The abundant use of plastic bags across the nation has provoked the environmental consciences of many cities, including Berkeley, to consider enacting plastic bag bans.

Berkeley's preliminary proposal for a ban has been written, said the city's Zero Waste Commission chair Nashua Kalil, and may be brought to the City Council as early as January.

The proposal for the ban started with an outreach program that lasted six months, ending in January 2008. The program took into account merchant and resident concerns about ending the use of plastic bags and gathered input for the design of the proposal.

But many plastic bags will still be sent to landfills, as the ban will be adopted in phases, with big retail businesses being the first affected.

Though plastic bag recycling is an option, a 2004 city of Berkeley waste stream analysis stated that the market for plastic films-which make up plastic bags-is poorly developed and that source reduction is a more practical solution than recycling.

Additionally, the majority of recycling facilities, like Berkeley's, do not accept plastic bags. The only way to recycle them is at supermarkets that offer collection and recycling programs.

Sara Phillips, recycling assistant for Berkeley's Ecology Center, said she isn't optimistic that most of the bags collected in the city get reprocessed into new products.

"Because contaminations are such an issue with that type of plastic, even if they get sorted and baled they still can't be reprocessed," she said. "It's just not something that's happening in this country."

The difficulty in reprocessing plastic bags may still cause bags that get diverted to reprocessing plants to end up in landfills, Phillips said.

The Berkeley waste stream analysis stated that the city disposes between 120,000 to 140,000 tons of trash per year. In 2000, film plastics made up four percent of the waste disposed by Berkeley, with food waste making up the largest percentage at 13 percent.

Plastic is inherently non-biodegradable because it is composed of inorganic substances, but even biodegradable plastic bags do not degrade in landfills, Phillips said.

Most of Berkeley's trash is first sent to the city's Transfer Station on Second Street and then trucked to a landfill in eastern Alameda County.

"The trash that gets put in landfills just stays there forever," Phillips said. "If you put anything into a completely sealed environment, a closed system, it's just going to persist as is."

UC Berkeley professor of agriculture and resource economics Peter Berck said plastic bags are more dangerous when they are not in landfills because they end up in the ocean or loose on land, endangering wildlife.

Even when properly disposed, the kite-like property of plastic bags can result in windblown litter, stated Tom Padia, source reduction and recycling director at StopWaste.org, in a 2008 report.

"Anyone who has visited the landfills in eastern Alameda County can attest to the quantities of plastic bags blown from the active landfill into adjacent hillsides and litter screens," he said in the report.

Berkeley's proposed ban follows in the footsteps of San Francisco's 2007 ban, which has been successful for the large supermarkets and pharmacies to which it applied, said Deanna Simon, outreach specialist for San Francisco's Zero Waste program.

But San Francisco's ban was constrained by state legislation that does not allow cities to impose fees on plastic or paper bags, something that the city was considering.

Berkeley's own proposal takes into account the state's current refusal to allow cities to impose bag fees and at the same time addresses the issue of paper bags, which are also an environmental concern.

"Berkeley can't impose a fee on carry-out bags, but that doesn't mean merchants can't," Kalil said. "Plastic bags are gone, gone, gone, but with paper bags, merchants can impose a fee."

After the failure of Oakland's 2007 ban, which was dropped because of a lawsuit, Berkeley's commission has been careful to consider all the legal and political issues surrounding a ban, Kalil said.

If the City Council approves the proposal, the ban's actual start date will depend on how long it takes to complete a state-required environmental review.

"The bottom line is that there is an environmental cost to these so-called free plastic bags," Kalil said. "Everyone, including future generations, will pay that cost if we don't implement alternative solutions."

Tags: PLASTIC BAGS, ENVIRONMENT