How to keep up with bag laws

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Susan Freinkel

When I was working on my book, trying to track the political debate over plastic bags was a major pain. Every time I saw a news story about some town considering a ban, I would log it into a chart I had made; it was hardly a precise or exacting method. Now I have the luxury of simply checking the wonderful website www.plasticbaglaws.org, a compendium of information related to the ongoing battle over bags. I only wish it had existed two years ago.

The site is the brainchild of  Jennie Romer, a San Francisco Bay area lawyer.  While in law school, she said, she decided to write an article about San Francisco’s landmark decision in 2007 to ban plastic bags. That got her interested in the growing debate over bags, but when she decided to write another article, she discovered that there was little available information about what was happening in other communities, the strategies bag activists were pursuing, or the kinds of tactics the industry was using. Unlike many issues, the push to ban plastic bags has been an entirely local phenomenon, undirected by any kind of national campaign. The upside is the movement is genuinely grassroots; the downside, as Romer discovered, is there’s been no central repository of information for localities to draw on. “I started the website as a research tool for myself,” she told me. “And it just kind of turned into a bigger thing.”

Now she’s tracking legislation in all 50 states as well as litigation in California, where most of the court battles have taken place. She has also compiled studies of plastic bag laws and regulations, life cycle analyses, scientific reports on their  environmental impacts and other related information, as well as a host of useful plastic-related links, including one to another bag-tracking site, Plasticbagbanreport. Personally, Romer favors efforts to restrict plastic bags, but she includes reports from both defenders and assailants of single-use plastic bags.

We are in the midst, she says, of a wave of “second generation” bag laws. San Francisco launched the first generation with its flat-out ban on plastic bags, the law that became the model for communities around the country. But now communities are recognizing the shortcomings of that approach: targeting plastic  bags alone leaves people free to keep using paper bags — which also have environmental costs, ie. more water and energy to produce – -and does little to break the general single-use habit. This newer generation of bag laws takes aim at both plastic and paper, typically by banning the former and putting a fee on the latter. This week San Francisco joined the wave, by expanding its original bag ban, making it a requirement for all retailers in the city (not just big grocery stores) and adding a ten-cent fee for paper bags. To see what other towns are doing, check out Romer’s site.

Posted in Plastics Policy | 1 Comment

The Coming Polyethylene Flood

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

Everyday I receive a news alert from the American Chemistry Council and each day it seems the alert contains at least one or more entries about fracking — the controversial practice of extracting natural gas (or oil) from shale. Even as recently as a few months ago, fracking was scarcely mentioned. Now, the ACC dispatches are brimming with excitement over the prospect of vast new supplies of low-cost natural gas, such as this article in Bloomberg News which was headlined, “Cheap Shale Gas Means Record U.S. Chemical Growth.”

What a difference a few hydraulic drills can make. When I was interviewing people in the plastics industry two to three years ago, there was a pervasive sense of impending doom. Oil and natural gas prices were high, pushing the petrochemical companies that make raw plastics to relocate closer to regions rich in the fossil fuels that supply the industry’s raw materials. Experts believed that the plastic industry’s center of gravity was shifting from its historic roots in North America and Europe to the Middle East and Asia.  Now there’s this sense of jubilation — American plastics is roaring back to life! — fueled by faith in fracking.  And indeed, thanks to new — and environmentally dangerous — drilling methods, expanding shale operations from Texas to Pennsylvania have dramatically dropped the price of natural gas, which provides the feedstock for about 70 percent of the plastics produced in this country, most notably polyethylene. (Elsewhere in the world, oil is the main starting ingredient for plastic.)  The Energy Information Administration predicts shale gas could account for as much as 47 percent of American gas production by 2035, up from 16 percent in 2009.

Several of the major petrochemical companies have announced plans to build new crackers — the gigantic $1.5  billion furnaces that break up hydrocarbons into the gases such as ethylene or benzene that are used to make plastics and commodity chemicals. No new crackers have been built in the U.S. since 2001. But in recent months, Dow, Chevron Phillips, Occidential and Formosa Plastics have all announced plans to build crackers in the Gulf Coast. Shell Oil says it will construct a cracker to produce ethylene in Appalachia, site of the massive Marcellus Shale formation; it’s the first to be built in the region in over 50 years.  Eastman is reopening one of its crackers, while LyondellBasell plans to invest in another.

No one, however,  is on a bigger building binge than Dow, the world’s largest producer of polyethylene. Just a few years ago Dow was closing down and/or shrinking its U.S. plastics facilities and trying to move operations to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.  Now Dow plans to spend about $4 billion to build a new cracker near the Gulf Coast, reopen another in Louisiana and construct two plants devoted to propylene, the base ingredient for polypropylene. “The U.S. now has investment-grade economics, and because of shale we are going to lock those economics in,” Dow CEO Andrew Liveris told Bloomberg News.

All this investment in ethylene crackers means stepped up production of polyethylene, as well as other commodity plastics. It will be interesting to see what happens then. One of the main uses of polyethylene is in packaging — the very sector of the plastic economy under sharpest political attack at present.  Will the industry push back harder against efforts to reduce excess packaging and measures to ban polyethylene bags? Will there be even less incentive for the industry to get behind recycling measures — since the price of virgin polyethylene is bound to drop? Will the flood of shale-gas reduce incentives to develop renewable feedstocks for plastics? Will we see new polyethylene applications, or an increased drive to export to new markets overseas?

My concern is that many of our plastic problems trace back to the fact that it is all too easy to waste — too much is used for single-use packaging and  throwaway products; there are too few economic incentives to recycle or reuse, much less reduce our reliance on new plastic stuff. We’re currently consuming 300 pounds of plastic a year — ten times the amount used in 1960. My fear is vast supplies of cheap new plastic ensure that number will only go up. It will be that much harder to drive home the message that the low price of plastic (or by extension, natural gas) doesn’t reflect its true cost, and that while we may seem to have endless supplies of this fantastically cheap material, it is still worth way too much to waste.

Posted in Business of Plastics | 1 Comment

Will Bag Bans Take Off in California?

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

If I were a betting person, I’d wager we’ll see a wave of plastic bag prohibitions coming out of California communities over the next year. And I’m guessing that unlike the first round of bag measures that were inspired by San Francisco’s landmark bag ban, these will be better crafted and restrict not only plastic bags, but paper ones as well. I’m envisioning — okay, maybe just hoping — that cities will finally focus on the root problem represented at check-out stands: our reliance on single-use bags and that they will enact laws that really encourage people to switch to reusables.

Anti-plastic bag activists have already been moving in that direction. For instance, the state-wide bag bill proposed in 2010, (and backed by an amazingly broad coalition including environmentalists, grocers, unions and even free-marketeers like former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger), took aim at both plastic and paper bags, with a ban on the former and a fee for the latter. Oregon followed the same tack with its bag bill earlier this year.  Big chain grocers like Safeway would prefer to see statewide measures rather than a patchwork of local ordinances.  But the resounding defeat of each of those bills suggested that for now, at least, any action on bags is going to have come out of local arenas.

And now California communities have gotten another nudge: the state Supreme Court’s decision upholding a bag ban passed by the small southern California town of Manhattan Beach. That 2008 measure barred retailers from giving out plastic bags; city officials said they were motivated by concerns about litter and plastic bags’ effect on the beach and ocean wildlife. They said they would later come back and pass a measure aimed at limiting paper bags. But no sooner had the ink dried on the new law then a group of bag makers, represented by San Francisco attorney Steve Joseph, sued.   Joseph argued — and two lower courts agreed — that the city should have done an environmental impact review (EIR) before passing the ban because it would lead to greater use of paper bags, which also have environmental impacts. Similar suits had already successfully blocked bag bans enacted in Oakland and the small Marin community of Fairfax.  And Joseph’s threat to sue any other city that tried to restrict plastic bags led many towns and local activists to shelve plans for bag bans.  Few were willing to brave a lawsuit or front the $50,000 to $235,000 it takes to conduct an environmental impact study.

But now the Supreme Court has said that a bag ban may not require an environmental review.  In its unanimous ruling Thursday, the court said that “substantial evidence and common sense” supported the city’s position that banning plastic bags in favor of paper bags would not harm the environment.

The ruling makes it easier for many communities to enact some kind of bag restriction. The advocacy group Environment California told the Los Angles Times that there are at least 20 towns with bag laws in the works. Nine communities have already approved plastic bag bans, including San Francisco, Long Beach, Malibu, Santa Monica, Marin County, San Jose and Calabasas, Manhattan Beach and Los Angeles County.

James Moose, attorney for Californians Against Waste, predicted the ruling will change the kind of fight the bag industry has been mounting in local town halls. He told the Times the industry will no longer be able to simply cite generic studies that show the environmental perils of paper bags but have little to do with the community imposing the prohibition on plastic.

The court ruling doesn’t let all towns off the hook, especially bigger cities contemplating  bans on plastic bags. The court said the legal “analysis would be different for a ban on plastic bags by a larger  governmental body, which might precipitate a significant increase in paper bag consumption.” This suggests the most lawsuit-proof policies are ones that aim to restrict consumption of both plastic and paper bags.

It also means some larger communities may be required to do environmental reviews, attorney Moose told the Times. But “each case turns on its own facts,” he said. “This decision makes it more difficult for people in the industry to thwart environmentally benign regulations adopted by communities in California.”

Joseph is not giving up the fight, however. And a story in Plastics News suggests the legal strategy he plans to use in continuing to press his fight on behalf of the Save the Plastic Bag Coaltion.

Joseph argues the decision is specifc only to Manhattan Beach and leaves room to take small, as well as larger cities to court over bag ban proposals.  “The court cleared the path to require cities other than Manhattan Beach to do EIRs – under two circumstances,” he told Plastics News. Certainly larger cities have to do EIRs, and he maintains even smaller smaller cities may have to do EIRs because of the build-up of critical mass of smaller and larger cities with plastic bag bans since 2008. He plans to press ahead with suits now pending against Marin County and Long Beach. “This decision is good for the plastics industry and it’s good for the environment. We are delighted and will continue to demand EIRs,” Joseph said.

 

Posted in Business of Plastics, Plastic Pollution, Plastics Policy, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Plastic Groups Team Up

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

Plastic has long been a balkanized industry, fraught with internecine rivalries. For years, there was bad blood between the industry’s two biggest trade groups, the Society for  the Plastics Industry (SPI) and the American Chemistry Council (ACC). But there’s nothing like shared adversity to bring old rivals together.  In the face of growing public agitation about various plastic-related issues, the SPI, the ACC and the Canadian Plastics Industry Association are now forming a united front. Their new group, the North American Plastics Alliance will  “help the industry speak with a single voice in North America,” according to a report in Plastics News. (For now, that voice doesn’t include the Mexican industry, but ACC vice president for plastics, Steve Russell, said that eventually the Alliance will bring in other associations, including representatives from Mexico.)

As PN reporter Mike Verespej notes, the alliance comes at time when the industry is facing challenges on many fronts. Anti-bag measures continue to be introduced: some 22 US communities have banned them and two — Washington, D.C. and Montgomery County, MD — have passed five-cent fees on plastic and paper bags. In California alone, more than three dozen communities have banned polystyrene take-out containers. Nine states have banned bisphenol A from baby bottles, as have Canada, Europe and Beijing; Canada also has declared the chemical a toxic substance.

Misery loves company. According to Verespej. the new Alliance will focus on managing its misery in four main areas:

1. Advocacy: which presumably means presenting a unified voice and single message on issues such as bag bans or anti-BPA measures. This could increase the industry’s political clout and presumably allow development of a bigger warchest than any of the individual groups can muster individually.

2. Energy recovery: Given the low recycling rates of plastics and the challenges of recycling many varieties of plastic, increasingly the industry is pushing for waste-to-energy technology as a way to deal with plastic trash. It’s interesting to see that this is high on the new alliance’s agenda.

3. Pellet containment: Encouraging companies to take measures to prevent pre-production pellets from escaping into the environment. The U.S., and more recently Canada, already have a pellet containment program, Operation Clean Sweep, which has been effective where and when it’s implemented. Unfortunately, it remains voluntary.

4. “Initiatives aimed at getting key stakeholders to look more favorably on plastics,” in Verespej’s words, which I assume refers to PR campaigns like the ACC’s recent sponsorship of art exhibits and fashion shows with the message that “plastic is the new black.”

What’s not on the list: Increased support or investment in recycling infrastructures; Support of research into the health and environmental safety of chemicals used in plastics or as additives; Promotion of development of biodegradable plastics; Support of litter abatement initiatives; Research into marine debris.

In short, aside from the pellet containment program — which remains purely voluntary — the new alliance doesn’t seem any more interested in taking real responsibility for the impact of plastics on health and the environment than its individual member groups. And now legislators, policy-makers, activists and others grappling with problems posed by plastics will have to contend with an even stronger opposition.

 

 

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Building Bridges from Bottles

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

Tom Nosker, a polymer engineer at Rutgers University, has invented a method for turning used plastics into an incredibly strong, durable building material. In Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, I describe how a New Jersey company is using Nosker’s technology to transform used milk jugs and car bumpers into bridges strong enough to hold locomotives or Abrams M-1 tanks weighing thousands of pounds. Nosker’s interest in recycling plastics goes back to the field’s birth in the early 1980s, when faced with growing concern over plastic pollution, the plastics industry set up a center for recycling research at Rutgers. At the time the only business recycling plastic was Wellman Industries, a textiles company that had figured out how to turn PET beverage bottles into polyester fiber. But as Nosker says, “they weren’t telling anyone how they were doing it.” With backing from the industry, Nosker developed a bottle recycling plant and helped set up the country’s first curbside collection program for PET bottles in Highland Park, New Jersey. He’s been looking at ways to give old plastics useful new lives ever since. I talked recently with Nosker about how he came to develop the technology, as well as a new approach to fireproofing plastics:

SF: Why did you get interested in recycling as opposed to working with new plastics?

TN: I saw that people were attacking thermoplastic materials used in packaging. I thought it was ridiculous that people were going to ban the materials when you could melt them and do other things with them. I knew it was an easy thing to tackle – easy in a relative sense. That’s what I decided to spend my life doing.

SF: So you’re making these very strong materials out of plastics like the high- density polyethylene used in milk jugs?

TN: High-density polyethylene (HDPE) is one of the most durable materials in the world made out of a hydrocarbon. Like all thermoplastics, it’s prone to a problem called creep. Which means if you put some stress on it, if it’s a high enough stress, the plastic will change shape as a strict function of time. So you build a picnic table or park bench or bridge or something from it, it will get saggy with time.

SF: Is this the same quality you get with a plastic bag, when you load it up and the handles stretch?

TN: Yeah it’s like that. I had to solve the problem of creep. We had to develop a method to gauge creep, to see if over a few months you can predict how it will behave over 25 years. Then you get to the point of the game, which is to modify the plastic somehow and make it so it’s creep-resistant. HDPE normally creeps at pressures of less than 100 pounds per square inch, which is pretty low — prohibitively low. You could never build a bridge or picnic table or park bench without using some other kind of material in it to take care of that creep issue. So we made composites, different kinds of composites with blends of plastics and fibers.

SF: The bridges you were making were made of milk jugs and car bumpers — and bumpers are made of polypropylene, right?

TN: Fiberglass-filled polypropylene.  That’s where the fiber comes in. We chop those bumpers up and we blend that with bottle-grade high-density polyethylene.

SF: And that’s how you get the strength to have it be a bridge?

TN: Yeah. With that composite material I can go to a stress of at least six times or more of what I can do with regular HDPE. I can leave a tank on the bridge for 15 years and drive the tank off and it will go back to its original shape.

SF: Can you do this sort of thing with other of the main packaging plastics, like low- density polyethylene (a film plastic used in baggies) or just plain polypropylene (used in yogurt or margarine tubs)?

TN: I look at each material and think what can I make out of that which would be useful. I would never try to turn low-density polyethylene into a bridge. It’s less stiff than HDPE. It actually belongs in asphalt in my opinion, as an addition to asphalt binder. In fact, there are people that make expensive version of asphalt with virgin low- density polyethylene. Doesn’t that seem like just like falling off a log?

SF: What about polypropylene? What could you make with polypropylene?

TN: Polypropylene can be used to make railroad ties. Railroad ties are big deal in this country.  I actually started working on those in 1994. Now there’s 1.25 million recycled plastic railroad ties. And I’ve got a $15 million purchase order from a class one railway somewhere in the United States. We’re working on a much bigger contract with another company that’s maybe 20 times as big. I’m really pleased the technology is taking off.

SF: Could you make a car out of recycled plastic?

TN: Sure, if you can build a bridge, you can build a frame of a car. In some ways I went for making the things thing that were the hardest things to do. That was to make a point — that if you can do what I did, there are a lot of easier things that are like falling off a log.  There are a lot of different uses of these different materials and we’re at the beginning of people using them intelligently.  There’s a lot of stuff in our waste bin that people in the future will look at as raw material.

SF: What about trying to recycle plastics back into the same products they were before – you know, closing the loop?

TN: People say crazy things like ‘if we don’t close the loop, it’s not recycling.’ That’s baloney.  I don’t think its necessary to close the loop. And that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.  I’ve been looking for things that don’t necessarily close the loop but are ways I can create something of really good value so you’re not just landfilling this stuff. (In fact, in the long term, I don’t care if it gets landfilled because one day when plastic recycling is well established, I believe the value of the plastic will be more recognized and people will actually mine landfills for some of the things that are valuable in there. So if it gets stored in landfill for a generation or two, that’s okay. )

You need to think what is the smartest thing to do with this material. And at the end, after you’ve recycled something as many times as you can, if you can close the loop, that’s great. But if you can’t or it doesn’t make sense, or something else makes more sense economically, then just do that. And eventually when you’re done and there’s nothing else to do with the plastic, you can always convert it back to oil or natural gas.

SF: You said you are also doing work on non-toxic flame-retardants?

TN: I have had to develop flame-retardants because people are really nervous about the fact that plastic things burn.

SF: And these are non-brominated fire-retardants?

TN: Absolutely non-brominated. Bromine is a halogen; I don’t use any halogens in my stuff. I use radiation. I have a material in the plastic or the coating of the plastic. When it gets warm it radiates ultraviolent light and that actively removes heat from the flame area so it drops the temperature down. So the plastic may burn, but it’s going to take forever for the plastic to burn up

SF: Could this be used in furniture in place of halogenated fire retardants (which are suspected hormone disrupters)?

TN: Yeah, it could be used for a lot of things.

SF: How come it’s not being used?

TN: I just developed it –this is new stuff! How come there aren’t more plastic bridges out there?

SF: Why not?

TN: Why not? We’re working on it.

Posted in Business of Plastics, Recycling | Leave a comment

A New Bag Battle

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

 

In the old days — say, four years ago — bag battles  were centered on the plastic or paper question. Which was always something of a red herring since the issue at stake is really our dependence on single-use products made of any materials, our habit of using finite natural resources for trivial uses, like carting groceries from the the store to the front door. But over the past year or two, bag activists have been increasingly successful at reframing the issue as disposability versus resusability. And not surprisingly, the industry has stepped up its efforts to discredit resusable bags. Now that effort is taking a new and nasty twist.

Three of the country’s biggest bag makers have sued Chico Bag, a small California firm that makes reusable bags, accusing the company of causing them “irreparable injury,” according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. The suit reportedly accuses Chico of using false or misleading information on its website and in its marketing materials in a deliberate effort to “misappropriate customers and potential customers.”

Chico Bag founder Andy Keller has acknowledged posting some inaccurate information, including statistics from an out-dated EPA website, but also has said he took them down once informed the facts were wrong. He told the Chronicle he considered the suit an attempt to squelch his company — and silence the bag-ban activism he has supported since founding Chico Bag six years ago. For instance, Keller created a costume, the “Bag Monster,”  a shaggy suit made of 500 plastic bags, which he says is the number of bags the average American shopper uses in a year. Though Keller trademarked the costume, he has lent it out freely in support of bag ban activities.

Keller sees the suit against his company as a strike against bag activism in general. “The plastic bag is under attack all around the world,” Keller told the Chronicle. “I think the plastics industry doesn’t know what to do, and they’re scared, in my opinion.”

The bag companies told the newspaper the suit isn’t about politics, but about truth in advertising . “It’s not fair for any company to go around and publish any false or misleading marketing materials,” said Philip Rozenski, the director of marketing and sustainability for Hilex Poly Co., one of the plaintiffs, along with  Superbag Operating Co. and Advance Polybag. (Hilex, incidentally, has been leading the charge to quash an Oregon proposal to ban plastic bags and put a fee on paper ones.)

The companies reportedly want to block Chico Bags from publicly blaming disposable bags for environmental problems or claiming its reusable bags are environmentally superior. It’s true that all bags carry environmental impacts and that the significance of those impacts vary depending on what you’re measuring and your end goals (eg paper bags require more energy and water to produce and are responsible for more greenhosue gas emissions than plastic ones.) But given the wealth of facts pointing to the environmental impacts of plastic bags (marine debris, clogged storm drains, litter, tangled recycling equipment), it’s hard to see how that injunctive request can stick.

According to the Chronicle, the bagmakers want Chico Bags “to hand over any profit resulting from the allegedly false statements, and to pay for any damages suffered” by the companies. They are seeking punitive damages, as well. The suit doesn’t specify how much money the bag makers claim they have lost.  But fighting the suit, much less losing it, could be a heavy financial hit for a company that made only $5.5 million in revenues last year. By contrast, one bag maker told me, the American plastic bag industry generates about $1.2 billion a year.

 

Posted in Packaging, Plastics Policy, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Blight to Beauty

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

Plastic shopping bags may be a blight on the landscape, but Jessica Lee, a student at Parsons The New School of Design, has found that these puffs of polyethylene also contain a certain hidden grace. For her thesis project, Lee wanted to explore ways to upcycle used bags. Her experiments transformed utilitarian products designed for the briefest uses into objects of surprising delicacy and beauty that you might be happy to have around for a good long while. Lee hopes that “by showing people the latent beauty these materials contain it is possible to change people’s point of view toward them.” Here are some examples of her work:

 

 

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To Burn or Not to Burn

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

The U.S. has a dismal record recycling used plastics: scarcely seven percent get a shot at a second life. But the plastics industry is starting to rally behind a new option for dealing with plastic waste: burning it for energy.

Dow Chemical – the country’s largest producer of polyethylene – recently announced a successful test project in which it burned 578 pounds of the filmy plastic scrap to generate energy. Dow was able to extract nearly all the energy embedded in the material, showing that used plastic can be used to create heat or electricity, said Jeff Wooster, plastics sustainability leader for Dow’s North American Plastics business. It also demonstrated a feasible way of dealing with hard-to-recycle plastics, like the lightweight films used in packaging, said Wooster. “We were looking for a way to make use of the material so it doesn’t just end up in landfill.”

It’s not surprising that plastics can be a source of heat or electricity; they are, after all, originally derived from natural gas or oil. Many types of plastic burn hotter than wood or coal, making them fantastic fodder for energy.

Still incinerating plastics has long been controversial. Proponents of waste to energy technology say today’s plants are cleaner and safer than incinerators of the past.   Arrays of scrubbers and filters capture dangerous chemicals – hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans and heavy metals – as well as small particulates. The plants are said to produce less dioxin than is released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues.

But even those small amounts of dioxin worry environmentalists, who point out that the plants also produce a lot of residual ash.  Critics also argue that waste-to-energy facilities are so expensive to build that they end up undercutting traditional recycling programs.  The need to keep the plants going acts as an incentive to keep producing, rather than reducing waste, said Brenda Platt, of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Washington, D.C.  “You have to keep feeding the beast.” She called the plants “wasted energy.”

In places short on landfill space, like Europe or Japan, such environmental concerns have carried little weight. Waste-to-energy plants are a mainstay of garbage disposal in Europe, as well as an important source of heat or electricity. About 400 plants are scattered across the continent, and altogether they take care of about 30 percent of the plastics Europe diverts from landfill. Even famously green countries have embraced the strategy. The Netherlands, for instance, landfills only 3 percent of its trash, and burns 35 percent for energy.

In the U.S. – where there’s room to continue the debate, so to speak — there are only 87 waste-to -energy facilities, most on the congested East Coast, and no new ones have been built since the mid-1990s.

But Dow and other makers of raw plastics are hoping to bring an end to that informal moratorium, putting forth waste-to-energy as a solution to the eco-angst that has fueled calls for bans on plastic bags, take-out containers and other packaging. The American Chemistry Council has recently been touting the technology as both a renewable energy source and a form of recycling. (The European Union also counts it as recycling, which is one reason that countries like the Netherlands boast 90-percent-plus recycling rates.) To bolster its case, the ACC just released studies reporting that waste-to-energy plants in four communities were using significant amounts of unrecycled plastics, and that the programs complemented existing recycling efforts. Recapturing waste plastic would help to create a “reliable source of alternative energy from an abundant, no-cost feedstock” while diverting potentially valuable material from landfills, the ACC concluded.

Whether such arguments gain more traction in today’s political landscape remains to be seen. But stay tuned for a lively debate.

 

Posted in Business of Plastics, Recycling, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Plastic Portraits

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

Tess Felix, a Bay Area artist, wrote me recently about work she has been doing with plastic beach debris.  Felix said she first got the idea after a huge storm in February, 2010:

[It] washed tons of plastic garbage out of the Sacramento Delta and flooded the shores of Stinson Beach completely with colorful fragments of plastic. Shocking was the sight. The beach looked like a mosaic. I picked up some garbage that day, went home and made a portrait out of the plastic. I returned the portrait to a little shack on the beach as a gift back to the sea. Someone found it and took it home, so I made another one. This is how the  plastic debris portraits came to be.

Fortunately, while the garbaged beach reminded me that we consumers are destroying our environment, I also saw shapes, color, and a potential to create something positive. I wanted to give order and meaning to it.”

“The new medium was exciting to work with. It reflects my passion as a painter. I continue to roam the beach picking up bits and pieces of plastic to clean, sort  by color and turn into portraits.”

Here are a few examples of her work and I’ll be posting more in the “Plastic Art” section of the website.




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Dispatches from battles of the bag (updated)

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Susan Freinkel

I’ve been meaning for some time now to do an update on the ongoing fight over plastic bags.  It is, forgive the pun, a mixed bag.

On the plus side: the suburban D.C. area of Montgomery County, Maryland, passed a five cent fee on all single-use grocery bags — paper and plastic. To my mind, this is the ideal approach to the problem of single-use bags; unlike a flat-out ban, it can be powerful way to raise people’s consciousness about the true costs of these throwaway freebies. And fees are effective in reducing single-bag use. The nickel fee on plastic bags in D.C. has reduced use of the bags by 80 percent since it went into effect last year, while also raising $2.75 million in funds dedicated to cleaning up the Anacosta River. That’s now 20 U.S. communities with bag measures in place.

Update: The Long Beach, CA City Council has unanimously passed a ban on plastic bags and a ten-cent fee for paper bags. The law will go  into effect August 1, a month after a similar law goes into effect in the unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County. The move is an example of how local communities are taking action on bags, having lost the fight for a statewide ban on bags last year in the wake of an intensive ad campaign and lobbying by bag-makers and the American Chemistry Council.

On the could-be-plus side: The California Supreme Court this week heard arguments in a lawsuit that may dramatically affect local communities’ ability to ban or restrict plastic and/or paper single-use bags. At issue is the question of whether communities have to conduct expensive environmental impact reports before enacting bag laws.

A group of bag manufacturers, the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, contend state law requires the environmental reviews. Citing the law, the group has used lawsuits and the threat of lawsuit to block communities from passing various bag measures, arguing that  bans lead to greater use of paper bags, with attendant environmental impacts.  The case before the Supreme Court focuses on whether the small Los Angeles suburb, Manhattan Beach, should have done an environmental review before banning plastic bags in 2009.  Two lower courts sided with the bag makers (though one dissenting appeals court judge argued that making a town of 33,000 conduct a review, stretched state environmental law  “to an absurdity.”)

Yet, accounts of the hour-long Supreme Court hearing suggest the whole case may be resolved on the basis of a technicality — that the bag-makers don’t have standing to sue. The Court is expected to pass down its decision sometime this summer.

On the down side: it looks like Oregon’s bid to be the first state to ban plastic bags has stalled out. The proposed ban on plastic and fee on paper bags is apparently one vote short of getting out of committee purgatory. And that needed vote is apparently nowhere in sight, according to a recent report in the Eugene Register-Guard. Watching the fight unfold in Oregon, has been like watching a replay of last year’s battle over a similar California proposal. (Figures for the amount of money plastics lobbyists have spent fighting the ban are not yet available from the state’s ethics commission.) In California, the fight to defeat the proposed ban was led by the American Chemistry Council (ACC).  In Oregon, Hilex Poly, one of the largest bag makers in the U.S., is leading the charge, but it’s following the same playbook the ACC employed so successfully in California and which I described in Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.

What are the key elements of that strategy?

1. Trivialize the issue. On its website, Bag the Ban Oregon, Hilex argues that  “Salem legislators have more important things to do than ban plastic shopping bags and raise taxes on Oregon shoppers.” In these hard economic times, with the state facing a deficit,  that’s an argument that plays well to legislators.

2. Frame the fee as a regressive tax. No one is required to buy a single-use bag, yet calling it a “tax” makes it sound like a mandatory charge– which never goes over well with voters or lawmakers.

3. Narrow the options. First, the plastics industry worked to keep the debate focused on the relative merits of plastic versus paper single-use bags  — a falsely limited set of choices, but one which favors plastic bags, since they have many eco-pluses over paper bags. But the tactic doesn’t work with measures, like Oregon’s, which cover both paper and plastic bags. So now, the industry is trying to discredit reusable bags. The Bag the Ban Oregon website carries this alarming headline:  “What’s in your reusable bag? Lead, cadmium, salmonella, E. coli. And that’s not all.” It’s true that some reusable bags from China have been found to contain heavy metals and lead, and that unwashed bags can harbor food-borne bacteria. But it’s not as if the only choice is either toxic, contaminated reusable bags or clean, sanitary disposable bags. There are plenty of  reusable bags that don’t contain lead or cadmium, and regular washing with soap and water will banish bacteria.

4. Push recycling, which one ACC strategist described to me as the ultimate “guilt eraser.” “As soon as [people] recycle your product, they feel better about it,” he explained. Recycling seemed especially attractive to Oregon legislators who acknowledged the problem of plastic pollution, but were loathe to enact a ban. As one senator reportedly testified: “We are a resolute state that loves to recycle…I would prefer that we recycle (plastics) and do an education system on recycling.”  These ban opponents were apparently unmoved by statistics from the Oregon Department of Environmental  Quality showing that even in this recycling-loving state, only about 11 percent of bags or plastic film are currently being recycled.

 

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