October 15, 2014
I suspect you heard some of the same well-meaning warnings as a child that I did: Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t run with scissors. Don’t sign ballot measure petitions.
What? You didn’t hear that last one?
Well, I’m here to share it with you now because there’s a new ballot measure petition circulating that you should not sign.
It’s designed to overturn one of the boldest environmental bills the California legislature has passed in a long time.
That legislation, Senate Bill 270, was signed into law in September and establishes the first statewide ban on distribution by grocery stores of the ubiquitous plastic grocery bag. The ban phases in over a couple of years and includes some special funding to make sure a single-use plastic bag manufacturing company in Southern California is able to transition to making other products.
The petition to place a referendum on the 2016 ballot to overturn the new law is pushed by the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a group that’s part of the plastics industry trade association called SPI. Both groups are based in Washington, DC. Both groups represent plastic bag manufacturers based outside of California who are apparently offended by Californians’ desire to live in a place that’s not polluted with plastic bags.
Are Californians being too harsh when we decide to stop bag pollution? Well, as I write this at my desk in a second-floor office in downtown Sacramento, I can look out my window and see a plastic grocery bag hanging from the high branches of an old oak tree. Right now I feel rightly hostile toward plastic bags.
Plastic grocery bags haven’t always been the norm. They started becoming a regular part of the grocery shopping experience in the 1980s, when major grocery store chains started shifting from paper bags to plastic. Since then, they have also grown as a consumer of oil (in their manufacture) and a source of non-biodegradable ocean pollution and everyday street litter (in their end use).
Our friends at Californians Against Waste note that plastic bags create between $37 million and $107 million in litter cleanup costs in California’s cities and counties. And that’s just one of the easier costs to count. Plastic grocery bags have also been found trashing nearly every corner of the globe, and have been found in the stomachs of a variety of dead wildlife. Those costs are harder to put into dollar figures.
The senate bill establishing the plastic bag ban wasn’t created on a whim. It was the result of many years of work and had been preceded by other ban bills that failed. The bill had also been preceded by adoption of local plastic bag bans in more than 100 California cities. And, significantly, the bill was supported by a diverse coalition that included the California Grocers Association and the California Retailers Association.
So now we have a situation that we’ve seen before in California. State lawmakers create policies that protect the environment and have broad support. Then out-of-state special interests move in and try to stop the policies from taking hold.
The plastics makers who want to kill the ban bill have just over two months left to collect more than 500,000 signatures to put the referendum to overturn the bag ban on the ballot in 2016. They will be hiring signature gatherers who are paid per signature to assertively obtain your John Hancock.
If you are approached by anyone in the next couple of months asking that you sign a petition to put a bag measure on the ballot, just say no.
There are times when well-meaning warnings are worthwhile. This is one of them. Pass it on.
Sincerely,
Kathryn Phillips
Director
Sierra Club California is the Sacramento-based legislative and regulatory advocacy arm of the 13 California chapters of the Sierra Club.
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