The Battle of the Plastic Bag: Voting on Ref 1 in Today's Election

Today is a huge day for Seattle's paper and plastic bag ban. I wrote an article on the ban a year ago for Seattle Business Monthly and what I learned made me a fanatic. Here are a few things every Seattleite should know:

-The fee shouldn't hurt the elderly or low-income as the city plans to set aside $1 million to put reusable bags in the hands of consumers who need them.
- Approve the bag ban and we could save the City $503,000 in street cleaning costs annually.
-Disposable bags account for nearly 4 percent of Seattle's residential garbage, by volume, regardless of the fact that many plastic bags are reused.
-The 360 million disposable bags Seattleites use each year cost the City of Seattle more than $4 million a year in costs such as processing and contamination, collection and disposal costs and future landfill liability.
-Once weaned, we could cut the number of disposable bags distributed to shoppers by nearly 75 percent, saving approximately 4,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. The equivalent of taking 665 cars off the road.

Other interesting factoids:
-Each of us uses approximately 485 plastic and 111 paper bags each year.
-Paper is actually worse for the environment than plastic, though we don't see it in the waste stream (or blowing around the streets, stuck on fences or floating through the Puget Sound) the way we see plastic.
-Once up and running the green fee is expected to cost the average consumer a mere $10 a year, less than many spend on coffee in a week.

So, here's a shout out to all my fellow Seattleites: Approve Referendum 1 and send in your ballot today!