Dear Board of Supervisors,

The management and employees of Earthwise Bag Company Inc would like to congratulate you and commend you for your recent decision to ban single use plastic bags in LA County. We are confident that your bold decision will certainly help to encourage other cities & counties around the country to move in this direction to help in protecting our environment and reduce the enormous cost of cleaning up these bags.

We also want to bring to your attention that at the hearing last week Mr. Stephen Joseph, council for SaveThePlasticBag.com held up a green reusable bag during his presentation against the measure and stated that “this bag made for LA County has lead in it”. Earthwise made and supplied that bag to LA County earlier this year and we are pleased to report that the lead content in this bag was way below the federal standard laid down by the Consumer products safety commission and in fact is even lower than the 100ppm that will be required by August 2011.
I have attached a copy of the test done by Bureau Veritas an independent and internationally recognized lab for your information.

Should you require any further information about reusable bags please do not hesitate to contact us. We thank you again for your public service and hope we can be helpful in the future to LA county in helping to inform the public about the benefits of using reusable shopping bags.

Yours sincerely

Stanley Joffe
President
earthwise bag company, inc.
2819 Burton Avenue
Burbank, Ca 91504
p. 818.847.2174
f. 818.847.9681
Choose to Reuse™

Lead Test Report

There are two things wrong with the plastic bag ban imposed this week by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. One is that charging a small fee for carryout plastic bags is a better solution than a ban. Fees have hugely reduced the use of the bags in countries that charge them while offering an option to consumers. The other problem is that a patchwork of municipal laws is confusing to consumers and inefficient for large chain stores.

Yet for both wrongs, the blame belongs not with the supervisors but with the Legislature, which pushed municipalities into this situation by passing one law that prohibited them from imposing fees on plastic bags until 2013, and rejecting another law that would have addressed this source of pollution on a statewide level.

Given the Legislature’s bumbling and the continued damage caused by carryout bags, the board did the best thing it could. If more large municipalities follow its lead — particularly the city of Los Angeles — the grocery industry, which supports a statewide solution, might join in prodding the Legislature into action.

One way or another, California should follow the lead of the more than 30 countries — and many more local governments — that have acted against plastic bags, a list diverse enough to include Papua New Guinea, France, Botswana and China. People in these countries appear to be getting along just fine without the bags, which choke waterways, contribute to urban and wilderness litter, are the second-most-common source of trash on California’s beaches and a key ingredient in the giant patches of plastic debris that are polluting the oceans. California’s consumers need to understand that plastic bags are not as “free” as they seem; the cost is rolled into the price of the goods they buy. What’s more, the state’s taxpayers pay close to $25 million a year to rid streets, beaches, parks and waterways of the bags.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich’s objection to the county ban — that poor people won’t be able to afford to pick up after their pets if they don’t receive plastic bags from stores — is off base. Only carryout bags, which are responsible for most of the plastic bag trash, would be banned. The smaller bags in which people put their produce, and in which this newspaper is delivered, tend to be disposed of properly in recycling or trash bins and are not affected by the ban.

The state tried beefing up recycling efforts for carryout plastic bags. It didn’t work. Californians use more than 120,000 tons of the bags each year, and recycle 5% of them. Now the Legislature needs to take stronger action, through either a statewide fee or a statewide ban, to put an end to the growing patchwork of local regulations.
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Shop & Save says no issues with their Earthwise reusable bags

A spokesperson for Shop ‘n Save said that “no problems have been identified with the reusable bags sold in SHOP ‘N SAVE stores. We have verified with our primary bag supplier, Earthwise, that our bags have passed independent testing for lead content. Additionally, we are closely monitoring this issue and are actively communicating with each of our vendor partners to ensure the safety of our bags going forward.”

Original article found on LA Times website

Enacting one of the nation’s most aggressive environmental measures, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to ban plastic grocery bags in unincorporated areas of the county.

The vote was 3-1, supported by Supervisors Gloria Molina, Mark Ridley-Thomas, and Zev Yaroslavsky, and opposed by Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. Supervisor Don Knabe was absent.

The ban, which will cover nearly 1.1 million residents countywide, is to the point: “No store shall provide to any customer a plastic carryout bag.” An exception would be made for plastic bags that are used to hold fruit, vegetables or raw meat in order to prevent contamination with other grocery items.

If grocers choose to offer paper bags, they must sell them for 10 cents each, according to the ordinance. The revenue will be retained by the stores to purchase the paper bags and educate customers about the law.

“Plastic bags are a pollutant. They pollute the urban landscape. They are what we call in our county urban tumbleweed,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said.

Mark Gold, president of the Santa Monica environmental group Heal the Bay, said previous county efforts to promote recycling of plastic bags at grocery stores was a failure.

“You cannot recycle your way out of the plastic bag problem,” Gold said. “The cost of convenience can no longer be at the expense of the environment.”

The measure is a significant win for environmental groups, which suffered a major defeat in Sacramento at the end of August with the failure of the state Senate to pass a sweeping plastic bag ban that won the support of the state Assembly and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger amid heavy and costly lobbying by plastic bag manufacturers.

But the ban could cause confusion. The action by the Board of Supervisors only covers the unincorporated areas of L.A. County, covering some neighborhoods like Altadena, Valencia and Rowland Heights, but doesn’t cover 88 cities in L.A. County. City councils could adopt a similar ordinance.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich raised the prospect that small mom-and-pop shops could suffer financially because they won’t be able to buy paper and reusable bags in great volume, and could force low-income people to buy bags to pick up pet waste or carry their lunch.

“At a time of economic uncertainty, with a large number of businesses leaving our state and community this would not be an appropriate time … to impose this additional regulation,” Antonovich said.

Opponents of the ban told the supervisors that a legal challenge to the ban is still a possibility.

With the Tuesday vote, L.A. County’s measure is more stringent than similar bans adopted elsewhere in California, Gold said.

San Francisco’s ban, which passed three years ago, is less restrictive because it still permits grocers to offer bioplastic bags made from corn starch, which are imperfect because they also do not degrade in the ocean, Gold said. Bans in San Francisco and Malibu also do not add a surcharge on paper bags, Gold said, which does not give consumers an incentive to switch to reusable cloth bags.

Washington, D.C., decided to tackle the issue not with a ban on any kind of bag, but a 5-cent surcharge per any item of disposable bag.

Gold, however, said an outright ban will be more effective on reducing the 6 billion plastic bags that are used in L.A. County every year, which according to the county, account for 25% of the litter picked up here.

Government figures show that just 5% of plastic bags are recycled.
Last week, the American Chemistry Council, one of the chief opponents of the ban, warned L.A. County leaders that the proposed ordinance and fee on paper bags fall under the voting requirements of Proposition 26. The initiative, which passed this month, reclassifies most regulatory fees on industry as “taxes” requiring a two-thirds vote in government bodies or in public referendums, rather than a simple majority.

County Counsel Andrea Ordin said Tuesday that the 10-cent surcharge on paper bags is not a fee covered by Prop. 26 because the revenue is being kept by the grocers and not directed to a government agency.