Yesterday, Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to enact a ban on single-use takeout bags. With reasonable exceptions, it bans plastic bags, bans paper bags with less than 40% recycled content, and requires a 15 cent fee on paper bag use to encourage the use of reusable bags. We thank Supervisors Shirakawa, Cortese, Kniss, and Yeager for their votes. Supervisor Yeager in particular has been supporting this issue for several years. President Cortese also rightly applauded the cooperation by the California Grocers Association on this matter, which I’ve seen personally at the city and county level.
You can watch the Supervisors here (Item 7). A Mercury News report is here. We have been following this issue for years in San Jose, Morgan Hill and elsewhere in addition to the County level, and are glad to see it succeed. Below are CGF’s latest letter to the Supervisors and video testimony by CGF Advocate Julie Hutcheson. Next up is to get the remaining cities in our area and elsewhere to move forward.
-Brian
CGF letter:
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