This will be worth watching.
The City of Austin might enact one of the broadest bag bans in the nation and prohibit disposable paper and plastic bags at all checkout counters starting in January 2016.
In the meantime, starting in 2013, retailers could continue to offer thin, so-called single-use bags, but customers would have to pay 25 cents apiece for them, according to a draft of the ban. That three-year period would give the public and retailers time to prepare for the ban, city officials say.
More than two dozen U.S. cities have enacted bag bans since 2007 . Most prohibit plastic only, or ban plastic and impose a fee on paper. Austin would be one of only a few U.S. cities to ban both, said Bob Gedert, director of Austin Resource Recovery, the city department that wrote the draft ban and handles trash collection and recycling.
Under the ban, retailers would be able to offer only reusable bags, defined as those that have handles and are made of fabric or durable materials or are thick paper or plastic bags with some recycled content.
Exempt from the ban would be restaurant carryout bags, bags for wine and beer, dry cleaning bags, newspaper delivery bags and bags that hold meat, fish, produce, bulk foods or pharmaceuticals.
The city commission that reviews trash and recycling matters will discuss the draft ban Wednesday . The City Council will consider and might vote on it next month .
See here for some background. We tend to use paper bags from the grocery store to hold our paper recyclables between pickups. I’d have a little heartburn over that if those bags became less available, but I’m sure we’d find a way to deal with it. The issue of how to deal with plastic bags came up before the Lege this year but no bills were passed. I feel confident it will come up again, especially if Austin pushes the envelope like this. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.
Here in Portland, OR, we’ve had a bag ban in place for several months now. The State of Oregon contemplated a ban, but caved to lobbying pressure, so Portland stepped up and did it anyway. After predictions by the plastic bag industry of chaos, riots in the streets, and random human sacrifices, the absence of plastic bags seems to have devolved into a total nonevent. Guess what? People really can change their habits while incurring a minimum of inconvenience. And the bag industry hasn’t yet gone into the toilet. Go figure.
Paper bags still don’t solve the problem of single-use waste, but at least they’re recyclable.
In my mind I live vicariously through Austin and Portland and appreciate their common-sense while my body lives in Houston unfortunately. The land of non-progressives.
Brad, If you love Austin and Portland so much, move. I would hate to live in a place where my every move is subject to scrutiny, or control, by the “progressive” thought police, who revel in making people toe the line of politically correct thought. Ban all single use bags? That’s just stupid. We recycle ours, the paper ones for paper recycling, the plastic bags for removing dog waste to a proper receptacle.
Keep Houston Houston!
Keep Houston, Houston….let’s bring back slavery while we’re at it,lol
Ross,
We are not talking ‘progressive thought police”. We are talking common sense.
I guess the inconvenient political correctness of child labor laws, womens sufferage and civil rights is stupid too even though you may personally might not have your own child working in a sweat shop or you treat people of another color with equality.
What do bag bans have to do with civil rights? Nothing. Occasionally, Progressive though coincides with doing the right thing (child labor, women’s suffrage, and civil rights being some of them). Generally though, progressive thought requires ever more government control over every last aspect of our lives. Progressive thought seems to favor controlling objects rather than punishing misuse. I refer to that as the “If we ban this or that, life will be great”. It’s used against guns, bags, light bulbs, and myriad other objects that, on their own or when used properly, do no harm.
Banning bags makes absolutely no sense, and works a hardship on those who can’t afford to buy the special organic, free trade, no hydrocarbon, cloth bags progressives seem to think we should all use. We have cloth bags, but forget to take them to the grocery store most of the time because they are being used for something else at the house. On many occasions when we take the cloth bags, we buy more groceries than we have bags. Quit trying to control how others run their lives. If you are worried about the bags, punish those who misuse them.