A final draft should be ready by the end of this month, and council will vote on it in March.

Read the Statesman article here.

The City of Austin might ban disposable plastic and paper bags at checkout counters three years earlier than originally planned.

A revised draft of the ban, released Friday, moves up the date the ban would take effect to January 2013 from January 2016 .

The new draft would require retailers to charge customers 10 cents per disposable bag — paper or plastic — from June to late December, as a precursor to the outright ban. Under the old draft, retailers would have had to charge 25 cents per disposable bag from January 2013 to late 2015 .

A city commission will discuss the revised draft Wednesday. Austin Resource Recovery, the city department that wrote both ban drafts and oversees trash and recycling, also plans to hold a public meeting Jan. 23 to gather feedback.

The changes reflect input from retailers, residents and other advocates since the first draft was unveiled last month, said Austin Resource Recovery Director Bob Gedert. Some wondered why the city couldn’t enact the ban sooner than 2016. And retailers, as well as advocates for low-income people, complained that the 25-cent interim fee was too high.

The draft could be changed again before the council votes on it in March , Gedert said.

I didn’t attend the public meeting about the first draft, I only read about it in the Statesman, but it sounds like city staffers were convinced that there is a lot more support for the ban than against, so they came up with something that moves faster toward a total ban.  Exciting!

• Establishing reuse centers and drop-off facilities throughout the city to recover a variety of recyclable, reusable and repairable materials, including batteries, motor oil, paint and anti-freeze

• Enhancing the Single Stream Recycling Program by accepting additional material types

• Conducting a pilot program to collect yard trimmings, food scraps and compostable paper at the curb, and possibly rolling out a new citywide organics collection program based on the pilot program results

• Developing and operating a new Household Hazardous Waste Facility in North Austin

• Phasing in universal recycling and composting requirements to all waste generators — both residential and commercial — within the city

Check out the ABJ article for more details.

Neither of those arguments sound like such great points as to negate the benefits of a bag ban.  Just as people will have to learn to remember to carry their reusable bags into the store, they will also have to remember to make a point of washing their bags every few weeks (more or less depending on what you’re comfortable with), and if you aren’t able to lift large bags, you’ll have to remember to ask the bag boy or girl to not fill your bags over X pounds, and if they do fill them over X pounds, you’ll have to ask them to re-do it.  I can remember back in the day when I was little my mother preferred paper over plastic, and often she would have to watch the bag boy/girl when they were bagging our groceries into paper bags and make sure they didn’t over-pack them so they got too heavy. It wasn’t that big of a deal.

The Texas Retailers Association, which represents grocery stores, pharmacies and other retailers statewide, has resisted a ban and said it is disappointed with the details of the draft.

Ronnie Volkening, the group’s president, said Friday that the 25-cent fee would be one of the highest in the nation.

“It will have a hugely regressive impact on low-income citizens and families,” he said.

He also said the ban unfairly exempts some plastic goods, such as dry cleaning bags, while targeting large retailers that have worked hard to cut down on plastic bags by promoting recycling and reuse. Enacting a ban would be a disincentive for retailers to continue to accept plastic bags and other plastic products for recycling, meaning many more of those products could end up in landfills, he said.

I for one am very happy with what I’ve heard about the proposal and look forward to learning more!

Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell started his re-election bid in November with an announcement that it is his intention to find a way to provide energy to the City of Austin without the use of any coal-generated electricity.

“Starting immediately, I’m going to begin a dialogue with the community, with Austin Energy, with the LCRA, and with state officials, about how to make Austin coal-free–and aggressively plan a date to achieve that goal,” the mayor said during his announcements.

Currently, Austin obtains coal-based energy from only one source, the Fayette Power Project in La Grange.

The 600 megawatt plant provides nearly 20 percent of Austin’s power, while the rest comes from natural gas, nuclear
and an increasing amount of wind power. As a start to getting off coal, all City of Austin facilities and operations are 100% powered by Greenchoice® energy, derived from entirely renewable sources.

The city started a program in 2008 that allows owners or renters of single-family homes to put all their recyclables, unsorted, in big curbside carts. Gedert recently signed deals with two local firms to sort and process those goods well into the future.

In the next few years, Gedert wants to add more goods — such as durable plastics, aluminum foil and small scrap metal items — to the recyclables accepted at the curb.

Austin already collects yard trimmings at the curb and turns them into Dillo Dirt at a city facility. But the plan calls for starting a program in 2015 to collect more organic goods — food scraps, yard trimmings and untreated wood — at the curb in a cart separate from recyclables. The city would compost those goods or hire a company to do so.

Currently, organic materials make up more than 40 percent of the trash Austin sends to landfills. That means a lot of material that could have another life as rich soil is going to waste, Gedert said.

The city collects recyclables every two weeks and trash carts once a week, but Gedert wants to swap those schedules about 2016 — in the hope that if Austinites are recycling and composting more, they’ll have less trash that can be hauled away less often.

The city also plans to add a second location, in North Austin , where residents can drop off hazardous items such as paint, cleaners, batteries and pesticides for the department to dispose of properly. The current location is in South Austin .

Aiming to make reuse simpler, Gedert wants to set up four “eco-depots” run by nonprofits where residents could drop off or take items that could be reused or repaired, such as furniture and toys, and creating a resource center where people could bring goods suitable for classrooms that teachers could retrieve for free.

These are all really great ideas I think.  Adding durable plastics to the list of things that could be recyclable would be great, and I’ll admit, I thought aluminum foil was already accepted so adding that would be great too.  Making it easier to get rid of hazardous materials correctly would also be a huge improvement.  The eco-depots sounds like a great idea although some aspects of them may duplicate the efforts of Goodwill, but I think other cities have similar programs despite also having Goodwill/the Salvation Army.

Gedert also talks about possibly implementing a per-gallon trash fee, rather than the current rate configuration which is  a base rate plus a rate for whatever size trash cart you use.  I think getting rid of the base rate and more directly assigning costs based on causation  also makes a lot of sense. Check out the whole article!

The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They’re made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recentstudy found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide — about 2 percent in the U.S. — and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that’s not always the case. “They’re so aerodynamic that even when they’re properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter,” says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It’s as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we’re not talking about your everyday eyesore.

Once aloft, stray bags cartwheel down city streets, alight in trees, billow from fences like flags, clog storm drains, wash into rivers and bays and even end up in the ocean, washed out to sea. Bits of plastic bags have been found in the nests of albatrosses in the remote Midway Islands. Floating bags can look all too much like tasty jellyfish to hungry marine critters. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In theNorthern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there’s now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that’s twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There’s six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre. “It’s an endless stream of incessant plastic particles everywhere you look,” says Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of education and research for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation,which studies plastics in the marine environment. “Fifty or 60 years ago, there was no plastic out there.”

Following the lead of countries like Ireland, Bangladesh, South Africa, Thailand and Taiwan, some U.S. cities are striking back against what they see as an expensive, wasteful and unnecessary mess. This year, San Francisco and Oakland outlawed the use of plastic bags in large grocery stores and pharmacies, permitting only paper bags with at least 40 percent recycled content or otherwise compostable bags. The bans have not taken effect yet, but already the city of Oakland is being sued by an association of plastic bag manufacturers calling itself the Coalition to Support Plastic Bag Recycling. Meanwhile, other communities across the country, including Santa Monica, Calif., New Haven, Conn., Annapolis, Md., and Portland, Ore., are considering taking drastic legislative action against the bags. In Ireland, a now 22-cent tax on plastic bags has slashed their use by more than 90 percent since 2002. In flood-prone Bangladesh, where plastic bags choked drainage systems, the bags have been banned since 2002.

The problem with plastic bags isn’t just where they end up, it’s that they never seem to end. “All the plastic that has been made is still around in smaller and smaller pieces,” says Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation, which has undertaken a Campaign Against the Plastic Plague. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade. That means unless they’ve been incinerated — a noxious proposition — every plastic bag you’ve ever used in your entire life, including all those bags that the newspaper arrives in on your doorstep, even on cloudless days when there isn’t a sliver of a chance of rain, still exists in some form, even fragmented bits, and will exist long after you’re dead.

And further down in the article:

The only salient answer to paper or plastic is neither. Bring a reusable canvas bag, says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. However, if you have to make a choice between the two, she recommends taking whichever bag you’re more likely to reuse the most times, since, like many products, the production of plastic or paper bags has the biggest environmental impact, not the disposal of them. “Reusing is a better option because it avoids the purchase of another product.”