While there was briefly 100 percent compliance with the city’s first-of-its-kind plastic bag ban, some chain supermarkets have in recenter months been exploiting a loophole in the law in order to continue offering its shoppers plastic as well as paper.
Yes, it is still possible in San Francisco to bring home one’s groceries in a landfill-choking, high-polluting plastic bags, although those halcyon days will soon be over for good.
Some chains, like Lucky and Delano’s, offer bags of higher-grade plastic — thicker and stronger than the typical shopping bags seen in exotic locales like the Target in Daly City. They can legally do so in San Francisco by calling the higher-grade plastic reusable.
That’s it: thicker “reusable” plastic, and you’re good to go.
The bag ban’s author, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, on Tuesday called for an end to this “loophole” in the original bag ban’s language. Mirkarimi asked the Department of the Environment to strengthen the existing language in a way that would really, truly and for real this time prevent all supermarkets from using plastic bags.
Still exempt from the law: liquor stores, who will still happily wrap your six-pack in black plastic, lest the world at large be filled with envy over your tasteful choice of Mirror Pond IPA or other libation.
