Seattle bag fee

Mexico City has joined the anti-plastic bag crusade. It became illegal last week for supermarkets and other businesses to hand out nonbiodegradable plastic bags to consumers, reports LA Times blogger Deborah Bonello from Mexico City. With the ban, Mexico City becomes the second bigggest city in the Western Hemisphere to enact such a ban, following San Francisco, which enacted the ban way back in 2007. Seattle voters rejected a fee-for-plastic (and paper) earlier this month after Big Chemical spent $1 million lobbying against the measure. San Jose city council members currently are considering such a measure, as reported earlier this week on InvestigateWest.

Bonello reports having her grocerices packed into plastic bags "emblazoned with a logo promising they were biodegradable."

She also notes:

The move by the Mexico City government follows a number of other recent environmentally friendly initiatives, including the introduction along some routes of new buses that emit less pollution, and a planned bike-lending scheme expected to launch in December.

Officials hope to increase bicycle use, but riding on the streets of the city right now is a health risk due to a lack of bicycle lanes and reckless drivers.

-- Rita Hibbard

There will be no 20-cent bag fee for Seattle residents, the Seattle Times reported today. While the city had passed an ordinance last year to start charging for every paper or plastic bag residents received from grocers, convenience stores and markets, that was halted after opponents quickly funded an initiative to put the decision back in the public’s hands.

With over half the ballots counted, voters in Tuesday’s primary rejected the fee 58 percent to 42 percent. Referendum 1 would have made the city the first in the nation to target both plastic and paper bags. According to the Seattle Public Utilities, about two-thirds of the 360 million paper and plastic bags Seattleites use each year end up in the garbage.

Plastic bag makers outspent bag fee supporters’ lobbying efforts by 15-to-1.

Across the country, bag taxes have encountered mixed reactions. While a 5-cent bag fee was passed in Washington D.C., New York dropped its proposed charge and Philadelphia outright rejected a plastic bag ban. In California, bag manufacturers successfully sued Oakland and Manhattan Beach after the municipalities proposed citywide bans on plastic bags.

In an Associated Press article last week, David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay in Oakland, likened bag manufacturers' efforts to the tobacco industry’s campaigns to fight smoking bans:

We've seen lobbying and blatant attempts to intimidate cities... They're trying to force an expense on a city and hope that cities would drop their bag ban efforts…

Some feel that if the reputably eco-concious Seattle rejected the bag fee, similar proposals will be doomed elsewhere.