Bag ban coming to a minimart near you

Supporters of plastic bag ban rally before Board of Supervisors' vote last year. Photo/Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors may have officially declared Thursday to be  “A Day Without A Bag” in the county, but at the 7-Eleven on Las Virgenes Road, the holiday hasn’t exactly taken hold.

“We go through more than a hundred plastic bags a day,” says store manager Andrew Kassar. “People rarely—well, actually, I’d say people never come in here and use their own bags.”

That will change January 1, as a number of municipalities, including Los Angeles County and the City of Calabasas, where Kassar’s store is located, swing into the second phase of local bans on single-use plastic bags.

The first phase, in effect since July, stopped the distribution of the light, ubiquitous—and polluting—bags in large supermarkets and pharmacies. The ordinance allowed these retailers to charge a dime apiece for paper bags to cover the costs of compliance and of stocking the paper bags themselves.

The next phase extends the same rules to smaller drug stores, convenience food stores and smaller retailers and grocers. To that end, the county Department of Public Works this week will be dispatching teams of “Eco Elves” to pass out free reusable bags, while supplies last. (Click here for a list of dates and locations throughout the county.)

“We’ve been notifiying our customers,” says Franco Hasroun, manager of Calabasas Liquor and Market. “Most of the bags we use are plastic, though, so we’ll see how it goes.”

The county’s bag ban covers only stores in unincorporated areas, but it was written to allow the county’s 88 incorporated municipalities to extend it by easily enacting ordinances of their own.

Malibu had a ban in place when the county ordinance was written but since then, Long Beach, Santa Monica and Calabasas have cracked down on the proliferation of single-use bags. Now bans are in various stages of passage in more than a half-dozen of the county’s other cities, including the City of Los Angeles.

The California Supreme Court made passage of such laws easier for cities this summer, ruling that cities could forego lengthy and expensive environmental impact reports in determining that their ecosystems would be better off without the proliferation of single-use bags.

That lawsuit, brought by a pro-plastics organization against a Manhattan Beach ban, had been closely watched by cities statewide. The court decision unleashed a flood of municipal legislation. In Manhattan Beach, the disputed ordinance was reinstated and will be implemented on January 14.

However, the plastic bag industry has continued to push back. In October, for example, the South Carolina-based plastic bag maker Hilex-Poly and four residents filed suit against the county, arguing that the 10-cent charge for paper bags violates a new state law that reclassifies local fees as “taxes” and requires a two-thirds majority vote to raise them.

Pat Proano, assistant deputy director for the Department of Public Works’ environmental programs division, says that the few complaints he has received about the first phase of the county ordinance were from callers “who were concerned that this was a new county fee of some sort.”

“But it isn’t,” Proano says. “The ten cents being charged by the store is retained by the store—it doesn’t go to the county.”  The lawsuit is pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court, with action expected sometime next year.

In the meantime, store managers say, the bag ban—so novel when it was passed this summer—is becoming an increasingly mundane fact of life.

“Mostly, everybody just brings their own bags now,” says Cynthia MacNeil, front end manager at the Albertson’s supermarket in Calabasas. “It took a couple of months for people to get into the habit, but we don’t hear many complaints these days. I  think they’re just used to it now.”

Posted 12/13/11