Am I showing my age in saying that I can remember when checkout clerks asked whether I wanted paper or plastic?
As more and more eco-conscious chains and brands have moved away from disposable bags, major metropolitan areas have gone ahead and taxed or banned one-use bags outright. Trust California to be the trendsetter on this issue. Malibu has had a bag ban in effect for more than three years, and Santa Monica is now at a year and a half. Take a look at this data map by KPCC to see what municipalities in SoCal have already taken action before this week.
Now after several months of study and debate, the City of Los Angeles is now moving ahead with its own bag ban.
To back up, the move is not an altruistic endeavor to attack the Pacific Gyre or reduce the average joe’s oil footprint. This is about trash in our waterways and the laws behind them. Trash in streams and bays has numerous negative effects on the surrounding community – typically destruction of wildlife habitat, loss of tourism and recreation revenue, and increased health care costs to treat those who go in or around the water.
Southern California loves its beaches – and all three of those impairments described above come to a very real dollar value. In order to set up a pollution management strategy, the EPA requires impaired waters to develop a Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL, defining how much of a pollutant can safely go into a water body. The LA Region has even set a up a site where you can easily see what and where those TMDLs are – thanks Region 4!!
So how much trash is supposed to go into rivers and oceans? Well, zero, which is why you’ll see that each TMDL has a target of zero trash pieces for the water bodies. Is there a way to cost-effectively ensure that absolutely no trash enters the water (A discussion on TMDL efficacy for point-source and non-point source contributors to come later)? Probably not.
Which brings us to plastic bags. Time and again, studies (and engaged parties) observe that they are the trash item most often found in waterways. Similarly, they can easily be substituted for paper or reusable bags. Here, policy makers have identified a low-hanging fruit: eliminate or reduce plastic bags in the community and see trash counts drop dramatically.
To further incentivize such actions, the LA Regional Water Quality Control Board (who drafts and executes the TMDL programs) allowed bag-banning cities to get an extra three-years to figure out how to get to “zero trash”. I’m surprised so few other outlets have mentioned this. Don’t take my word for it, look at the adopted amendment for Santa Monica Bay:
If within three (3) years of Regional Board adoption date of this TMDL, a city or county voluntarily adopts local ordinances to ban plastic bags, smoking in public
places and single use expanded polystyrene food packaging, it shall receive a three-year extension of the final compliance date.
What does this mean for the actual health of the ecosystem? We’ll have to wait and see. Certainly less pieces of debris will likely be found in the local waterways, but will the beach cities observe any changes to water quality or wildlife populations? In full disclosure, I hope to look at this issue with some independent research.
Hopefully this served as an effective primer on plastic bag regulations and can serve you well as our more and more cities and advocates start to consider the same question.
The Water Main 