Below appears the letter we submitted during the initial committee hearing accepting public comment on proposed San Francisco Bag Fee. 11.23.2004

To committee members I request this be read at today's hearing.

Introduced a little more than 25 years ago, plastic bags are accumulating in our environment at an alarming rate. They're everywhere: strewn along roadways, stuck in trees, and piled up beneath our kitchen sinks.

An estimated 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide every year. According to the Wall Street Journal the U.S. alone consumes 100 billion annually . While this massive consumption has represented a windfall for the plastic bag industry, the true costs to society from all these free bags are enormous: U.S retailers spend an estimated $2-4 billion on their plastic bags, which are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, and, the production of plastic bags consumes vast quantities of non-renewable fossil fuels.

According to Australia's Department of Environment, upwards of 3% of plastic bags end up as ugly, wind-blown litter. (That is billions every year.) Also, despite the common belief that plastic bags decompose and disappear, they actually slowly break down into smaller and smaller toxic bits that will forever pollute our oceans, rivers, lakes and soil. Each year millions of taxpayer dollars are spent collecting a tiny fraction of this litter. Most of it remains polluting our environment.

Before us is a choice. We can either sit back and let powerful industries set the agenda (keeping us on this treadmill of mindless, over-consumption) or wake up and take action. By following the lead of places like Ireland where their "PlasTax" has successfully reduced plastic bag consumption by over 90% we have at our hands a smart model to implement. They have had the foresight and will to implement a well designed consumption based fee that has curbed consumption and help capture the costs we all share with little ill effects outside of the plastic bag industry.

The bottom line is that "free" plastic bags are an illusion. Time to wake up. As the old adage says, nothing comes for free.

Vincent Cobb
Concerned Citizen and Founder of ReusableBags.com