Stopping those Urban Tumbleweeds:
The Sligo Naturalist for January 2011
December was a very windy month. I spent a lot of mornings walking my dog through an empty park with my collar turned up against the cold, watching the tumbleweeds roll across the abandoned soccer fields.
Only wait!… those weren’t tumbleweeds. They were plastic shopping bags!
One particularly blustery morning I worked with my kids to untangle no less than five of them from a single brambled corner of our local park. We hurried to catch them and dispose of them before they sailed towards our favorite tall oak trees. Sometimes the bags make their way to the highest branches there, mocking us with their crackly calling sounds for years.
The bags can be more than just noisy and unsightly; they are also increasingly seen as a potential health hazard. Many times they make their way to streams and rivers. In fact, some past trash clean-ups in our area have recorded close to 30,000 of them along the Anacostia’s banks – and that only includes the ones which volunteers were able to snag by hand and record for the official count. The ones that remain behind drape themselves across the shrubs that line river banks like parodies of weeping willow branches, sometimes strangling animals and suffocating aquatic animals who mistake them for prey.
What’s more, the plastic in the bags does not biodegrade -- it simply becomes part of the industrial flotsam which is now accumulating in the world’s oceans. There is growing scientific concern about the effect the plastic particles from bags and other kinds trash are having on the planet’s food webs. The fish eat the plastic… we eat the fish… we all consume the pollution.
So with all of these things in mind I heartily celebrated the January 1 anniversary of the new DC bag law. It has been one full year since the District imposed a five cent fee on all plastic bags given out in the city during retail transactions, and by all accounts the new law has been a resounding success. Retail bag use has declined by 80 percent since last winter.
Groups that work to clean the rivers have even noticed a reduction in trash. The Alice Ferguson Foundation, a group that works along the region’s rivers each year, saw a marked reduction in the amount of bags reported during their events last spring.
“Plastic bags were down sixty percent at the clean-ups,” Julie Lawson from the Maryland’s Trash Free Alliance told me. “That was only three months after the law went into effect.”
Initially, there was doubt about how it would all work, even from those in environmental quarters.
"I was really shocked at how effective the small fee was in DC. You wouldn't think that five cents a bag would change anyone's behavior. But apparently it really helped make people think twice about needing a bag," Michael Wilpers, President of the Friends of Sligo Creek (FOSC), said at the organization’s December meeting in Silver Spring.
FOSC had gathered that night to hear State Delegate Al Carr from District 18 discuss the possibility of enacting a similar bag law Maryland next year. Carr worked on a bill about bags last year in Annapolis, but was unable to get the support needed from other regions of the state. He suspects the fact that it was an election year during tight budget times made candidates blanch at the idea of imposing any kind of new fee on anything.
Carr and State Senator Jamie Raskin, however, have had tremendous constituent support in our local area for their proposed bill, which would place a five cent fee on all single-use plastic and paper bags distributed at carryout food establishments and liquor stores in the state. Raskin’s supporters even handed out reusable bags imprinted with his name to promote his support of bag reduction at parades and other events over the summer, and Carr thinks his own sponsorship of the bill helped him become the “top vote getter” in the general election in November.
“Support the bag bill and you’ll be supported by the voters,” Carr told me over the phone recently. He plans to take that message to Annapolis again this year, where he hopes to gain new support for the legislation.
Some have worried that a bag fee might disproportionally impact low income families in Maryland. To answer this concern, reusable bags would be distributed in neighborhoods where poverty remains a constant problem and the bag bill’s authors say a large portion of the money collected from a new bag law could be used to fund environmental restoration projects. The funds would most likely be made available through grants from the Chesapeake Bay Trust.
In urban areas like those around DC and Baltimore, it is often the impoverished communities which suffer the most from pollution’s many ills. To have the bag fees available for environmental projects in such locations would add an extra bonus to the bag reduction law.
Maryland’s Trash Free Alliance has started a blog (http://www.blogger.com/www.trashfreemaryland.org) about the bag bill for those who are seeking more up-to-date information as the legislative season gets under way this year.
When I visited the site last week I was really entertained by entries about activists in California who are working on bag reduction programs. You can find, for example, a link to a “mockumentary” narrated by actor Jeremy Irons about the “life” of a plastic bag in his state’s “wild urban environment.” You can also find pictures of protestors in San Jose who staged a protest at a city council meeting, complete with people dressed in Bag Monster costumes made entirely of plastic bags. What surprises me is that this same kind of political theater hasn’t happened in Takoma Park… at least not yet!
The Sligo Naturalist for January 2011
December was a very windy month. I spent a lot of mornings walking my dog through an empty park with my collar turned up against the cold, watching the tumbleweeds roll across the abandoned soccer fields.
Only wait!… those weren’t tumbleweeds. They were plastic shopping bags!
One particularly blustery morning I worked with my kids to untangle no less than five of them from a single brambled corner of our local park. We hurried to catch them and dispose of them before they sailed towards our favorite tall oak trees. Sometimes the bags make their way to the highest branches there, mocking us with their crackly calling sounds for years.
The bags can be more than just noisy and unsightly; they are also increasingly seen as a potential health hazard. Many times they make their way to streams and rivers. In fact, some past trash clean-ups in our area have recorded close to 30,000 of them along the Anacostia’s banks – and that only includes the ones which volunteers were able to snag by hand and record for the official count. The ones that remain behind drape themselves across the shrubs that line river banks like parodies of weeping willow branches, sometimes strangling animals and suffocating aquatic animals who mistake them for prey.
What’s more, the plastic in the bags does not biodegrade -- it simply becomes part of the industrial flotsam which is now accumulating in the world’s oceans. There is growing scientific concern about the effect the plastic particles from bags and other kinds trash are having on the planet’s food webs. The fish eat the plastic… we eat the fish… we all consume the pollution.
So with all of these things in mind I heartily celebrated the January 1 anniversary of the new DC bag law. It has been one full year since the District imposed a five cent fee on all plastic bags given out in the city during retail transactions, and by all accounts the new law has been a resounding success. Retail bag use has declined by 80 percent since last winter.
Groups that work to clean the rivers have even noticed a reduction in trash. The Alice Ferguson Foundation, a group that works along the region’s rivers each year, saw a marked reduction in the amount of bags reported during their events last spring.
“Plastic bags were down sixty percent at the clean-ups,” Julie Lawson from the Maryland’s Trash Free Alliance told me. “That was only three months after the law went into effect.”
Initially, there was doubt about how it would all work, even from those in environmental quarters.
"I was really shocked at how effective the small fee was in DC. You wouldn't think that five cents a bag would change anyone's behavior. But apparently it really helped make people think twice about needing a bag," Michael Wilpers, President of the Friends of Sligo Creek (FOSC), said at the organization’s December meeting in Silver Spring.
FOSC had gathered that night to hear State Delegate Al Carr from District 18 discuss the possibility of enacting a similar bag law Maryland next year. Carr worked on a bill about bags last year in Annapolis, but was unable to get the support needed from other regions of the state. He suspects the fact that it was an election year during tight budget times made candidates blanch at the idea of imposing any kind of new fee on anything.
Carr and State Senator Jamie Raskin, however, have had tremendous constituent support in our local area for their proposed bill, which would place a five cent fee on all single-use plastic and paper bags distributed at carryout food establishments and liquor stores in the state. Raskin’s supporters even handed out reusable bags imprinted with his name to promote his support of bag reduction at parades and other events over the summer, and Carr thinks his own sponsorship of the bill helped him become the “top vote getter” in the general election in November.
“Support the bag bill and you’ll be supported by the voters,” Carr told me over the phone recently. He plans to take that message to Annapolis again this year, where he hopes to gain new support for the legislation.
Some have worried that a bag fee might disproportionally impact low income families in Maryland. To answer this concern, reusable bags would be distributed in neighborhoods where poverty remains a constant problem and the bag bill’s authors say a large portion of the money collected from a new bag law could be used to fund environmental restoration projects. The funds would most likely be made available through grants from the Chesapeake Bay Trust.
In urban areas like those around DC and Baltimore, it is often the impoverished communities which suffer the most from pollution’s many ills. To have the bag fees available for environmental projects in such locations would add an extra bonus to the bag reduction law.
Maryland’s Trash Free Alliance has started a blog (http://www.blogger.com/www.trashfreemaryland.org) about the bag bill for those who are seeking more up-to-date information as the legislative season gets under way this year.
When I visited the site last week I was really entertained by entries about activists in California who are working on bag reduction programs. You can find, for example, a link to a “mockumentary” narrated by actor Jeremy Irons about the “life” of a plastic bag in his state’s “wild urban environment.” You can also find pictures of protestors in San Jose who staged a protest at a city council meeting, complete with people dressed in Bag Monster costumes made entirely of plastic bags. What surprises me is that this same kind of political theater hasn’t happened in Takoma Park… at least not yet!
This article was originally published in the Voice newspapers of Silver Spring, Takoma Park and Kensington.
No comments:
Post a Comment