4 million to overturn Seattle’s $.20 bag fee legislation through the initiative process.
Bag ban proponents, led by Environment Washington, are working city by city and say that efforts are underway in Lake Forest Park, Mukilteo, and Olympia and that there is developing interest in Issaquah, Sammamish and Port Townsend in pursuing bag bans.
The next Seattle City Council hearing for public comment on the issue is 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 5 at Seattle City Hall.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Nov 29, 5:56 a.m. Inappropriate
Meanwhile, as King County reports, 200 tons of pet waste is dropped in the Puget Sound region EVERY DAY. Are we supposed to be protecting the environment or just joining another Party party?
Posted Tue, Nov 29, 7:05 a.m. Inappropriate
You can buy plastic bags at Amazon for about 1.5 cents each in boxes of 1000. It'd be easy to have five or six in your pocket or bag when you go to the store, which would be handy for bus commuters who stop at the store on the way home from work.
Posted Tue, Nov 29, 9:45 a.m. Inappropriate
This coming from the same group of people that banned nuclear weapons downtown. I don't think they could survive 24 hours without making a statement for the press.
Posted Tue, Nov 29, 10:19 a.m. Inappropriate
'Walking the dog' is a code phrase for taking the dogs dump to someone else's trash can. Neighbor's trash cans, stranger's trash cans, city litter cans, parks litter cans, dumpsters, alleyways, etc are all the unwilling recipients of dog waste. Most all of it is in a blue newspaper plastic wrap bag or another grocery style type plastic wrap bag. What will the self-centered, irresponsible, dog owner do if Seattle bans plastic bags?
Posted Tue, Nov 29, 10:42 a.m. Inappropriate
"What will the self-centered, irresponsible, dog owner do if Seattle bans plastic bags?"
Buy them for that purpose. I use lots of paper bags in my business (native plant seeds). Usually, I use recycled bags but sometimes when I'm on a long trip I simply buy them. Its a cost of doing business. And when your dog's crap is in a plastic bag, its simply is not going to break down. If, on the other hand, you use a biodegradable container (paper bag, folded sheet of newspaper), it will compost quite nicely.
Really, this is just another example of private profit and socialized cost. The reality is that the bag manufacturers are not going to pay the cost of even achieving 50% recycling of this instant litter. Instead, the cost is passed on to us in ways that directly cost us money (recycling programs, litter pickups, etc.) and ways that hard to measure monetarily but still cost us (litter, trashy environment to live in, injured and killed wildlife, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, microscopic plastic particles moving up the food chain to be consumed by humans).
Its also a stupid thing to do with a finite resource. About the only thing single plastic bags can be "recycled" into is plastic lumber.
PS: I know that the posters above love to bash all things Seattle, but this has already been enacted in Bellingham and Edmonds. Coming soon to the environment you live in - less plastic that you will eventually eat.
Posted Tue, Nov 29, 11:06 a.m. Inappropriate
My understanding is that the industry's efforts in Oregon and California were defense, to prevent state level regulations on bags, whereas in Washington it will need to be an offensive effort, to get the Legislature to control what municipalities can do. That would be much harder. Any details yet on the specifics of proposed legislation?
Posted Tue, Nov 29, 4:05 p.m. Inappropriate
You know I recently found out that in the middle ages, people picked up dog crap to sell as a leather tanning product! So that's what we need, a leather tanning shop to recycle our dog doo doo!
As for banning those stupid bags, about time. I'm sick of picking them up out the ditch. They don't "bio-degrade" they just get into smaller and smaller bits until they wash into the ocean and become part of the food chain. Yuck!
Posted Tue, Nov 29, 9:56 p.m. Inappropriate
Let's just ban all PLASTIC!!!!!!! It's not just the grocery bags that are the problem. At least those plastic bags are sanitary. I love putting my food into CLEAN AND NEW BAGS , knowing I'm protecting my family from those BAD germs, like e-coli, strep and listeria found on so many of those CLOTH BAGS that lay across the conveyer belt just before your order. Seriously, I know from 1st hand experience what those bags contain and frankly I don't understand how these people aren't aware of how filthy they are. Poop, pee, rotten food, meat stains, mildew, mold, pet hairs and smells. What is this? Seriously folks, WASH THOSE BAGS! As for those of you new to this information, beware!!!!!
Posted Thu, Dec 1, 11:57 a.m. Inappropriate
The ban is being led by a group of zealous lobbyists over at Environment Washington that apparently believe that by banning a product that makes up less than 1% of all litter that the whales will be saved from human garbage. The truth is that plastic bags are the least of our environmental worries, and the city of Seattle is supposed to be working on reducing carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses. This ban will result in higher levels of those emissions as people switch to paper. Which is fine with the Grocery stores, since they get to make a nickle on each bag and a huge profit on reusable bags.
This resolution is short sighted at best, and based on the "success" of Bellingham's ban which hasn't even gone into effect yet. What success or failure could it have had at this point?
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