Styrofoam’s days in Long Beach restaurants are numbered after the city council voted Tuesday night to implement a phased-in ban of the product that is often used to package nearly everything from tacos to pumpkin pie.
The vote was part of year’s-long process that has spanned many iterations of the city council and will place a ban on the product being used in restaurants or in other retail settings where ready-to-eat food is sold within the city, including food trucks. Long Beach will join a list of over 100 other cities in the state that regulate the use of the substance to package food.
The first entities that will have to comply with the ban are city-owned and sanctioned events with large restaurants—defined as those having over 101 seats—having to follow suit within nine months of the ordinance’s passage. Smaller restaurants (less than 100 seats) would be subject to the ban at a later date, currently proposed as 18 months from the adoption date, but compliance could be subject to a study that will measure the impacts of similar bans in other cities.
Originally the motion stood to impact smaller businesses sooner with “large” restaurants being defined as those with 31 or more seats. Changing the threshold to over 100 seats will result in about 1,000 Long Beach restaurants having more time to comply with the proposed ban.
Items like styrofoam ice chests, bean bag chairs containing polystyrene beads, as well as bags of the beads currently sold at arts and crafts stores would also be subject to the ban. The council’s vote will initiate a separate study to identify if it’s feasible for the city to install a number of “Big Belly”-style trash receptacles along key corridors of the city to better hold debris and prevent overflows that result in trash ending up on city streets.
“This is not intended to beat anybody up, this is intended to work with them, to help them comply,” said Diko Melkonian, Long Beach’s Bureau Manager of Environmental Services. “Ultimately the goal would be to reduce litter on our streets and beaches, to prevent that pollution from getting to our ocean habitats, reduce the public’s contact with harmful chemicals and promote the use of reusable items over single-use items.”
The item, authored by First District Councilwoman Lena Gonzalez, first came to the council in December 2016 and was spurred by research from a local environmental group that found millions of broken pieces of polystyrene products mixed into the city’s beach sand.
Polystyrene, more commonly referred to as styrofoam, is credited with polluting beaches but also contributing to the risk of disease due to its compounds containing likely cancer-causing chemicals that can leach into water supplies and bioaccumulate in fish and other animals fished for human consumption.
Katie Allen, executive director at Algalita Marine Research and Education, the firm that conducted the study, said that styrofoam takeout containers and like materials often break down into smaller pieces where they can intermix with the local environment and enter water ecosystems and food supplies. The group’s study found some four million pieces of styrofoam products on just a two-mile stretch of the Long Beach coastline.
Allen said that the material, while recyclable, is often not recycled at the rates that it could be due to its low resale value. She remarked that on a trip to a recycling center that her group witnessed the staff paying a customer to take away recycled polystyrene “to meet their quota” of diverting a certain amount of the material.
“We’re working with plastics that literally are designed to be used once yet are designed to last forever,” Allen said. “We’ve been very irresponsible with this material when we should have feared the consequences of plastics from the very beginning. We were not responsible with a persistent and polluting material that now is ubiquitous in nature.”
To read the full story, visit https://lbpost.com/news/2000011633-a-unanimous-vote-bans-styrofoam-packaging-from-use-in-long-beach-restaurants.