Fight to ban the bag
As a member of CALPIRG fighting to ban single-use plastic bags here in Berkeley, it excites me immensely to see that the City Council is taking a stand against the state Department of Education’s decision to promote plastic bags in our environmental curriculum.
Few of us take the time to consider where these plastic bags end up after they leave our homes. We use plastic bags in a plethora of ways every day and never think twice about them.
According to Environment California, 100 million tons of plastic and other garbage are swirling together in our oceans. The result is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: a mass of trash in the North Pacific that is currently twice the size of Texas, consisting of the very plastic that we hold in our hands every day.
Our marine life is not the only victim of the plastic bag; we also suffer because of the toxins that plastic puts in our oceans. Humans constantly eat fish, and these fish swim around in those toxins. And that makes this a personal problem!
Now, CALPIRG chapters throughout the state are fighting to ban these bags in 10 cities. This semester in Berkeley, we’re going to do this by collecting 9,000 petitions.
Every Cal student can help by using reusable shopping bags and signing our Ban the Bag petition. By banning single-use plastic bags, we can save not only the marine life but ourselves as well.
— Candice Youngblood, CALPIRG Berkeley intern
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A Step in the Right Direction
I applaud the Berkeley City Council for taking a step in the right direction of environmentalism by urging the Department of Education and Gov. Jerry Brown to remove the pro-plastic bag additions for California’s education curriculum.
Educating students about the effects of their choices is extremely important, but will not be enough to save our environment. Now is the opportunity to take action by banning the use of plastic bags in the city.
California alone uses 12 billion plastic bags a year, and we recycle less than 5 percent of these. A lot will end up contributing to the Great Pacific Gyre, which kills over a million birds and marine animals a year.
Across the state, 14 other cities and counties have already taken action to ban the bag, helping to reduce use by 33 percent. Paper bags and reusable bags are an even better choice.
The California Supreme Court has already decided that an Environmental Impact Report is not needed to pass a plastic bag ban. It is time for the city of Berkeley to continue being a leader in helping the environment by banning the use of plastic bags.
— Caitlin Catalano, CALPIRG Berkeley chapter chair
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1) Plastic bags aren’t toxic in any way, shape, or form, whether in the ocean or out of the ocean. HDPE does not break down into any kind of toxic byproducts.
2) How exactly does a bag go from a grocery store to the ocean? Berkeley is pretty far from the coastline, and I’ve never seen a single plastic bag floating in the ocean on any beach I’ve been to. 3) The Pacific trash pile is not composed of plastic bags. World plastic bag production is 500 billion bags a year. A single bag weighs an average of 5 grams. 100 million tons of plastic would be equivalent to 20 trillion bags — 40 years’ worth of plastic bag production, if every single bag produced was dumped there. We are not just counting shopping bags — that would be every kind of plastic bag.
In response to number 3: Yes, because obviously plastic bags are just SO heavy that natural occurrences such as wind could not possibly migrate them into the ocean. Obviously the trash pile isn’t composed of plastic bags, that would be impossible; yet they’re still detrimental to the pile. You have to move forward in steps, leaps are impossible.
Do you believe in the Magic Sky Wizard and the Government’s secret alien conspiracy in Area 51 too?
Do you believe that ignorance is bliss?
“it excites me immensely”
A little perspective, please. How much of the Great Pacific Gyre was created by bags discarded in Berkeley?
California and Berkeley alone are definitely not responsible for all of the plastic bag pollution– but close to 85% of the plastic pollution in the gyre comes from land sources. So why wouldn’t we cut off the pollution from the source?
Estimates for worldwide use of plastic bag use vary from 500million to 1trillion. But countries like Australia, China, Bangladesh, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, Taiwan and Mumbai among many others have already banned the bag. Other major cities like Paris and London have either banned plastic bags, placed a fee or are considering taking action. California has come extremely close to passing a statewide bag ban recently, but efforts were crushed by special interest groups like the American Chemical Council who has spent close to $2million this year alone to fight policies like plastic bag bans. Berkeley was one of the first cities to ban styrofoam, another extremely problematic item that causes harm to the environment and never completely biodegrades. And now almost 30 years later styrofoam bans are commonly found across the nation. So we need to start somewhere! We must continue building upon the work that other cities and counties have done to reduce plastic pollution, creating a patchwork of bans across the state that will eventually lead us to having a statewide ban.
“styrofoam bans are commonly found across the nation”
Can you provide any statistics? Styrofoam isn’t banned even in Oakland. What are the stats “across the nation”?
“So we need to start somewhere!”
Only if the destination is attainable. Otherwise you’re just wasting time and effort that could do good elsewhere.
What a useless relativist argument – it’s like saying “everything gives you cancer, so expose yourself to as many cancer causing agents as possible!”
Obviously plastic bags are one symptom of an entire single use society, but you’ve got to start somewhere. A change in public consciousness about one very ubiquitous and well known unnecessary throw-away item is a good longterm strategy for reducing our pollution into the ocean.
“you’ve got to start somewhere”
And to be immensely excited you’ve got to have a prospect of achieving something significant. How often has Berkeley changed the direction of the country, not to mention the other couple of hundred countries? This is just a “feel good” measure intended to avoid facing the true magnitude of the building catastrophe. Depletion and destruction of natural resources is a consequence of overpopulation.
“California alone uses 12 billion plastic bags a year”
And how many bags are used and discarded elsewhere in the world?