Seattle—less green than LA and Mexico City!
Mexico City’s thousands of stores went green Wednesday, as amended ordinances on solid waste now outlaw businesses from giving out thin plastic bags that are not biodegradable. The law affects all stores, production facilities and service providers within the Federal District, which encompasses the city limits. Nearly 9 million people live inside the district and another 10 million reside in surrounding communities that make up greater Mexico City.
Mexico City becomes the second large metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw the bags. San Francisco in March 2007 enacted an ordinance that gave supermarkets six months and large chain pharmacies about a year to phase out the bags. Los Angeles is set to impose a ban if the state of California does not enact a statewide 25-cent fee per bag by July.
We’re never leaders. We wait for validation and consensus. We’ll wait until 48% of cities precede us, but not for 50%, since we won’t want to be in the wrong half.
we’re so much different than LA & DF – we’re an ISTHMUS.
We aren’t like LA and Mexico City, we’re a big city and our environment is different from theirs.
everyone in Seattle should kill themselves right now
@ 4 inadvertently proves @ 1 wrong; Seattle does lead in suicides.
Have you ever BEEN to LA or Mexico City?
Green? … only if you like your air crunchy
Thank You. Mexico City,
for being smart enough to ban plastic bags
so that I can feel all guilty -n- shit.
Love,
a beige Seattle.
Actually, the article backs me up on their air quality. Just ban em and get on with it.
From the article: “Thin-film, single-use plastic bags, which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere,” Steiner said in June. “There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere.”
Notice how it says nothing about imposing a pro-rich Bag Tax on the Poor.
To “outlaw businesses from giving out thin plastic bags that are not biodegradable” is very different from banning plastic bags…
Aren’t brown paper bags biodegradable? And didn’t the bag tax try to treat them just like a plastic bag? Why (again)? Never mind. I’m sure it was the Progressive thing to do!
I truly hope that the Stranger convinces McGinn to run on a disposable bag ban, biodegradable or not (to be consistent with the noble bag tax on brown paper bags that the illiterate populace was duped into voting down by evil big industry).
I think a “disposable bag ban” coupled with his “kill the tunnel” plank will absolutely guarantee a favorable outcome in November…
I told you. I’m a selfish bonehead American who doesn’t care about anyone or anything ‘cept Jeebus and my right to pollute the earth. Now go away with your inconvenient facts.
Will, you can catch a bus every 12 minutes for 19 hours of the day in an area of central LA about twice the size of the city of Seattle: they go FAST. They opened a light rail line this year and are set to open another next year (to add to the 72 miles of rail already built). The air in LA is actually pretty clean most of the time – definitely however due more to strict emissions controls than lifestyle.
In Mexico City about one out of ten people have access to a car, and so some twenty million people get around every day exclusively on foot, bikes, circulator bus, long-distance bus, subway, and light rail. The air is pretty bad – think L.A. in the 70s – but this is mostly due to geography. Certainly no group of 25 million Americans produce so little pollution per capita.
The environments of these cities are more a result of having five and twelve times the population of the Seattle metropolitan area. If they lived like Seattleites do, these places would be hellish – and they aren’t. Seattle: the last to know, the last to go.
Seattle isn’t as green as LA or Mexico City, but bags have fuck-all to do with it. Density, sprawl, and consumption rates do. Yes, Mexico City has polluted air; that’s because they (like LA) live in an inversion zone and have TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE LIVING THERE. Seattle’s metro area is bigger than LA’s, and twice as big as Mexico’s, but has a small fraction of the population. Truck in 16 million additional people — the entire population of WA, OR, ID, NV, MT, WY and UT — into Seattle and see what our air looks like.
Density = green. Everything else is window dressing.
What those savages south of the border don’t understand is the importance of ‘liberty.’ Read the comments over at yonder Seattle Times, and you’ll understand that we don’t need to ban or tax bags, because we’re so enlightened that we’ll individually choose to stop using disoposable bags. It’d be unfair to tax us, because so few of us are so lazy as to waste the environment. Probably Mexico and LA has to do this, not because their citizenry is willing to make a very small sacrifice for the greater good, but because they just don’t value personal freedom the way we do and aren’t the shining beacons of individual responsibility we are. Seattle is so NIMBY and anti-tax, you’d swear we were all Republicans.
@12, you beat me to it.
The ordinance was poorly thought out, the campaign poorly run, and it was doomed to fail from the outset. A good ordinance would likely pass in Seattle. Rather than sulk and try to pass the blame, backers should figure out to get a really effective ban passed by the city council, and if need be, the electorate.
And Dan, if you think Mexico City is a “green oasis,” try drinking the water.
A couple years ago I had never heard of a bag tax and came up with the idea on my own. What they really ought to do is start charging people 25 cents every time they accept a plastic grocery bag at the store! I said.
Now we’ve had the chance to vote on it, and it turns out that a majority of my fellow Seattleites(/Seattlites) are just too fucking stupid to take this one easy step in the right direction.
“Think of the poor!” says Will, though. Because poor people are incapable of reusing bags.
@16 – I actually agree with you about the campaign, but I still think the ordinance’s defeat was garden-variety, Tim Eyman-like, NIMBY, misarchistic selfishness. Where were the city leaders who proposed the thing? I don’t remember seeing much from them when the American Chemistry Council was convincing us that the money would somehow be wasted. The fee would have done exactly what it was intended to do – reduce waste. The quibbles over details (particularly the bogus argument that Wal-Mart would be excluded from the law) are akin to suggesting we not cure polio because we can’t roll up our long sleeve shirt for the shot.
@9…over here on the OTHER Capitol Hill, we are awaiting implementation of a policy that DOES treat paper and plastic bags the same. It’s a straight-up tax, a way for the government to take more of our money, not an initiative to prevent plastic bag trash in the Anacostia. I don’t use plastic bags, but on the rare occasion that I run to the store after work or forget to toss a reusable bag in my purse, I choose paper because (a) it’s waaaaaaaay more environmentally friendly; (b) we have to put our paper recycling in a separate bag, and paper bags just seem to make sense because they can just go in the recycling pile at the facility with the paper inside of it; and (c) I find it a lot easier to carry stuff home from the store in them (they don’t cut off the circulation to my fingers after 5 blocks). I’m not sure what I’ll do once they start charging tax on them…actually, I know exactly what I’ll do, I’ll have my old-school, doesn’t live in DC, gets paper bags because that’s just the way it should be grandmother collect all her bags and stash them for my recycling. HA – take that bag tax!
bag ban (outlaw) = OK
bag tax = retarded
both = pissing on a forrest fire
@11 – Sierra Club magazine rates the UW as the 2nd greenest University in the USA.
Hint: it’s in Seattle.
@20 sadly is correct.
I read a few years ago in the National Geographic that if fecal matter could glow in the dark and there were no electric lights that Mexico City would still be easily seen from space at night.
And apparently 57% of us like it that way.
You lost, go cry quietly in the corner.
Oddly enough, paper bags are probably way worse environmentally than plastic. Paper production is horribly polluting.
If banning one, you gotta ban both. Otherwise you end up in the situation San Francisco was in where they banned plastic and paper bag use skyrocketed. Of course, that had the nice side effect of making the stores who previously opposed a fee switch to wanting one when they realized how much more money they were now spending on the far more expensive bags.
And Will, you sure love to nya-nya-nya about how you voted to overturn a current law cause you want a ban instead. Are you going to do the research and lobbying to get that new law you want, and going to do the fundraising and organizing to fight the ACC again when they come back and run a campaign convincing the public that a ban is unfair and we should let people buy bags for, oh, a fee?
Unfortunately in Mexico City those plastic bags are probably roofing and insulation for half the population.
In Ireland, all plastic bags cost 22c (about 30c US) and nobody complains anymore. The majority of paper bags are recycled, but more significantly, pretty much everyone uses re-usable bags. I haven’t seen a single-use bag in about six months.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say Mexico City probably doesn’t have an initiative/referendum process and just passed the damn law without having to put it up to a public vote.
Initiative = nothing gets done.
Well, except anti-gay measures but it’s still a form of social stasis.