If Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and City Council President Richard Conlin get their way, you will be charged a 20-cent “green fee” on all disposable shopping bags from Seattle grocery, drug and convenience stores, starting Jan. 1, 2009.

According to SPU, about 360 million disposable bags are used in Seattle every year, most plastic. That translates to 600 bags for each Seattle resident.

And those handy white foam containers that hold your pho soup or Mexican takeout, pictured at left? Under the proposal, you’ll also stop seeing those. Instead, businesses would have to replace everything from foam plates, cups and egg cartons with a different product by Jan. 1, 2009. Then, they would have to switch to using compostable or locally recyclable packaging by July 1, 2010.

The changes were announced in a proposal today supported by Nickels and Conlin. The legislation isn’t ready yet, but Conlin said it should be finalized, and considered by council, in June.

Nickels said Seattle is the first city in the country (that he knows of) to create a program like this, though cities across the world are adopting similar policies. At least 20 U.S. cities have banned polystyrene food packaging including Portland and San Francisco.                                                                             

Other options include packaging made of corn starch and sugar cane. A spokesperson for local restaurant group Tutta Bella, pictured at right, said at a press conference today that due to the restaurant’s recycling and composting of everything from expired pizza dough to food containers, the waste from all three restaurant locations combined fills only one garbage can per day.

Trudy Bialic of PCC, pictured at left, also spoke at the press conference. Last Fall, PCC eliminated plastic bag use and started selling reusable bags at cost for 73 cents or $3.55, depending on the product. Since then, she said use of reusable bags has increased and more than half of the store’s customers now use reusable bags.

Wondering why these products matter at all? Check out these facts from Seattle Public Utilities:

Charging a fee for disposable bags will cut throw-away bag use by about 70 percent or more. This will prevent the manufacture of 184 million bags a year and cut greenhouse gas production by 112,000 tons over 30 years.

A similar fee in Ireland achieved a 90 percent reduction, cutting individual use of plastic bags from 325 to 23 over a year.

SPU will collect $10 million annually from the fee. About $2 million will be spent to promote the switch to reusable bags, including distribution of free bags to Seattle households.

Of the 20-cent fee, merchants will keep five cents and the city will get 15 cents. Businesses that gross less than $1 million per year will keep the entire 20-cent fee.

For more information on the issue in general, visit advocacy group Foam Free Seattle.  For information about Seattle’s plan, visit SPU here.  

Tags: foam containers, Greenhouse gasses, Mayor Greg Nickels, plastic bags, Portland, products, Seattle, Seattle City Council, Waste

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Challenge, Greenhouse gasses, Seattle, Waste. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.