San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Plastic waste piles up as pandemic wears on
Emphasis on singleuse containers compounds environmental hazards
Before the coronavirus pandemic upended daily life, Min Son Yi tried to live wastefree — and mostly succeeded.
She found secondhand home furniture and baby supplies through a Buy Nothing group in the Bay Area. She made her own cleaning products. She used reusable containers and bags. But her daughter is so young that she worries about her immune system, so when COVID19 hit, she had to make sacrifices.
When going out, she often wears gloves and a mask. “As much as I care about the planet and saving it, I can’t really compromise the safety of my child,” Yi said.
To avoid leaving the house, she also switched to online orders for food and supplies — “a lot of
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waste,” Yi notes, because of the wrapping and boxes.
Yi’s worries will sound familiar in the ecoconscious Bay Area, where people are struggling to balance health needs with traditional environmental priorities. Consumption of singleuse plastics like takeout containers, bags and gloves has escalated with the pandemic.
“A little part of my heart dies every time I have to get a plastic bag to keep myself and workers in a grocery store safe,” said Katie Koche, who works at a coffee shop in the Sunset District known for its reusable mugs. “And since I work in the food service industry and we had to switch to all orders in carryout containers, I’m rather sad all the time.”
The results of the Bay Area’s new wasteheavy lifestyle can be seen at San Francisco’s Baker Beach. Plastic bags had started to disappear from litter there after San Francisco mostly banned stores from offering them in 2007, according to Eva Holman, who cleans up trash from the beach most mornings.
Now, “the birds are pecking at the plastic bags, and that’s really frustrating to see,” she said.
In May, waste tonnage
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Eco-friendly cleaning products
San Francisco’s Department of the Environment has posted a fact sheet (available at https://bit.ly/sfdisin fecttips) for people who want to find safe, environmentally friendly cleaning supplies and disinfectants in the coronavirus era. Consumers should clean surfaces first, then use a disinfectant on high-touch surfaces where the coronavirus could be transmitted, according to Jen Jackson and Chris Geiger, who work for the department. To choose safe and eco-friendly cleaning supplies, Jackson and Geiger recommend looking for products labeled Safer Choice, Green Seal Certified, Ecologo or Cradle to Cradle. Those products include, but are not limited to, all Seventh Generation brand products, Midlab’s Nattura Oxy Orange and All-Purpose Cleaner and Clorox’s Greenworks.
Some disinfectant products the department recommends include Midlab’s Bright Solutions HP202 and Oxivir TB One-Step. for residential routes has risen about 6% in San Francisco year over year, thanks partly to more takeout containers, plastic bags and shipping boxes, said Robert Reed, public relations manager for Bay Area waste management company Recology. Residential compostable materials are up about 12% year over year. But commercial trash is down about 20% since January because of the closure of offices and other spaces, causing the tonnage of waste collected by Recology to fall. Masks are sometimes discarded on sidewalks. Disposable wipes, too, are showing up where they shouldn’t. “I’ve never seen so many wipes on the beach,” Holman said. “Because I feel the need to clean up the beach, I’m having to touch someone else’s contaminated wipes . ... It feels unsafe.”
Cleaning supplies are another point of tension. Plenty of people, including Yi, have switched from “green” cleaners for more traditional choices, in at least some instances.
“I don’t know if it’s safe enough to wipe things with these natural ingredients,” she said. She bought Lysol and hand sanitizer in plastic containers for the first time, though she tries to limit use.
Oakland firm Clorox’s sales jumped 32% in the first three months of 2020.
Jen Jackson, manager of the Toxics Reduction and Healthy Ecosystems program at the San Francisco Department of the Environment, said some products billed as ecofriendly can work well. “Some people may think that ‘Oh, it’s a safe or ecolooking type of product, but it’s not going to work.’ And that’s totally not true. There are numerous products that contain safer disinfectant ingredients and do the job,” Jackson said.
For ecoconscious consumers, there are some hopeful developments. San Francisco, which had overridden its antiplastic leanings and banned reusable bags from grocery stores in April, will allow shoppers to resume using their reusable bags on Monday.
“Once released, stores should remove signs prohibiting reusable bags and post signs welcoming customers to bring their own reusable bags according to specified measures. At that time, stores also should resume charging for bags provided at checkout now at the new rate ($0.25), which went into effect on July 1, 2020,” the Department of the Environment said in a statement on its website.
Many will welcome the return of their beloved reusable bags. Kate O’Neill, a professor in the department of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley, takes her groceries unbagged out of the store and packs them in reusable totes outside. “You have to go to a lot of effort” to avoid plastic bags, she said, adding that “it doesn’t feel terribly sanitary.”
Cynthia Wu, a Mission District resident who tries to live a zerowaste existence, said her grocery store closed the bulk food section she had formerly used to avoid plastic packaging for food. So she signed up for a communitysupported agriculture subscription with her local farms as a substitute.
But she still can’t get away from plastic gloves at the store. “That’s waste. ... It’s just hard to avoid this plastic waste that’s trying to keep you clean,” she said.
“There are two threats to us,” Wu added. “There’s the pandemic, which is the shortterm threat, but there’s also the longterm threat that our world will not be habitable.”
Anna Kramer is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: anna.kramer @sfchronicle.com Twitter: @anna_c_kramer