Bags be Gone

Save Plastic

Plastic, no longer a staple in Hollywood? Rest assured, you can still get a botched plastic surgery job in as LA county strip mall (no shortage of those), next to a Kinkos and a Chinese Restaurant (What was Kanye West’s mother thinking?)

The real plastic ban comes in the form of plastic bags used at retail. The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to ban plastic carryout bags in the city’s supermarkets and stores by July 2010. In the interim, it appears that plastic bags will still be available to shoppers—along with a 25 cent fee. According to the city council the 25 cent fee is designed to encourage shoppers to seek canvas bags. If stores don’t implement the the 25 fee, the entire county will be subject to a full scale ban.

San Francisco was the first to implement the ban on plastic bags about a year ago for large scale grocery chains. Globally, China followed suit shortly after, saving 37 million barrels of crude oil annually by just eliminating those pesky plastic bags.

This is great news for our environment! Is your city next? Let’s hope so.

As consumers become more and more aware of the plastic bag crisis, it important to stock ecofriendly bags made of cotton or canvas. We just returned from the Natural Products Show in Las Vegas and our neighboring booth, Oasis Bags, had plenty of nice options.

Even mainstream shopping stores have finally joined the reusable cloth bag bandwagon, as stores like Harris Teeter, Safeway and Fred Meyer carry such bags emblazoned with their respective logos.