The Dallas City Council is no closer to voting on a single-use bag ban today than it was in March, when council member and current Quality of Life Committee chair Dwaine Caraway first asked the city attorney to draft an ordinance. Nevertheless, the subject returned to the committee this morning in the form of a hearing of sorts, with reps from the plastic-bag industry, the Texas Retailers Association and environmental groups making their cases to council members divided over how to proceed.
“It’s just like the smoking ban,” assistant city manager Jill Jordan told us this morning, before the meeting’s 9:30 a.m. kick-off. “Let every side get its say and craft a policy after that.”
And so cases are made, points were disputed, exhibits were … um … exhibited, and everything’s just the same now as it was two hours ago, except now we know Sandy Greyson’s more than likely leaning toward imposing a fee of some kind rather than coming down in favor of an outright ban.
Said Caraway by way of scene-setter, all he wants is “a solution that will assist us in keeping our environment clean and safe and our city free from litter.” On this point, almost all the speakers agreed: A single-use bag ban won’t make Dallas litter-free. Far from it. Some said it’ll help; others said, not much.
“We share your view entirely that we want to reach a comprehensive voluntarily solution to clean up the environment,” said Ronnie Volkening, president and CEO of the Austin-based Texas Retailers Association, which is decidedly against a bag ban. Rather than a city-imposed crackdown his group wants “an aggressive public education camapaign about what we can do to address this situation.” To which Greyson responded: Yes, but who will pay for it?
Volkening said his group vehemently opposes the ban because, for starters, it’s “not comprehensive.” As in: “It exempts tons and tons and tons of plastic bags for good reason — from restaurants, dry cleaners, newspapers,” ice bags, shrink-wrapping, bread bags … the list is relatively endless. Said Volkening, “There is no suitable alternative for that plastic bag or film in the marketplace.”
Phil Rozenski of plastic-bag-making titan Hilex Poly told the council that those reusable bags environmentalists love to tout — or tote — are even worse for the environment than plastic bags, because they’re petroleum-based products made in China. “Banning of plastic retail plastic bags can turn customers to alternatives that are worse,” he insisted, calling them “the new disposable bag.”
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