By Andrew Christie
In October 2019, after years of activism and months of deliberation, the SLO County Integrated Waste Management Authority finally banned the sale of plastic polystyrene products in the county, including the ubiquitous flagship of the category, take-out food containers. The IWMA ordinance requires that these are to be replaced by reusable, recyclable or biodegradable, with a list of alternatives available from the IWMA for the last six months.
Because polystyrene is bad news, 130 California cities and 8 counties preceded SLO County, passing ordinances to keep this pernicious environmental pollutant and other non-recyclable plastics out of their waterways, roads, parks, sewage treatment plants and landfills.
The movement to ban polystyrene has gone national, showing up in ordinances passed in South Carolina, New York City, and Washington DC over the last four years. Consumer pressure made McDonald’s and Dunkin Doughnuts get with the program. As the Fredonia Group reported in a market research report, “Dunkin’ Brands Group plans to finish switching to double-walled paper cups throughout its global chain of stores in 2020. The company’s new cup was designed to mimic the appearance of the previous foam cup to ease the conversion for consumers.”
In other words, this is not a surprising new development. Businesses know how to do this and have been making the change. The cities of San Luis Obispo, Pismo Beach, and Arroyo Grande passed bans three years ago.
The ordinance was set to go into effect on April 9. Local businesses had six months from the date of the SLO County ordinance’s approval last October to prepare for the changeover. But on March 23, the IWMA postposed the ban for a full year “in consideration of businesses facing challenges brought on by Covid-19 and related impacts.”
More than five of the six months accorded to businesses as ample time in which to make the transition had already passed when the IWMA suddenly added a year. And the ordinance includes a section containing eight paragraphs of exemptions, which the IWMA highlighted in its notice to businesses when the ordinance was approved: “A business may apply for a one year exemption to Ordinance 2019-1 under criteria that include: affordability, undue hardship and public health, safety, or medical exemption.”
The ordinance is equally clear on its main point: “Take-out food and beverage packaging that is Reusable, Biodegradable, and Recyclable is the most responsible and sustainable choice for San Luis Obispo County’s tourist economy, its citizenry, and its environment. When products are reusable or recyclable, natural resources are spared, and less energy and resources are used to produce new products.” Not to mention maximizing “the operating life of landfills.”
And as Californians Against Waste has pointed out: “Alternative food packaging material that is compostable or recyclable is cost-competitive, and in some cases cheaper than polystyrene containers.”
Nevertheless, the IWMA board – comprised of elected representative from the County and all city governments – decided that now is not a good time and later will be better.
I'll interrupt myself here to tell a tale from the annals of SLO County politics: Once upon a time, the SLO supes agreed on a series of tiered fees on new development that would fund the creation of affordable housing as a component of new housing projects (something environmentalists generally favor, because policies that make if possible for people to live near where they work cut way down on suburban sprawl, commuting travel time, greenhouse gas and the long menu of associated tailpipe emissions). The tiers would be raised a little every year over five years until the program was at full funding. When the time came to raise that first tier to second-year levels, the Home Builders Association turned out to scream bloody murder: Bad idea! The housing bubble just burst, the market for new homes is down the tubes, construction projects have been halted, imposing this modest fee increase now would break the industry's back and no new housing will ever be built in SLO County, etc. This is terrible timing. Don't do it.
The supervisors put the program on hold, where it stayed for several years, because every time they tried to implement the program they had agreed on, the home builders' returned with their energetic arguments on behalf of their industry. Five years later, when, still at first-tier funding levels, the supervisors tried one more time to creep upward to the second tier that they should have put in place five years before, things had changed. But the more things changed, the more things stayed the same. Now the homebuilders cried: Bad idea! The housing market has recovered, the market for new homes is booming, construction projects are springing up all over, imposing this modest fee increase now would break the back of the industry's recovery and no new housing will ever be built in SLO County. This is terrible timing. Don't do it.
They didn’t. And a few years later, the County formally gave up, disposing of the idea of ever implementing tiered fees to fund affordable housing.
Moral: Delays have a way of turning into forever.
Where was I? Oh yes: Industry will always let you know that it's always a bad time to impose regulations on them that will safeguard health, protect the environment, or otherwise improve the general welfare. There is no good time.
Compare and contrast: The California Geologic Energy Division (CalGEM) just issued an oil company 24 new fracking permits in the middle of a pandemic. Increased air pollution is one of the many tainted gifts fracking bestows on the communities it plagues, and it’s a point of fact that the coronavirus goes especially hard on those whose health has been compromised by bad air.
While the Newsom administration was giving oil companies that green light, state legislators chose this fraught historical moment to prevail upon the California Air Resources Board to delay by another six months the adoption of rules aimed at cutting diesel pollution by trucks and tankers. Those rules, years in the making, are scheduled to be voted on in June.
Sierra Club California Director Kathryn Phillips notes that “lobbyists for industry interests up and down the state have seen the COVID crisis as an opportunity to blast out letter after letter asking for rollbacks in all kinds of regulations. So far, none of the most critical rollbacks or delays have been granted. So the lobbyists for the shipping industry, which includes the oil industry, turned to their friends in the legislature to send a letter.”
The 31 representatives urging the state to slow-walk vital health regulations during a pandemic obviously need to hear from their constituents. (One signer of the letter, Senator Richard Pan, a physician, is known for literally running away from environmental advocates when asked to explain his anti-environmental votes – a practice that inspired Phillips to join a gym “to improve lung capacity and running speed.”)
You need not take such drastic action with another signer, Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham, who is accessible to his constituents at either assemblymember.cunningham@assembly.ca.gov or 805-549-3381. Let his office know that his choice to fire off a letter calling for a slow-down in regulations designed to protect public health during a pandemic was ill-timed.
Some good news: CalGEM is -- so far -- not bowing to demands for delays in its Public Health and Safety Rulemaking process for California's oil fields. You can sign on to the Sierra Club’s comments on the need to put the health of communities above the profits of oil companies, and add a comment of your own, go here.
And to communicate with the SLO Integrated Waste Management Authority about their polystyrene ban postponement, address your comments to iwma@iwma.com. You might suggest that businesses that already had six months to transition from what should now be a banned product to readily available alternatives should not need another twelve months on top of that. September 2020 – six months from the date of the IWMA board’s March 23 postponement vote – should be more than enough time to implement "the most responsible and sustainable choice for San Luis Obispo County’s tourist economy, its citizenry, and its environment."