PAPER OR PAPER?

PAPER OR PAPER?

It’s the latest public policy fashion direct from San Francisco’s spring collection

San Francisco recently banned those plastic bags you carry your groceries home in. They have been deemed bad for the environment so San Francisco supermarkets and pharmacies will be required to use recycled paper bags, canvas bags or compostable plastic bags..

Austin, not to be left behind when it comes to petty, harassing laws, is considering a similar measure. As City Councilman Lee Leffingwell put it, “We got the idea from San Francisco.” He is reported to have the support of Mayor Will Wynn and Councilman Mike Martinez.

As in San Francisco, the main rap against plastic bags is that they supposedly clog the landfill. Leffingwell, using figures from San Francisco, estimates at least 1,000 tons of plastic bags make it to Austin’s landfill each year.

Leffingwell is also concerned about the wold’s supply of crude oil. He noted that 430,000 gallons of crude oil will only produce 100 million plastic bags – barely enough to get us through a weekend’s shopping at HEB.

He might have mentioned -- but didn’t -- that 430,000 gallons sounds like a lot of crude but it’s less than 7,900 barrels. And he left us to just guess how many barrels of oil are consumed to fuel the chain saws and logging trucks needed to harvest enough trees to produce 100 million paper bags. The Film and Bag Federation reports that plastic bags consume 40 per cent less energy to produce than paper. Not to mention the destroyed trees – which contribute more to the environment than crude oil sitting under the sand in the Near East.

If plastic bags are clogging our landfills, we have to ask, “What are they doing in the landfill?” According to the Austin American-Statesman, an outfit called Trex which manufactures decking and railing is planing to purchase about 5.6 billion (that’s billion as in Perot) used plastic bags this year alone.

Like a lot of Americans, Austinites have become accustomed to tossing recyclable items into a separate receptacle. They can include used plastic bags if they asked to. We could avoid yet another annoying regulation and the city could maybe pick up a few bucks to spend on filling potholes on our streets. Remember streets?

Maybe it’s time Austin got over it’s fascination with San Francisco and tried to function in the real world where the rest of us live.

Bob Ward