Hidden Membership of Save the Plastic Bag Coalition Finally Revealed

Posted by Bag Monster — August 24, 2011 6:15 am

Stephen L. Joseph, spokesperson for the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition (SPBC) has repeatedly denied any connection with the American Chemistry Council (ACC), stating on his website “We have a different membership”.  Also, in legal documents filed by Stephen Joseph against Palo Alto’s bag ban ordinance, he claims that the petitioner (SPBC) is a non-profit environmental campaign organization.  He also states that petitioner (SPBC) does not manufacture, sell, supply or distribute plastic bags or any other bags in Palo Alto or any other locations.

While, I am not a lawyer, I wonder how he can say all of this, when the coalition’s membership consists primarily of individuals in the plastics industry, mainly manufacturers of plastic bags who most likely sell, supply or distribute plastic bags.  Now is this an environmental group or an industry group pretending to be an environmental group?  Please take a look at the public member list and comment below:

Peter M. Grande, Cathy Browne, Louis Certkow, Rick Zirkler, Chandler Hadraba, Tom MacMillan, Stephen L. Joseph, Allied Plastics, Inc., Benchmark Polymers, LLC, Bradley Packaging, Crown Poly, Inc., Elkay Plastics, Co., Inc., Fluid Ink, Grand Packaging, Inc. D/b/a “Command Packaging”, Great American Packaging, Inc., H. Muehlstein & Co., Inc., Hilex Poly Company LLC, Metro Poly Corporation, Montebello Plastics, LLC, PPP, LLC, Ship & Shore Environmental Inc., Sun Plastics, Inc., Symphony Environmental Technologies, PLC

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Author: Bag Monster Single-use bags are easy to spoof since they're such a bad idea. The Bag Monster™ feature 500 bags; the average number of plastic bags an American uses yearly.
  • http://www.facebook.com/goffinet.mclaren Goffinet McLaren

    I am on board with anything that will help to protect our wildlife from plastic bags.

  • JSmith and Family

    PLASTIC BAGS ARE GOOD!!! Be reasonable. Don’t penalize the more than 99% of responsible plastic bag users for the actions of less than 1% of guilty ones. We always reuse/recycle our bags. We never just throw them out to the wind for them to end up in the waterways. Solve the real problem: educate those who are irresponsible.

  • Barbara Mason

    Hello JSmith and Family,

    Thank you for writing in. If only you were correct with your statistics, it would be a happy day for all of us who are trying to be responsible citizens. The latest information from the Environmental Protection Agency (who get their recycling information from plastic industry sources) state that there is only a 4.3% HDPE recycling rate (High Density PolyEthylene), down from 6.1% from last year’s stats. Most grocery single-use plastic grocery bags are made from HDPE plastic.

    Even when disposed of properly into landfills, plastic bags have a propensity to blow in the wind and if you’ve been to a landfill recently, you will probably notice fencing around the area. Those fences have been put up specifically to catch bags and are in fact called “bag catcher fences.” Some landfills even have to employ extra staff to go around at the end of the day to pick up wayward bags. Please see the link: http://daviswiki.org/Yolo_County_Central_Landfill

    Education efforts have been going on for years and simply don’t work (see my first paragraph above, where recycling rates for HDPE bags has gone down in the last year). Plastic bags are not good: They use a finite source of energy in their production, then are used for a matter of minutes before disposal; they cost taxpayers for their cleanup (CaRecycles estimates the expense per year for bag cleanup is $25 million dollars in California alone); extensive studies by credible scientists show they are a source of harm to our marine environment. Please remember that shoppers did without plastic for hundreds (thousands?) of years before plastic bags came along, and only in the last 50 years have they become the poster child for unnecessary waste.

  • Nicholson

    um, look it up. You should have said the less then 6% that do the right thing since 94% of plastic bags are never recycled. Yep, EVIL. 

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