Peninsula Daily News and news sources
Mukilteo has become the latest Western Washington city to ban plastic carry-out grocery bags.
The measure is aimed at cutting pollution in Puget Sound and the ocean where plastic bags can harm whales, seals and salmon.
In 2010, a beached gray whale in West Seattle was found with 20 plastic bags in its stomach.
With this new policy, Mukilteo becomes the third city in the state to ban plastic bags, joining Bellingham and Edmonds.
The next one might be the state’s largest: Seattle.
The Seattle City Council is also considering a plastic bag ban.
Mukilteo won’t implement its ordinance for a year to give retailers time to get used to the idea, exhaust their supplies and give City Hall time to promote use of reusable bags.
Edmonds adopted a similar approach, putting its ban into effect in August 2010, a year after it was approved by its City Council.
The city of Bellingham last July passed a similar ban to take effect in July 2012.
There are exceptions to most of the bans.
Bags for takeout food at restaurants as well as the smaller bags for meat, bulk foods and vegetables at stores, and for newspapers, door hangers and pet waste are among those that will still be allowed.
It’s estimated that every American household uses between 520 and 1,000 bags per year, Mukilteo Planning Director Heather McCartney said. The national recycling rate for plastic bags is less than 5 percent, she said.
Plastic bags consume more resources and produce more waste than reusable bags, and cause more problems than paper bags because they require oil to produce, take years to break down and pose a hazard to marine life, according to Mukilteo city research on the issue.
Plastic bags take anywhere from 10 years to more than a century to disintegrate, according to various Internet sources.
Ironically, it’s exactly 10 years ago this month that Port Townsend Paper Corp. closed its 65-year-old paper bag plant, costing 90 people their jobs.
The reason: Plastic bags had decimated the paper bag market and the plant was no longer profitable.
