Phil Gutis's Blog
San Francisco Does it Better
November 19, 2007
Posted by Phil Gutis in Curbing Pollution , Living Sustainably , U.S. Law and Policy
When you are deep in home renovation land, there are few places you visit more often than Home Depot and Lowes. Most weekends involve at least once visit and sometimes we actually end up going on both Saturday and Sunday.
Yesterday, we stopped by Home Depot to pick up some stuff and I was delighted to see that they too were offering branded reusable cloth bags. (I wasn't so delighted when I tried to buy one and use it at the checkout counter and the staff could not figure out how to open it; in fact, in trying to open the bag, they broke it and we just carried our few items out to the car.)
Scenes like this (without breakage, I hope) are increasingly common across the United States where more and more stores are selling reusable bags. And starting tomorrow in San Francisco, the retail scene will be changing even more dramatically.
That's when, as the San Francisco Chronicle writes today, "plastic grocery store bags are going, going, gone."
"The 180 million plastic bags city officials estimate are handed out in the city each year end up as litter on city streets, clog storm drains, harm wildlife, and contaminate and jam machines used in recycling," the paper writes. "And then there is the giant patch of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean that scientists are monitoring, estimated to weigh 3 million tons and cover an area twice the size of Texas. The patch is about 1,000 miles west of San Francisco, but plastic dumped in the ocean here can end up there."
Even better, San Francisco is requiring that paper bags must be made of at least 40 percent high-grade recycled paper and Jack Macy, commercial recycling coordinator for the SF Department of the Environment, told the paper that many stores are using bags made from 100 percent recycled paper.
That makes the most sense. While there are some creative re-uses of plastic bags emerging these days, I think its better that we as a society switch back to paper while we train ourselves to bring our own.
And since we can't probably rely completely on business to do this on its own, I think the San Francisco model makes the most sense. Forward looking local governments can often do it better.
(bookmark or email this entry)
Comments are closed for this post.
- Phil Gutis
- Director of Communications
- New York City
- I'm NRDC's Director of Communications so Switchboard and NRDC.org are ultimately my responsibility. (Cheers or...
- more→
Comments
J Newton — Nov 19 2007 01:50 PM
Yay for no more plastic bags in SF! Ban 'em everywhere!
In regards to training ourselves to bring our own cloth bags, I think we should have a transition period of only 6 - 8 weeks after which the only option will be cloth. We simply don't have the luxury of making this any more gentle.