Local youngsters who asked their supervisor last year to encourage restaurants in West Marin to stop offering plastic straws—now a state law—this week celebrated a step toward banning the use of other plastic wares.
On Tuesday, the Marin County Board of Supervisors agreed to draft a policy that would phase out the use of plastic food products by restaurants and food vendors in unincorporated Marin and at county facilities. The amendment would include so-called compostable plastics, which in Marin are largely redirected to landfills.
A group of students including fifth graders Viola Seda and Reese Patton had approached District Four Supervisor Dennis Rodoni in 2018 about the use of plastics in the county.
“A few years ago, me and my friend Reese started a campaign to stop plastic straws in West Marin. Now, Marin County is considering banning single-use plastics in Marin County like plastic forks, spoons, knives, and to-go boxes in addition to plastic straws,” Ms. Seda wrote to the Light this week. “Why me and Reese wanted to stop people using plastic straws was because the plastics are hurting animals in the wild, and we do beach cleanups sometimes and we find all of this plastic washed up on the beach and it’s just really sad, and animals eat plastic that’s in the ocean because they think it’s their food and they die because of the plastic inside them.”
Their efforts prompted Supervisors Dennis Rodoni and Kate Sears to look toward a new policy.
Marin already has a law regarding disposable food packaging, including cups, plates, bowls, trays and cartons. In 2009, it prohibited restaurants, food vendors and county facilities from using packaging made from polystyrene foam—commonly known as styrofoam—and required vendors to use “compostable disposable food packaging.”
The dated ordinance allows for the use of paper and bio-plastic wares that meet a common certification issued by the American Society for Testing and Materials, an international organization that sets standards for a variety of industries.
Rebecca Ng, the deputy director of the county’s environmental health services, said it has been difficult to enforce that ordinance over the last 10 years, considering the large number of products on the market and inconsistencies in labeling.
But the real problem, which Ms. Ng detailed in a report to the supervisors, is that the facility that processes the majority of the organic waste produced in Marin today—the Novato facility Earth Care, operated by Waste Management—cannot process the majority of the products that advertise as biodegradable, which often require high heat and shredding to break down. Accepting those wares would violate standards that make the compost produced there eligible for use on certified organic farms, based on guidelines from the United States Department of Agriculture.
So it’s not necessarily a fault of the facility, said Garen Kazanjian, the zero waste specialist for Recology, which hauls most of West Marin’s compost to the Novato site. Very few facilities nationwide can compost them, he said. Mr. Kazanjian was supportive of the county banning both single-use plastics and compostables.
“Compostable plastics are a way that people don’t feel so bad that they are using something for just five minutes,” he said. “In reality, we need to see people not using those things, and knowing that if you just use something for a short period, it still has to live somewhere: someone is responsible for it for a long time.”
Marin’s new policy—which Ms. Ng hopes will be brought before supervisors by January as an amendment to the existing ordinance—could surpass the state’s effort to tackle single-use plastics. The California legislature ended this month without voting on a bill, the California Circular Economy and Pollution Reduction Act, which would have been the first nationwide to mandate the reduction of single-use plastic packaging and disposable foodware, including plates, bowls, cups, stirrers and straws. The bill would have required producers to reduce waste from single-use packaging and foodware by 75 percent by 2030 through source reduction, recycling and composting.
The project approved by supervisors on Tuesday details coordinating with the local food service industry and with Marin’s cities and towns to allow for the potential of countywide implementation. It will also explore charging for non-reusable packaging items, the development of enforcement protocols, recommendations of potential funding strategies for continued implementation and the development of a public outreach and education program.