Item C: Plastic Bag Ban - Laserfiche WebLink

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Attachment D: Text responses from consumer plastic bag ban survey Portland offers a very small container for composting materials. Why can't that be encouraged with the garbage companies the next time they wan to raise their rates or extend their permit. Whatever leverage you have you should us. I am opposed to a ban BUT would love to have the retailers not use plastics as a first. Have them available, but have people have to ask for it. I do use the plastic and paper that I get from the stores. I do forget to ask for the paper to often and the plastic seems to be the first up. It takes hundre4ds of years for plastic bags to break down in the land fill. People are just plain lazy ! I rinse my fabric bags after each trip to the store and place them back in the car when they are dry for the next trip. So easy to do. Let's ban those bags! I support a ban Our family reuses plastic bags a minimum of 3 times, wash & rinse, often 5+ times. We are very conscious of the plastic disposal problem, aware also that they were a potential substitute for reducing paper use to preserve our trees. They did that, which we were glad for the opportunity to reduce tree cutting. The ability to carry heavily loaded bags into the house. (Diapers are another non- deteriorating problem.) We would really be handicapped at our house without the bags, and besides convenience, it was a way to acquire sacks when the kids were little and our money was extremely tight. As we age, it is the same situation. We would have to spend extra money (and sacks are quite expensive as an independent purchase) to have them for the purposes we need them for. They are a less expensive means of packaging purchases for stores as well, and other types if packaging is considerably more expensive. As for cloth bags, I see people putting fresh vegetables in the carts without wrapping, along with bloody wrapping of meat packaging, as well as in the cloth bags. I'm amazed at how lax people have become! The single-use plastic sacks are at least cleaner and help protect the buyer a little more than a cloth sacks--most protective if the cloth sack has been used before. It doesn't change the fact that they didn't cover the vegetables and/or not put them in a different sack than the meat, but a single-use sack is a help. I also shop for a lot of stuff at one time to conserve fuel expenditure, and the cloth bags fray easily, and I have to keep buying them to reuse. That costs more than I can afford these days. I recycle and haul my own garbage too to control disposal costs. I would be willing to do more extensive and effective recycling if a better method were created, even pay a little more at the disposal sites to be able to continue using plastic sacks. I think it would just add way more cost to my consumer costs and that it would be a huge mistake to prevent their use. There's way more that will be negatively impacted that should be considered than just the single solution to a disposal problem. I would rather do something more to effectively dispose of them than have to eliminate them at the stores. Please take that into real-life consideration before you just write us off without putting yourselves in our shoes. There's way too much of that in government as it is. Banning single-use plastic bags is the right thing to do for the environment!