The new year brings a few new regulations:
1. Electronics recycling is now free. But please don’t dump everything off this week. Give them time to ramp up.
2. Chain restaurants must post nutritional info, and all restaurants cannot use trans fats.
3. Minimum wage bumps to $8.55
4. Grocery bags are now 20 cents and styrofoam is banned for takeout food. Remember to bring your own bags. And take video of other people having temper tantrums about it. (The ban is on hold until the referendum is voted on.)
I think that only the bag ban part is being voted upon, but the bullshit styrofoam thing is still on. This is really going to put a hurting on small local businesses.
how is not using styrofoam bullshit and in what way does it hurt small businesses?
I had no idea about the electronics thing, and I’d wondered about the bag thing, the nutritional thing and the minimum wage thing, too. U R helpful, srsly srsly!
you sneaky star rabble rouser
I’d like to see the numbers on the cost differences between styrofoam and a biodegradable alternative. I bet it’s like 4 cents vs 5 cents. Is that really gonna hurt business, raising prices a penny?
SeattleBrad, if it is so negligible, why do we need to legislate it? Wouldn’t those restaurants feel the pressure of a marketing campaign? Is this really what we should be spending our time legislating (and enforcing!)?
I bet if you look at the difference to the environment, it’s pretty negligible too.
That’s fantastic. And banning transfats – they are very bad for health and it’s nearly impossible to figure out who uses them and who doesn’t.
Anyone know by what percentage the bring-your-own bag law is going to reduce our city’s waste by (should it ever be passed)? I wager it is under 0.1%. Want to actually make a dent? Why don’t we just increase garbage collection fees – residential AND commercial?
What’s the goal of the styrofoam ban? Reduce the amount of non-recyclable stuff going into our trash cans? Is left overs and take out even close to 10% of the non-recyclable waste we produce in this city? Shouldn’t we either do something that makes a real dent or do nothing at all, lest we all feel like we’re doing something when we are not?
I’m guessing some of the cost will be for businesses that had previously purchased huge supplies of the styrofoam containers that are now “against the law.” If they weren’t able to plan accordingly (or purchased prior to the passage of the law) they are forced to incur more costs w/the new replacement containers.
Side note: Boom Noodle has already been using a cardboard/recycled-type alternative for take-out boxes. But those things seem to degrade pretty quickly. A durable alternative to styrofoam might be a challenge for some of the joints that offer juicier entrees.
@dudeman – I don’t understand what your first point, just because something doesn’t cost a lot of money, we shouldn’t legislate it? I just don’t understand the logic behind that.
And yes you’re right, the effect of this particular ban, taken on it’s own, could probably be considered negligible. But that is the kind of thinking that got our environment in the shape it is today in the first place. People thought that Puget Sound was so huge that we could just dump garbage into it, the effects would be negligible. People thought we could burn all the fossil fuels at that the effects of the Co2 would be negligible. There are a lot of people in this world, which means that any individual action, even by a city like Seattle might seem negligible, but that’s no excuse for doing nothing.
I agree with you that raising garbage collection fees would be a great way to go. But I don’t think that would ever pass if reducing waste was the stated goal. That is something that is NOT optional (like the bag fee is), and it seems like it would have to be a pretty significant increase in order to actually make a difference in peoples behaviors.
I would hope that they would allow business to use up their remaining supply. I think even the city would realize that making businesses throw away all their already purchased styrofoam would be counter-productive to their goal.
@cheesecake – we’d need thousands and thousands of rules like this to make a difference and each one would have unintended consequences.
I don’t think incrementally small rules got the environment into the shape it is today – what made the environment bad was massive dumping and polluting. Metro didn’t clean up Lake Washington in the 70s and 80s by implementing a ban on spitting in the lake, they spent real money and effort to figure out where the pollution was coming from.
I just feel like there are only so many laws you can pass before people become overwhelmed and have a knee-jerk “no” reaction to them. Each one incrementally makes sense and seems easy to follow – particularly for people like us who care – but there are only so many that we can take.
The bag fee won’t do anything practical to reduce the amount of waste the city makes except to make people annoyed at the environmentalists for nickel and diming them whenever they go to the grocery store. And it will add an extra few hours to track the number of bags used in each store every year.
My point on the styrafoam is if they are virtually the same price, why do some people use one and not the other? I personally hate food in styrafoam – it tastes like cancer – but it seems like a really arbitrary thing to legislate when we could just tell restaurants we don’t like it.
One last little bit – I always get annoyed by people who don’t run businesses saying things like “is this really going to affect business?” I’m guessing that usually it won’t, but usually business owners know pretty well what will and what won’t affect their businesses.
Okay, actual last bit until someone riles me up again. Laws like charging 20 cents for grocery bags are exactly the kind of laws that wouldn’t change where we are today one bit. We’ll still use just as much CO2 and drive all over the place, but some people will feel like they’re doing their part because they are reusing bags when they buy bottled water that was shipped from Fiji.
And it wouldn’t take that much of a garbage fee increase to reduce consumption – there are plenty of people who will never change, but there are also people on the margin who would decide to go for a smaller container.
There are lots of “real” things we could do that would make more than a symbolic difference to the environment. We could also impose a car tax. Or raise the gas tax – high gas prices were very effective at reducing driving and increasing mass transit use this last summer. Or reduce bus fares. Or create expensive toll lanes on the freeway and use the revenues to improve mass transit. Or we could raise rates on electricity and use the additional money for transit.