L.A. votes in plastic bag ban

The Sierra Club Angeles Chapter applauds the city of Los Angeles' decision to ban plastic bags at supermarket checkout lines. L.A. becomes the largest city in the nation to approve such a ban.

Chapter members rallied at City Hall on Wednesday before the City Council vote on controlling single-use plastic bags.

Why does it matter? Heal the Bay outlines the problem with plastic:

Plastic bags blight our communities and harm the environment. They clog our water ways, take up precious landfill space and foul our oceans.

Paper bags are wasteful – reusable bags are the most sustainable solution.

An estimated 2.33 billion single-use plastic carryout bags, and 400 million single-use paper bags are used in L.A. each year.

Plastic bag pollution is costly to clean up – it costs an estimated 17 cents per bag to clean up, recycle and landfill plastic bags.
We can’t recycle our way out of this problem – only about 5% of plastic bags and 21% of paper bags are recycled.

Forty-five cities and counting have already adopted single-use bag bans in California. If L.A. adopts a bag ban, one-fourth of Californians will live in a plastic-bag free community.