On the bags, I'd be happier if the bag charge (especially if at the higher end) went to a fund to subsidize reusable bags for low income people. Current varieties mostly wouldn't be cheap for a family with low income and several children i.e. largish shopping item volumes (though I've seen some from Freddie's I think that may be cheaper than the cloth "tote bag" style on offer at some places).

Maybe you could get a coupon or a card punched every time you paid your 20¢ per bag & when you reached a certain amount trade the coupons or card in right there for a reusable bag.

A lot of the "social cost" probably involves landfill costs & I almost wonder if there's enough to be saved to the city there to justify handling re-usable bags something like the way recycling & yard debris bins are handled.

Also wonder if this will have a particular effect on stores near the city boundary, i.e. lead some people to choose to shop outside of Portland.

I tend to like positive incentives (a credit for bringing your own bag) vs. a negative one. I'm also worried about creating a completely new revenue stream for city government that bears very little relationship to what I view as their core functions.

If we could somehow institute this without creating a new city tax collection authority, I'd be more inclined to support it.

I don't think what works in Ireland will necessarily work here because our lives are structured very differently. I just got back from Paris, a city where people shop daily, where refrigerators are tiny, and where the city is full of bakeries, fruit stands, small groceries, etc.

Much as we might like to think we're like Paris or Ireland, we aren't. Most of us are not within walking or even cycling distance of a grocery store and shop once or twice a week. It's going to be quite a challenge managing groceries for a family of six using completely reusable bags.

==

Cogen's proposal--I like it. Nothing other than more information, which is good.

On the bags, I'd be happier if the bag charge (especially if at the higher end) went to a fund to subsidize reusable bags for low income people.

From the O: "Part of the money raised from the fee would help provide free cloth bags to low-income people."

The grocery bag charge is yet another unfunded mandate on business.

From the O: "Some would go toward city recycling programs and some would go to stores for administration and programs to educate consumers about the fee."

To all those who are wondering what the "social" cost of plastic bags are, I suggest that you investigate a bit the problem of the Plastic Ocean.

From PBS (my bolds):

The problem with plastics is they do not biodegrade. When something biodegrades, naturally occurring organisms break down natural materials into their simple chemical components. For example, when paper breaks down it becomes carbon dioxide and water. However, plastic is a synthetic material and never biodegrades. Instead it undergoes a process called 'photodegredation', whereby sunlight breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces over very long periods of time. A disposable diaper takes an estimated 500 years to break down while plastic 6-pack rings for cans take 400 years and a plastic water bottle can take up to 450 years to degrade. However, this does not mean they will disappear, all remain as plastic polymers and eventually yield individual molecules of plastic too tough for any organism to digest. In 2001, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation based in Long Beach California led by Captain Charles Moore, conducted a survey thousands of miles out to sea in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre in an effort to assess the extent of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean. Gyres are areas where oceanographic convergences and eddies cause debris fragments to accumulate naturally. What the researchers discovered was both shocking and outrageous, a floating mass of plastic junk stretching across an area of ocean the size of Texas. Rivers of soda and water bottles, spray can tops, candy wrappers, cigarette lighters, shopping bags, polypropylene fishing nets, buoys and unidentifiable, miscellaneous fragments collected in a huge rotating mass of plastic pollution. Captain Moore and his team made a series of trawls with an apparatus he devised shaped like a manta ray. Towed at 1 to 2 knots along the sea surface, an opening at the front filters both plankton and plastic fragments from seawater through a surface net. In addition to large obvious pieces of plastic, the results of the survey revealed minute plastic fragments mixed with tiny sea creatures. The published results from the survey reveal a sea of plastic soup comprising "six pounds of plastic floating in the gyre for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton." Charles Moore now believes "plastic debris is the most common surface feature of the world's oceans." Until now, no studies were conducted on filter-feeding organisms such as jellies, whose feeding mechanisms do not permit them to distinguish between tiny fragments of plastic debris and plankton, and no studies to assess potential effects on these filter-feeders. It is now known that plastic fragments heavily impact these creatures. When broken into smaller pieces, these tiny plastic fragments accumulate non-water soluble toxicants such as PCB's, and pesticides such as DDT. Plastic polymers, or tiny plastic resin pellets act as sponges for these chemicals and other persistent organic pollutants, concentrating such poisons up to one million times higher than their concentration in the water as free floating substances.

While it's almost certainly impossible to quantify the costs, it's almost certain that the costs are tremendous.

If our oceans die, we will too. It may take a few generations, but without plankton, say goodbye to the planet.

Personally, I think the whole bag-tax thing is silly. We should just ban plastic bags outright.

Nice story in today's NY Times, Kari, indicates that the "total life cycle" analysis shows paper bags are worse for the environment than paper bags.

Cite is here

As Douglas points out, I can surely manage this transition. It means we'll have to purchase about a dozen reusable bags and carry them around since we never quite know how much we'll buy on our trips to WinCo, WalMart, Safeway, etc. But I kid you not, it's quite common for us to walk out of the store with 8-12 bags of groceries. I need bags and I need to use a car, that's the reality of raising a family.

What I object are policies that seem to assume the whole city consists of single person or two person households who are not at all or only mildly inconvenienced by these changes.

Paul:

That's the situation I'm in - it's not uncommon for me to come home from the grocery store with more than 10 bags. That's because I usually do our shopping after a paycheck comes, and I by most of the groceries we're going to need for the next 2 weeks.

I've purchased some of the reusable bags thus far, the problem being to make sure they end up back in the car and don't get taken out when the trunk is cleaned out. More often than not, I end up at the store without the bags.

The few times I've brought my bags with me, I end up with employees watching me real closely to ensure I'm not stealing stuff and putting it into the bags. If you're only bringing in a bag or two, you can have them folded up neatly so they don't seem like anything to be worried about - ever tried bringing in 10, 12, 15 of them? It gets pretty bulky and it's often easiest to have them folded up and placed inside another bag.

I have the feeling what will happen is more often than not a poor family is just going to pay for the plastic bags - if the bags are 5 cents, you can get 10 of them for 50 cents. One reusable bag is a dollar. Sure, there will be "assistance" for those who are poor, but as someone who has been poor and has tried to get assistance through programs like that, there is always less assistance than there is a need.

To be honest, this just seems like another one of those programs that is made to make people feel all good about "helping" some cause, while at the same time ignoring the hardships put on people who are less fortunate than themselves.

Why not just stop allowing for the plastic bags and replace them entirely with those fairly cheap to make totes they're selling for $1 now? A public service campaign to encourage people to use those bags - and bring them back to the store? Is there really such a need to charge a fee and add on something else for the stores to have to deal with on every transaction?

Calorie count would be nice, but what I'd like even more would be fat information. Often times the calorie count on something isn't as important to me, as I rarely finish a meal at a restaurant - it ends up being my two major meals for the day, with a snack for the third. So if I get a meal with almost a full day's worth of calories, that's not that big of a deal. But I know it is to some people.

Fat is a bigger deal, as in late '05 I had my gallbladder taken out, and I have trouble with anything with too much fat in it. You might think that it would be easy to tell what has the most fat in it, but you'd be surprised. Many salads, for instance, have more than a day's allowance of fat in their salad dressing.

If you've ever gone through the pain of having too much fat when you have gallbladder trouble, you understand what I'm talking about. Nothing like feeling like you're being stabbed continuously in the abdomen.

Jenny's comment above (that she would like to see the grams of fat for each dish, too) points to the slippery slope and lack of thought inherent in putting dietary data right next to the other information on menus.

First, which data? Saturated/unsaturated, mono/polyunsaturated, High and low density lipoproteins, too? You could make a case for carbs, sugars, fiber, "whole grain," amino acids, B-complex vitamins, and about 50 other categories of data.

If I make a choice just based on the calories, am I guaranteed to make the better decision for my health?

Also, to be accurate, every purveyor of food down to the corner lemonade stand your sixth-grader opened this summer would have to TEST for calories, etc. on every one of their products. That costs extra, and to merely rely on Bowes and Church, or USDA for that data is easy, but not particularly accurate to your own methods of prep, ingredient choices, etc.

Besides, even in the fast food places, they're allowed to test once, post that information on the wall or have it available for review on a separate sheet, the same for EVERY STORE in their chain. Not big box? Suck it down, independent bakeries!

While I'm at it, to put calories, along with every other piece of nutritional information anybody could want (fat! sugars! "Whole Grain"!) directly ON the menu, creates problems with space, being able to see how much the item COSTS (which seems to me to be important, too), whether or not the menu is four panels or the size of Total Baseball, etc. And while I'd love to see my folks' printing business get more play, I wouldn't feel great about the sudden influx of 20-page menus that our small businesses need to outlay for in this RECESSION we've been living in. But they'll go ahead and pass the "savings" on to you, I'm sure.

And is this just the handed out menus, or do the places like Tran's Pho Closet and Pizza Hut have to put that data up on their wall/menu, too?

I like the good intentions with which this was crafted, but that's no substitute for not thinking through every single implication of the new policy, based on the times we're living in.

Took me 10 minutes.

I should resist because Jeff is my boss, but I can't. I love knowing what is in my food before I order it. I still WANT the crispy chicken at Burgerville, but I want to be able to work it off - so to speak - at the gym either before or after. It's impossible to correctly judge the amount of calories, fat, sodium or carbs that are in that sandwich. There's a cool video to show you what I mean...

So I take from the video that Commissioner Cogen wants to require "fast food" restaurants to post calories ON the menu. Presuming that's pretty close, it still raises way too many questions.

What constitutes a fast food restaurant, or as Comm. Cogen said, a "chain"? Does, for example, Big Town Hero qualify? What are the criteria?

Second, while Karol said calories, fat, sodium, and carbs, Comm. Cogen said calories, which meant, I'm presuming, just calories. Which is it?

It IS impossible for a layman to judge nutritional value on sight, but it is also accurate to just spit out a number from a calorimeter measurement three years ago, from a Burgerville in Albany, and have that number stand for Portland's official Burgerville chicken sandwich caloric measurement from now until the end of time. Maybe the difference from the real value is within two extra minutes of work on the Stairmaster, and maybe it's not.

Once you introduce accuracy into it, that goes hand and hand with expense, and control over where that stuff is displayed. Many companies already provide this information, and it's available on the wall, or a sheet if people want it.

Besides, you can burn all the calories you want, but unless you know and limit your sugar, not only might you still have a belly, but you're at risk for adult onset diabetes. OK, me - I was, all those things. I got better, and I didn't count one calorie (or have to rely on my County Health Department) to do it.

Finally, Jeff Cogen seems like a great guy, but this is overly simplistic, possibly at cross-purposes with the implied goal of better nutrition, and potentially very annoying. It seriously reminds me of Diane Linn's attempts to hasten the onset of pneumonia among smokers by forcing them out in the rain.

Thanks, but I already have a Mom, Commissioner Cogen.

Hi John, The calories will be on the menu, the fats, carbs and sodium will be available on request.

The requirements will be chain restaurants with 15 or more locations (not just in Multnomah County). There are over 500 chain outlets in this county, that's fast food and sit-down fare. Of those chains, only 7 of them would have to start from scratch. The others will already have to comply with calorie labeling in San Francisco, Seattle (King County) and New York City. Not much burden there.

Jeff is fully aware that just posting calories doesn't suddenly eliminate obesity. This is a piece of the puzzle that health experts try to address as we try to tackle this problem. Health experts agree that calories are a leading reason people are obese. They are simply ingesting too many calories a day. Men should have around 2200, women, 1800. How can we each know how to limit if we don't have the information?

That leads to your next issue. Jeff already has kids, he doesn't need one million more. No one is interested in controlling what residents eat. He is a STRONG advocate of personal responsibility, which is why he did not support a trans fats ban over a year ago when Lisa Naito introduced it. But one cannot be personally responsible if he or she does not have the information that allows them to do so.

Jeff doesn't just seem like a great guy, he is one.

Sarah, Like I said, I can adjust. We are already biking a lot more regularly and I'm trying to cover a lot of our short local jaunts that way.

I'm not a fan of plastic bags and would not oppose a ban.

But I suppose I am just cranky these days. I don't want to be, but Portland is becoming an awfully expensive place to live and even more so to raise a family, and the City seems little interested in the kind of concerns that animate my daily existence, and meanwhile the fees and taxes keep increasing.

[SET RANT=ON] My utility bills are going up 10-20%, water and sewer in paticular. My property tax bill jumped more than 10%. The city was contemplating (but now has rejected) a roads fee attached to my water bill.
My food bill has jumped quite a bit, in part because of increases in commodity prices caused by poorly considered public policies related to ethanol, policies that my City enthusiastically participated in. Combined with that, my Subaru Legacy has lost at least 20% in MPG because of the switch (confirmed by my mechanic--Subaru engines respond pretty poorly to the ethanol mix), meaning that I can't even feel good about using the ethanol mix because I burn more gas overall! My kids public schools are overcrowded and have eroding facilities, but there is no money on the table to improve the situation. Yet, I read in the paper how $190 million or more will go to develop condos in the South Waterfront, and how $19 million is going to an East County district, none of which will contribute more property taxes to the schools for decades (if ever). [SET RANT=OFF]

I am feeling nickled and dimed to death right now, and believe me, my salary is not increasing at the same pace as my cost of living.

So 20 cents? Sure, I can afford it. But I'm waiting for Sam Adams and the CoP to propose SOMETHING or even SAY something that will improve the lives of families and working class folks who live and work and make up the vast majority of the citizenry of our fine city.

I am personally more interested in an outright plastic-bag ban across all stores, not just grocery stores. Paul's plaintive wail is moving and if a Reed professor of all people is complaining that the city's too nannyish, maybe I should calibrate accordingly. Down with bags!

Paul, the price of your food probably is going up more due to the rising cost of gas than to ethanol production, although the ethanol has already turned out to have been wrong at the production end (because of high petroleum input industrial agriculture used to produce it) and your mileage anecdote adds to Vicki Walker's, part of her motive to move to repeal the law, to make me wonder if there isn't a consumption end problem too, at least unless we were to shift to much higher ethanol levels. This may prove to be ecologically localized -- Brazil's success with ethanol is tied to their being a major sugar producer; ethanol may prove to be a tropical biofuel.

I am not at all impressed with your NYTimes cite, I have to say. On the health stuff the approach to epidemiology is cherry-picking at best to intellectually dishonest at worst. E.g. on bisphenol, the line about "no human studies" dismisses a large body of animal studies, and if those animal studies had produced negative findings, given the approach of the article, he would be citing them as evidence of nothing to worry about.

And on the paper vs. plastic thing, it misrepresents the EPA link it supplies. That link gives a much more complex portrayal of trade-offs. E.g. recycling plastic bags is much more energy-efficient than paper bags -- but almost no plastic bags get recycled while lots of paper do (there are also some other issues about what each gets recycled into that they don't raise). Which also means that the landfill comparison per unit doesn't get at the real landfill problems posed by each, esp. given the 4:1 ratio of usage plastic over paper they cited, never mind the indirect landfill aspects that derive from otherwise relatively rapidly biodegradable stuff being mummified in plastic bags for centuries. I once heard a very funny comment in a t.v. documentary about an anthropologist who studies what people throw away in the U.S. in landfills, speculating on the possibility of archeologists five hundred years from now puzzling over why we went to so much trouble to preserve our garbage.

Nor does it go into questions we might ask about opportunity costs of various uses of petroleum -- should we use less for fuel not only because of greenhouse gases but so its available for plastics and other materials? Or should we cut back on plastics to save petroleum for energy needs? EPA doesn't go into this but does raise the petroleum basis of plastic bags as a disadvantage.

Anyway, short version is that NYTimes story misrepresents its source, which does not in fact show a superiority of plastic over paper.

But as for the subject raised by Jeff Allworth, here's the real punchline on bags from the EPA:

So, what is the answer, paper or plastic? NEITHER! Look into purchasing reusable bags or reusing your paper or plastic bags at the store. Reusing a bag meant for just one use has a big impact. A sturdy, reusable bag needs only be used 11 times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable plastic bags.

This still of course does not address the social aspects raised previously by yourself and others (including me), that I think are quite legitimate.

On both the menu issue and the bags issue, there is a missing piece, which is corporate marketing.

One reason to put calorie counts on menus (along perhaps with a note about average daily calorie needs somewhere) is the aggressive promotion of huge portions as a selling point, along with things like the creation of so-called "fourth meal" by Taco Bell.

And there has been a huge increase in the quantity of packaging in groceries -- in this case often going the other way from the fast-food mega meals into small-portion subdivisions sequestered from one another, along with stuff like bottled water.

The private sector, and especially the large corporate- bureaucratic private sector, does much more social engineering than the government. Information on menus or available actually is about providing us with means to greater autonomy in our responses to that private sector social engineering.

The bags thing is more complicated, but involves a larger issue about choices to use (or not to use) government as a collective means to control destructive collective behavior into which we are cajoled if not manipulated by powerful private sector forces that profit from one part of a cycle in part by evading responsibility for costs they create at another part. Whether this instance is a good use of that tool is less clear.

positive inducements are a nice idea, but a nickel per bag (to bring your own) isn't enough. if you spend $30 or more on groceries, you'll probably pay another buck or two for the convenience. that's why Kari is right: just ban the damn things. remember when Pdx banned styrofoam and McDonalds & Burger King and all the rest went bankrupt? oh, wait, that's right. they didn't lose a beat, and we got rid of that bit of nasty trash.

"freedom" doesn't mean you get to do anything you want, however you want. freedom comes with responsiblities, otherwise it's just selfishness. and in the world as we've made it, piled high with trash and starting to cook away, we can no longer afford the "freedom" to forget to bring grocery bags from home. it's time for Americans to grow up, become responsible and start building new habits. how many of us, as parents, would let our kids do whatever they damn well please just cause they wanna? well, that's what we're asking for when we want the "covenience" of plastic bags on demand.

not to mention: can you carry a 6-pack, 3lb roast, spuds & quart of milk in even a double plastic bag? my Nature's cloth bag -- no problemo.

Jeff, I am not complaining that the City is too nannyish.

Bag bans? Ok, I can adjust. I can adjust to lots of things. But I admit this is not particularly high on my priority list.

I just want what I perceive (I admit this may be my own bias) to be the core functions of the city to be done competently. A strong, broad based economy. Decent parks, schools, and other infrastructure. Social services for the destitute, disabled, and other disempowered citizens.

I don't see sustained effort or even rhetoric on most of these issues. Instead it's issue de jour. Sauvie Island bridge. Duct tape bans. Fights between city commissioners and the police. Incompetent cost estimates on major planning projects.

As I've posted elsewhere and at other times, I really do worry that we are doubly cursed in this City by complacency and arrogance.

We think we're so special and we have things so right that we don't have to worry about Austin or Salt Lake City or Raleigh/Durham or the many other cities competing for the same label of hip hot city.

I am a not outraged by the Tram or the South Waterfront as I am by the grossly inaccurate cost projections. I support density but don't think that density placed willy nilly in every neighborhood is a good idea.

To me, one of the central elements of Portland's livability is our affordable single family homes and vital neighborhoods. To the Council, livability = mass transit, high density, and downtown. I think these two visions can be made coherent, but I don't see anyone wrestling with them.

We're sure that we have 20:20 vision of the future which will consist of density and streetcars and Max lines--which it may--but what if rising gas prices spur innovation of drastically more efficient single passenger vehicles? Then we are, with our decrepit street and highway system, really screwed?

Terry Parker, there are no "far left wing socialists" in the Democratic Party. Real far left wing socialists reject the DP entirely as a party of big business, just less exclusively so than the Republican Party. There are a few "right wing socialists" a.k.a. social democrats (a suppressed term in the U.S.) though not too many. Of people who hold similar ideas, a lot are outside of the DP.

Sam Adams isn't a socialist of any kind.

Paul,

You might consider getting involved with the Coalition for a Livable Future, or anyway finding out more about them & the groups and organizations involved. The kinds of concerns you raise are very much on their agenda, particularly the away from downtown aspects (not just in Portland either, they have a more or less Metro regional scope). You won't agree with everyone there on everything, but they don't agree with one another about everything, and very much do really wrestle with competing visions, and with the very real tensions in "the triple bottom line" (affordability/economic efficiency, sustainability, and social equity) of goals. They also get people out of the private sector, non-profits, and governments -- the latter mostly at levels below elected officials or top-level appointees.