Victoria councillors are considering whether to bring in a bylaw banning city retailers from providing single-use plastic bags.
Councillors Ben Isitt and Jeremy Loveday are sponsoring a motion that calls on the city to implement the ban and on Mayor Lisa Helps to write to all the other municipalities and electoral areas in the Capital Regional District urging them to follow suit.
If the city gave first reading to such a bylaw, it would be the first city on Vancouver Island and the first Canadian capital city to do so. It also opens the door for public comment on the issue, Isitt said. “Eventually, we’d love to see it go CRD-wide, but our reading is that the city can move forward and we hope that other municipalities will join.”
The initiative is being promoted by the Vancouver Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental advocacy group with a coastal focus. Plastic bags are a major source of marine pollution. Surfrider says that on a single Coastal Cleanup Day in 2012, more than one million plastic bags were picked up and that the bags consistently make the top-10 list of items collected during beach cleanups.
Surfrider has been making presentations to council and has presented the city with a petition in support of the ban as well as 17 letters of support from local retailers including Mountain Equipment Co-op, The Copper Hat, Elemental Body Adornment, Patagonia Victoria and the Good Planet Company.
“I think that we’re following suit from other cities that have done the same thing. We think it creates a level playing field for all businesses,” said Gillian Montgomery, Surfrider Vancouver Island chairwoman.
“There are some businesses that say, ‘Hey, we would love to not carry them, but we feel it’s a difficult thing because we are a smaller store and we feel that we might lose customers. But we do support the ban because it would create that level playing field,’ ” she said.
Isitt said the bags clog sewers and waterways. “Also, it takes about 500 years for a lot of petroleum-based products to break down,” Isitt said. “So essentially, it’s wasteful.”
A number of local retailers, including Thrifty Foods, have phased out use of the bags.
Thrifty Foods announced in 2009 it would stop providing single-use plastic bags, and switched to selling multiple-use bags. The grocer said at the time that it had handed out 27 million bags in the previous year.
“There are a lot of stores that do still carry them. We pick them up on the water,” Montgomery said.
Under the draft bylaw, plastic that would be permitted would include:
• bags used to package bulk items such as fruit, vegetables, nuts, grains, candy or small hardware items such as nails and bolts;
• bags used to contain or wrap frozen foods, meat or fish, flowers or potted plants;
• bags used to protect prepared foods or bakery goods;
• bags provided by pharmacists for prescription drugs;
• door hanger bags;
• laundry and dry cleaning bags;
• bags sold in packages for such purposes as garbage, pet waste, yard waste or recycling.
