[image by envirowoman]

Switching to compostable grocery bags has some barriers ahead in Los Angeles, though banning plastic bags isn’t out of the question, via a combo of paper bags and schemes to encourage canvas bag reuse.

San Francisco put a plastic ban through, so why can’t we? LA has few composting plants that can handle recycling them, and even less infrastructure for collecting them for effective recycling, sez the LA Times. It’s true — the current recycling system is inadequate to handle massive new amounts of compostable bags.

Of course, we could push the city to put these in place — but that doesn’t actually change our disposable, one-time-use consumer culture. It just replaces one throwaway package with another (albeit somewhat better) one.

Grocery stores, as is typical, want the government to let the corporations develop their own schemes — which seems like a v. bad idea, as left to their own devices, grocery stores generally do nothing, or what seem like purposefully doomed-to-fail things.

I’m leaning towards just adding on a bag tax, sort of like what IKEA has done voluntarily, making people pay a nickel per plastic bag. With such a tax, anyone who simply brings their own bag’ll never have to pay the tax, so it wouldn’t be onerous for anyone but the laziest of consumers….

Another idea would be to make grocery stores pay a bag tax for the plastic waste it gives out. This would then incentivize grocery stores to develop more effective bring your own bag schemes, which said stores say they’re willing to do to anyway….

Update, 4/11/07: Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors officially directed the Department of Public Works to study ways to deal with plastic grocery bags. DPW’s to report back in 90 days.

Update, 7/23/08: A roundup of all the state, county, and city level stuff happening to reduce styrofoam and plastic bag use in the LA area.

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