Florida Could Become 1st State in Nation to Ban Some Disposable Bags

[Lunican]

Florida Could Become 1st State in Nation to Ban Some Disposable Bags

Florida could become the first state in the nation to ban some disposable paper and plastic bags that are used to carry groceries.

Lawmakers are considering the ban, which could reduce pollution and trash, according to our partner, Bay News 9.

If the ban becomes law, it would be phased in over five years. Initially, shoppers would have to pay about a nickel for each bag they use.

Full Article:
http://www.theledger.com/article/20100201/news/100209984

[iluvolives]

Target already does this- if you tell them you don't need their bags they take .05 off your bill per bag. I've also heard that Walmart has several test stores that will no longer provide bags- you will have to buy them if you don't bring your own.

[copperfiend]

Great news.

[fsu813]

I think i'll have a heart attack if that happens. I can't see FL being that progressive. Hope i'm wrong.

[Lunican]

I think San Francisco and a few other cities have already banned them.

[Dog Walker]

Had an eye-opening experience a number of years ago while bird watching at a Canadian landfill.  (Dumps and sewage ponds are great places to see birds.)

The wind was blowing and every tree in sight was covered with brown plastic bags flapping away.  It was an unbelievably ugly sight and I have hated the blasted things ever since.  The only thing they are good for is picking up my dogs' poop on our walks.

[TheProfessor]

I reuse the plastic bags for my small trash can rather than the need for buying trash bags.  People should recycle these otherwise.  This will just end up a way for retailers to make a nickle for every bag like Ikea does now.

[reednavy]

I use them to collect to refuse in my cat's litter box or to take my lunch sometimes, but that's it. Other than that, I recycle them.

[chipwich]

Little platic bags are very handy as garbage cans an to carry items around.

I hope this law doesn't pass.  I am more than willing to pay 5 cents to get a bag.

The biggest problem I see is people using way too many of these for their grocerys and then just throwing them away.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.....but please don't ban.

[Overstreet]

"Banning" the bags means you can't use them at all.

Charging you a nickle, $.05, for a bag that cost $.015 is either a government tax or retail capitalism.

[Traveller]

D.C. charges 5 cents per bag as well.  I believe the revenue is used to fund litter cleanup.

[Dog Walker]

Maybe there should be a .05 deposit on each of them as there should be on cans and bottles.  Then they would get recycled.

[Sportmotor]

wow this would be very progressive. I am suprised

[fsu813]

Paper, plastic or punt; DEP gives lawmakers the choice on banning shopping bags


Paper or plastic used to be a simple question.


But after working two years, Florida’s environmental agency found no easy answers for lawmakers on how to shrink the mountain of throwaway bags lining landfills and streets.


So Monday, an agency that in October had seemed ready to approve a ban on the billions of shopping bags used each year in Florida punted the question back to the Legislature.


“It is recommended that the Legislature review the available options and take action,” Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Sole wrote to Gov. Charlie Crist and House and Senate leaders as he handed off a report listing 12 choices the state might try.
Somewhere around five billion bags a year might be used in Florida, an earlier draft of the report said, but no one has a firm number.


Only 12 percent of plastic bags are recycled currently, and about 37 percent of paper bags, said the report. Some of the rest become street trash or get washed into rivers and the ocean, where sea turtles and other sealife can die from swallowing objects they mistake for jellyfish.


“These plastic bags are everywhere,” Larry Balch of Jacksonville said as he loaded some into his truck Monday outside a Winn-Dixie in San Jose. The 54-year-old caterer and contractor said he thinks about it often because his eco-conscious wife uses reusable bags and needles him for not doing the same.


But canvas totes would never work for his catering gigs, he said. Besides, he said, he recycles the bags, bundling them in his garage and bringing them back to stores.


State lawmakers told Sole’s agency in 2008 to study how necessary and effective new regulations would be in ending bag pollution. Lawmakers froze plans for new laws in several towns while the statewide review was done.


Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif., are the big names on a list of about 40 communities nationally that banned bags, sometimes triggering lawsuits that remain unresolved.
Ideas the state considered ranged from outright banning throwaway bags to improving consumer education about the importance of recycling.


Nearer the middle were ideas about setting refundable deposits on bags, making stores offer biodegradable bags and setting bag recycling goals that had to be met to avoid stronger action.
“They’re finding it’s not the easiest topic to come up with a perfect plan,” said Mark Daniels, a vice president at Hilex Poly, a plastic bag manufacturer with about 100 employees at a Westside Jacksonville plant.


There’s no way to know yet how much lawmakers will even feel like taking up the subject this year, said Samantha Hunter Padgett, deputy general counsel for the Florida Retail Federation.
The state released a draft report in October that discussed the potential for banning bags after first imposing a nickel-per-bag tax that would grow yearly, topping out at 25 cents.


Retailers said they felt blindsided when that surfaced, and people with no business interests to protect jumped into the discussion.


Pet owners who use shopping bags for scooping poop asked what they were supposed to do. Other people stash diapers, dirty clothes and other items in the bags, said plastic bag defenders who count that as a kind of informal recycling.


Pushing a cart full of plastic shopping bags away from the Winn-Dixie, Mike Greenlee of Jacksonville shared a lot of the conflicts lawmakers will have to manage if they take action.


The 56-year-old pharmacist is tired of finding bags in the street, in storm drains, even in his koi pond. He’d like more recycling and more consumer education, but doesn’t want to drive up supermarket costs. A tax on bags would be putting the government’s hand in people’s pockets, he said.


If it would help, he said, “I’d just as soon go back to paper.”

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-02-01/story/paper_plastic_or_punt_dep_gives_lawmakers_the_choice_on_banning_shopping

[hightowerlover]

well if the stupid kids would put more than 2 items in the bag in the first place this wouldn't be such an issue