County on board with efforts
to reduce use of plastic bags
BY TERRY SCHMIDA
Last year you used about 500 plastic grocery shopping bags – if you’re anything like the average shopper at stores such as the Big Pine Key Winn-Dixie. And that establishment, not exactly located in midtown Manhattan, itself doled out some 2.5 million of the single-use enviro-time bombs.
Pretty much everybody who lives (or visits) the Keys can see that such voracious use of a wasteful product largely fabricated from a finite resource (oil) is an incongruous addition to our ecosystem.
Not that plastic bags are particularly helpful to any part of the earth’s biosphere.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration “plastics are made from liquid petroleum gases (LPG), natural gas liquids (NGL), and natural gas. LPG are by-products of petroleum refining, and NGL are removed from natural gas before it enters transmission pipelines.”
In 2010, about 191 million barrels of LPG and NGL and 412 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas were used in the United States to make plastic products, such as shopping bags.
Then there’s the fact that a huge number of these bags end up in the ocean or gulf, where marine life such as turtles, mistake them for jellyfish, and consume them, with potentially fatal consequences.
For these reasons alone environmental organizations throughout the Keys are cheering the resolve of the Board of County Commissioners, who at their April 15 meeting, approved a resolution supporting a pair of bills before the state legislature to help them curb the practice.
The bills, H.B. 661 and S.B. 966, would give municipalities the power to regulate plastic shopping bags, a capability they currently do not posses, on a two-year trial basis. This pilot program would allow governments of cities of up to 100,000 people to ban the use of the bags, beginning Jan. 1, 2016, and ending on June 30, two years later.
County commissioners such as Heather Carruthers, however, are determined to ensure the legislation would provide the same power to county governments presiding over populations of less than 100,000, such as Monroe.
“This allows us to act,” Carruthers said at the meeting.
Her colleague, Sylvia Murphy, agreed, adding that the wholesale distribution of plastic shopping bags “has to stop.”
Another cheerleader for the pending legislation is Deb Curlee of the “Got Your Bags? Florida Keys” organization, which is loosely affiliated with a national parent organization, and backed locally by Green Living & Energy Education (GLEE).
“I was up visiting my daughter in Montgomery, Maryland one time and saw that stores there were charging 5 cents for plastic bags at the check-out,” Curlee said. “I thought to myself, ‘what a brilliant idea.’ Unfortunately, up until now, the Florida government has been extremely reticent to allow communities to discourage the use of plastic bags, because [the manufacturers] are a powerful special interest. Winn-Dixie on Big Pine has been wonderful, allowing us to set up information kiosks in their store, and donating reusable shopping bags for us to give away. They’ve even paid for our lunch. But from a policy point of view, their hands are tied by their corporate head office. That’s why we need this legislation to pass. At the moment, the only grocery store in the Keys to offer paper bags only, in Fausto’s in Key West.”
[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]
Here’s the funny (odd not humorous) part: our waste collection service refuse (no pun intended) to accept these plastic bags in the recycling bins; saying that their machines can’t sort them, despite asking for and receiving a whopping $14million increase for their their contract. Why, one wonders, couldn’t they use some of that loot to upgrade their equipment? Hm…?