Litter

This Saturday, the local trash collection company--the one that has the community in something of an uproar over whether curbside recyling collection is one of the defining features of modern life—is sponsoring a local roadside litter cleanup day. We’ll see whether those who are deeply in favor of curbside recycling are equally in favor of curbside litter pickup. If recent history is any indication, it doesn’t look promising. Last spring, when such a day was scheduled—just in time to greet the summer visitors with clean roadsides—the response amounted to three or four kids, most of whom were the children of the guy who runs the trash collection company and sponsors the litter roadside cleanup. We were up in B.C. that week, but we will be here for this session and will make our appearance on the road with bags and tongs.

Of course, if people stopped throwing crap along the roadside in the first place, none of us would have to go out and pick it up in the second place. It just wouldn’t be an issue. The received wisdom, of course, is that the people who do the throwing are NOT the same people as those who do the litter picking up; instead, it is our friends and neighbors whom we normally think kindly towards. Some other received wisdom is that it is the NOT the residents of Point Roberts who do all this throwing of stuff out their car windows or out of their hands and pockets, but instead are the summer visitors whom we think of as an important stimulus to our local economy when we’re not thinking about them as mindless litterers.

I don’t know who it is who does all this throwing out and away. I wish they’d stop. Maybe they are the same people who are trying to overturn Seattle’s recent law requiring that people pay for plastic bags at stores. An initiative was recently sponsored by the American Chemistry Council. (According to the Seattle mayor, this is a trade group for, among other things, plastic bag manufacturers.) It was a paid signature initiative drive, so it was successful and now Seattle voters will be able to do the metaphorical equivalent in content if not in time of picking up local, roadside litter. If Seattle is able to defeat this attempt to repeal its plastic bag fee, it will certainly lead to fewer plastic bags in lots of places, including by the sides of roads. I hope they get out and vote in significant numbers against this repeal initiative. But then, I hope that people in Point Roberts will turn out in significant numbers to help clean up the roadsides. In addition, I am keenly aware of the fact that hope is not a plan.

My plan is to, in words ever present at Neilsen’s Hardware, ‘Just do it!’ I am hoping that those of you in this vicinity just do it, too. It’s tough to be a community; we are living through an era in which there is less sense of community than we have had in a century. (See Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s book on the collapse of American community and the steady reduction of community volunteer activities). This Saturday is a small thing to do, but that doesn’t make it an unimportant thing to do. Pick up bags at the Transfer Station. I don't think roll will be taken, but I'm pretty sure it will be on the final exam.

No Right to Plastic Bags?

This past week, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance imposing a 25 cent fee for the use of each plastic carry bag in commercial establishments. This ordinance will go into effect in July of 2010, which should leave people with plenty of time (24 months) both to obtain a canvas bag and to remember to bring it/them to the market, etc. And yesterday, the Seattle City Council joined the effort, with a 20 cent fee, starting in January of 2009. The Seattleites will have to make a concerted effort to get those bags together and into their cars in only five months, as opposed to L.A.’s 24 month conditioning period. Is it possible that we’ve reached a tipping point?

In other news on the plastic bag front: at the beginning of July, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that a Canadian teenager had developed a method to make plastic bags decompose in months rather than years by using high concentrations of bacteriae that could be introduced into landfills. Somehow, it’s hard to believe that this method was so complex that plastic bag manufacturers couldn’t figure it out in the past, say, 50 years, but high school students could. But then, I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the chemistry of plastic bags or about the quality of Toronto's teen-aged chemistry students.

If Point Roberts had a local government, it could join this sensible move and add to the momentum. Since it doesn’t, I guess people could just start bringing cloth bags. Or would that happen only if some government made them do it? What would explain that?

Too Much of Some Things

What do we all have too much of, rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban, whatever continent (except Antarctica) that we’re on?

Well, there’s war and sickness and slugs, and stuff like that, but in the realm of positive items, one thing we have too much of is plastic bags. It’s because they’re so useful, so cheap, so small-space occupying (at least in the house itself). This is one of those things that you might think that small places would have moved to get rid of just because a relatively small effort ought to get quick results. In Point Roberts, e.g., there’s only one or two places that actually give you a plastic bag. There could be none. Roberts Creek, much more of a problem because there are so many more stores, but still nothing like Vancouver or San Francisco (and San Francisco actually has banned them). And yet, and yet: The International Marketplace, the primary source of plastic bags in Point Roberts offers only to take your plastic bags back for recycling. Even the recycling program, such as it is on the Point, does not accept plastic bag recycling.

Why is that? Entire countries have banned plastic bags (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, according to the Daily Globe and Mail). Cities and towns all over the world have done it, but not Point Roberts, not Roberts Creek. The grocery stores in both places offer, as I recall, a three cent credit for each plastic bag you don’t use. Ireland, by contrast, charges you 23 cents for each plastic bag you do use. And at that price, the Irish have very quickly figured out some other way to carry their groceries.

Food prices are up, inflation is up: this may be the time to encourage the use of fewer plastic bags, either by charging more for them or offering a larger credit for using them, or just by people choosing to use cloth bags instead because we’ve all got way too many plastic bags around already. I’ve been using cloth bags for over 20 years—ever since my daughter, then working in a co-op grocery store, bought two or three wonderfully sturdy, black linen shopping bags for me. I’m still using them, along with a half dozen less wonderful ones that I’ve acquired here and there. They live in the car and, because I have so many of them, there are always a few available to me when I find myself shopping. Recently, I have had shoppers behind me in line congratulate me for bringing my own bag, so it appears that it is beginning to sink into our psyches that we don’t need anywhere near as many plastic bags as we have. These shoppers, alas, always say, ‘I forgot to bring mine.’ Time to start remembering, I’d say.

Plastic bags last forever, in landfills. Ocean-going animals have great trouble with them. They’re made from oil and we don’t really need to use that extra amount of oil, surely. Nobody who lives near the ocean is unaware of the ugly, trashy look that washed-up plastic bags give to the beach, and any walker knows what they look like, water-soaked, along the roadside. But maybe the killer argument is that we already have more of them than we need. We wouldn’t have to be giving something up; we’d be not having something we don’t even want.

(Addendum: The New York Times Magazine (June 22) has a terrific article on plastic trash drifting around the oceans, and what it took to clean up one beach in Alaska: go here.