Best alternative so far: Exchanging baskets for the bags

Plastic bags are taking a hit as Fairfax joins San Francisco and Oakland to ban their use at grocery and other retail checkout counters. It's a move that the Marin County Board of Supervisors is considering, beginning with an "awareness campaign" aimed at helping to wean consumers off the plastic - as well as the paper - diet and into the habit of opting for reusable shopping bags instead. San Anselmo is looking at a similar approach. "The Town Council is very interested in encouraging residents to voluntarily begin using reusable bags," notes Town Manager Debbie Stutsman.

Plastic bags aren't recycled, as we understand the term, and they don't biodegrade, either; in fact, plastic in general is so well-engineered, it's almost kin to the proverbial cockroach that can, through sheer evolutionary gall, survive world's end. Plastic is a dogged survivor, for even though it does degrade, it doesn't go away. It continues to exist as broken-up fragments of toxic litter that is already carpeting the earth, floating in the oceans, and turning pristine beaches into waste dumps. It's also killing animals, fish, and birds that eat the harmless-looking leftover scraps, which are, in fact, fatally indigestible.

"Barely recyclable (current figures have stalled at 1-4%), almost all of the 600 bags used in the State per second are discarded. Once discarded, they either enter our landfills or our marine ecoystem," Californians Against Waste advises on its Web site. That's not news to the Marin Conservation League, which in 1990 published a four-page report on the "plastic paradox": as in, how to handle the remains of the ubiquitous product that has short-term use, but a "long-term life span."

Promises Unfulfilled

Patty Garbarino, president, Marin Sanitary Service

Patty Garbarino has been face to face with the paradox of plastic for the past 17 years as president of the family-owned Marin Sanitary Service and says very little has changed - at least in terms of finding a recycle market for all those plastic bags stuffed in the garbage. "The plastics industry began promising a solution in 1992 and has yet to deliver on it," she says, her impatience and irritation unmasked.

Still, Garbarino is encouraged by the recent moves to ban the bag. "Environmental concerns have converged with consumer clout, adding synergy to the movement. Everything is coming together, and it's wonderful."

Marin Sanitary launched the first curbside recycling program in the nation and today recycles over 76 percent of all the trash collected in its central Marin service area. What makes plastic so tough to deal with, from a waste-management standpoint, is that this man-made fabric of our lives comes in 350 varieties, all made to suit certain purposes and manufactured with chemicals that often don't mix when it comes to the recycling process.

There are also two primary plastic consumer-use categories: pre-consumer and post-consumer. The former, representing products including shrink-wrap for packaging and dry-cleaning bags, is "clean" and can be reused to make other plastic things.

The Dirty Truth

Post-consumer plastic is what Garbarino deals with at the company's San Rafael-based Marin Recycling Center, 97 percent of which is plastic used to package or carry food. That means it's dirty, and food contamination poses another barrier for recycling. The only way to clean plastic for reuse is to heat it, but thin plastic, such as that used in bags, more readily degrades in the process. Worse, says Garbarino, melting plastic releases dioxin, a carcinogen - and that raises an issue that has kept Marin Sanitary from finding a suitable recycling solution.

"Most of that plastic gets sent overseas to developing nations, like Indonesia, where it's burned," which is how recyclable plastic, such as bottles, is in fact recycled - burning it to melt it down into pellets for "down-cycling," the term for what plastic recycling really represents: one-time reuse as just another product that is ultimately destined for the waste stream. "We do not deal with any potential plastic recycling effort that sends its waste overseas," says Garbarino.

"There's a place for plastic, but we also need to consume less, and we need responsible manufacturing," says Garbarino, whose feelings about plastic echo the assessment of her father, Joseph Garbarino, who founded the company five decades ago: "If a company can't recycle the product it makes, it shouldn't be making it."

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Californians Against Waste > www.cawrecycles.org

RECYCLING INFORMATION

City of Novato > www.ci.novato.ca.us

Marin Sanitary Service > www.marinsanitary.com

Mill Valley Refuse Service > www.millvalleyrefuse.com