The City of Berkeley, California, has proposed levying a tax on disposable food containers, prohibiting the use of takeout containers that can’t be recycled and requiring restaurants to use reusable dishware for dining in.
The proposal, presented by Mayor Jesse Arreguin on Tuesday, is part of the Bay Area city’s effort to completely eliminate the waste it sends to landfills by 2020.
Berkeley already bans polystyrene and imposed a plastic bag ban that predated California’s statewide ban by several years. It is also considering a ban on plastic straws.
According to The Daily Californian, Arreguin told a crowd at Berkeley Recycling Center on Tuesday that the proposed ban on all disposable plastic materials would be the first of its kind.
“We feel it’s essential that we must create a mandate for businesses in our city to do the right thing,” he said.
If passed, Berkeley’s ban would follow ordinances implemented by four other California cities – Santa Cruz, Alameda, Davis and Malibu – as well as Seattle and Fort Myers, Florida, that limit the use of disposable, single-use items like straws or plastic utensils. According to the Ecology Center, which handles Berkeley’s recycling, its ordinance would go further than the other cities’ bans.
As proposed, it would prohibit restaurants from using single-use dishes or containers when patrons eat in. All take-out containers would need to be approved by the city as meeting recyclable or compostable standards. The measure would impose a 25 cent charge on each cup or food container provided to customers, but compostable straws, napkins, utensils and coffee stirrers could be offered to customers for no charge.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, plastics take between 100 and 400 years to break down in landfills, while it never fully breaks down in the ocean, where a majority of the world’s trash ends up. Recent estimates of the size of the Great Pacific garbage patch peg it as twice the size of Texas and nearly four times the size of California.
“Single-use disposable foodware is a local and global problem, one with enormous financial and environmental costs,” City Council Member Sophie Hahn, who co-authored the proposal, said in a statement. “As a city striving toward Zero Waste, we do a good job with composting and recycling, but it is not enough. We need to start reducing our waste as well.”
The drive to reduce even recyclable waste became more urgent after China, which imports scrapped goods from much of the world, enacted new shipping rules that sharply reducing its intake of U.S. waste.
To read the full story, visit https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-04-25/berkeley-proposes-tax-on-disposable-food-containers.