Good afternoon Supervisors.  My name is Mark Gold and I’m President of Heal the Bay.

We are here today because Los Angeles County uses over 6 billion plastic bags a year.  Worldwide, we use over a million plastic bags a minute.  The marine debris problem has become a global environmental crisis.  Every year, 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die in the Pacific due to marine debris.  Unlike shoppers, marine life doesn’t get to make a bag choice.

Also, the County must comply with the zero trash Total Maximum Daily Loads for the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek.  There must be a 40% reduction in trash in the river and creek by the end of the year and full compliance by 2014.  It costs 17 cents a bag to dispose of them properly.  Also, plastic bags wreak havoc on the catch basin screens that the county is using to comply with the trash TMDLs.

We commend the County for their leadership on “The Day Without a Bag” event on December 20th.  Together, we really got the word out to tens of thousands of people on the need to use reusable bags.  However, education and voluntary programs have not worked.  Only 5% of plastic bags are currently recycled.

What has worked?  Bag bans and fees.  You can not recycle your way into cleaning up our rivers, beaches and bays.  Bans are in place in Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, China  and soon to be Australia. Also, San Francisco, Oakland and 30 towns in Alaska.  Fees are in place in Germany and Ireland.  No one has successfully used recycling to solve this problem.  The most successful recycling program, at 66%, would still leave 2 Billion bags in landfills and the environment.  This is unacceptable.

After 9 months of negotiation with County Public Works staff, the County CEO’s office, and Supervisor offices, we reached an agreement on Monday, January 14th.  The addition of convenience stores and approved accountability were enough to get our support.We prefer a ban and/or fee, but we are willing to support alternative 5 with Supervisor Yaroslavsky’s amendment, but we are absolutely opposed to Supervisor Antonovich’s 11th hour amendment on the supplemental agenda to weaken the proposal.  A delay of writing the proposal till 2010 is far too long to wait.  300 million more bags (5%) in landfills and the environment is 300 million bags too many.  We must stop this 30 year addiction to single use plastic bags.  Fifteen minutes of convenience is not worth hundreds of years of environmental devastation.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.