Greetings from The ID Project Portland.
Now that it’s Low Impact Consumption month, I wanted to find out the status of super-cool Portland City Commissioner and Mayor-Elect Sam Adams‘ proposed ban on plastic bags, which got a decent amount of press in the spring of 2007 and then stalled.
I couldn’t find any recent news on the internet so I called his office and spoke to Lisa Libby, Senior Policy Director, Environment and Neighborhoods. Lisa was very nice and helpful. She told me that the person who has been working on the plastic bag issue is actually Shoshanah Oppenheim, Senior Policy Director, Transportation and Good Government. Shoshanah wrote a blog post about this issue in December of 2007 but when I tried to load it my browser crashed, twice, so I won’t add the link here.
Lisa doesn’t know the current status of things and is going to check with Shoshanah and get back to me. She was able to tell me that the local grocery stores by and large are willing to participate, but that there has been resistance from convenient stores and larger department stores.
Stay tuned for updates…