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The Seattle City Council will vote today on whether to ban plastic grocery bags. KUOW's Catherine Kovell has the story.
TRANSCRIPT:
The ban would outlaw the free plastic bags you get to carry home your groceries or new clothes. It would not include plastic container bags for produce or bulk foods.
If the bill passes, shoppers will also have to pay a nickel for each paper grocery bag they get.
Seattle City Councilman Mike O'Brien sponsored the bill. He says he wants to change people's shopping habits when it comes to bags.
O'Brien: "The goal of this ordinance is to really encourage people to use reusable bags, whether they're shopping at a grocery store or a hardware store or a retailer like Nordstrom or the Gap. The thing that we're trying to focus on here is we want to reduce waste in the system. We want to take plastic out of Puget Sound."
O'Brien says Seattle shoppers take hundreds of millions of plastic shopping bags a year. It's hurting Puget Sound, he says. For 18 months, scientists have been looking for plastic in the Sound. They've found plastic particles in every water sample they've taken.
Katrina Rosen is with the green group Environment Washington. She says she doesn't want Puget Sound to look like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That's a patch of thousands of miles of garbage that have accumulated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Rosen: "Over a million tons of garbage, including a ton of plastic and lots of plastic bags, have accumulated over time to create basically a toxic plastic soup. And so when you take water samples from it, it just looks like small particles of plastic that have broken down over time to create this yellowish murky water. And so that's what Puget Sound could look like if we continue to put plastic in the landfills where they can easily make their way into the Sound and then never go away."
This is the second time Seattle has tried to reduce plastic bags. In 2008 the City Council voted to charge 20 cents for each paper or plastic bag people take. Voters killed that law in a referendum the following year. The plastics industry paid for that referendum.
O'Brien was not on the City Council when the first law passed. Since then, he says, cities around the country have adopted successful plastic bag bans. They include the Washington cities of Bellingham, Edmonds and Mukilteo.
Strom Peterson is on the Edmonds City Council. Stores stopped giving plastic bags in August, and he's happy with the results.
Peterson: "So far it's been fantastic, I think. We've had no complaints made to city staff regarding any violations. The businesses seem to have embraced it. And we've had very, very few complaints, and I'd say a lot more positive feedback than negative."
In Seattle, seven of nine council members co–sponsored the bill. O'Brien says the other two members will also likely vote for it. If the ban passes, it will take effect in July of next year.
For KUOW, I'm Catherine Kovell.