Baggage 

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Christman's statement illustrates the old credo about how big businesses aren't immoral but amoral. Between smarmy, bottom-line–driven salarymen or earnest, well-meaning public servants like Mirkarimi and the folks at the Department of the Environment (whose business cards are "printed with soy-based inks on acid-free, 100 percent postconsumer recycled paper processed chlorine free"), it's no mystery where San Franciscans' sympathies lie. And yet, just like scientific reports concluding plastic bags — "synthetic vermin" — are less of a toll on the environment than paper ones, the notion that self-interested industry representatives could be largely right while progressive politicians and environmentalists are wrong is a counterintuitive — and uncomfortable — notion. In this matter, life is more complicated than spotting who is wearing the black hat or the white hat — or, for that matter, the plastic or paper ones.

In 2002, Ireland mandated a fee of 21 euro cents on plastic shopping bags; within a year, its residents were using 90 percent fewer of them. This was the kind of measure the Department of the Environment and Mirkarimi originally pushed for San Francisco. It wasn't what they got. During a one-year voluntary bag-reduction program adopted by the city's largest grocery stores, the supermarkets' lobbying arm, the California Grocers Association (CGA), turned around and engineered a 2006 state law forbidding municipalities from forcing stores to charge a fee on bags. This galvanized the Board of Supervisors behind Mirkarimi — "I told the mayor, 'No more talking. We're going for the ban,'" he recalls. Mark Westlund, a spokesman for the Department of the Environment, told the media that San Francisco had no option other than the one it took. But that isn't true.

Thoughtful and innovative methods of skirting the 2006 state law are being developed in the Bay Area — but not in San Francisco. While the state forbids municipalities from imposing a bag fee on stores, leaders in Santa Clara County will vote this year on whether to place a fee directly on consumers, to be collected by stores. If that idea fails to gain support — or doesn't survive the inevitable lawsuit from the plastics industry — the county could simply ban plastic bags and then charge a fee of around 25 cents on paper ones. These methods don't have the San Francisco ban's righteous simplicity, and — in a possible anathema to city liberals — they target mom-and-pop shops as well as chains. But the South Bay plans would actually reduce consumption and help the environment.

While Mirkarimi likes to tout bag fees, he doesn't seem thrilled with the idea of San Franciscans paying them. The fee he proposed in 2005 would have been footed by stores, not by shoppers — a model that has never created significant reductions. He gushed about programs at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's in which shoppers who bring their own bags receive tiny rewards. While this approach makes people feel good about themselves, it doesn't produce real results. Yet when IKEA began charging for bags, consumption dropped 92 percent in the first year alone. Finally, shoppers who go the extra mile to bring reusable bags are missing the big picture — an Australian study noted that driving two kilometers (1.25 miles) roundtrip to the store burns the fuel energy it would take to create 17.5 plastic bags.

In the coming months, the state may step in and undertake the heavy lifting San Francisco has failed to do. The City of Los Angeles recently passed a measure proposing a ban of plastic bags in 2010 if the state doesn't put a 25-cent fee on them. A state bill that would have done just that died in the Assembly last year, a victim of the collapsing economy. That bill was supported by the CGA, which detests plastic bans, since they force stores to hand out paper and compostable plastic bags costing far more than conventional plastic. Yet even with backing from the grocers' lobby and the state's largest city, Mark Murray, the executive director of the environmental group Californians Against Waste, foresees "a very uphill battle" for any statewide bag fees in the current economy.

Ditto that on the local front. While likening San Francisco's bag ban to "a half-measure" and "one-winged airplane" without further provisions to actually cut consumption, Mirkarimi said, "the tsunami of our budget crisis" will keep San Francisco flying its one-winged plane for the time being. The honest, aggressive approaches to quell plastic bags in an ecologically responsible manner will be ceded to Santa Clara County: a region, ironically enough, many San Franciscans regard as superficial, boring, and — dare we say it — plastic.