9:35am | In August 1997, Long Beach resident Captain Charles Moore¹ was piloting his 50-foot catamaran the Alguita home from Hawaii, when he came across a line of plastic bags at one edge of what came to be known as the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, a “plastic soup” that as of 2007 was estimated to be twice the size of Texas.²

Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to publicize his findings and engage the public in a conversation about solutions. And while he feels bans on plastic bags “would not be necessary if there were a statewide policy, in the absence of leadership at the state level, we have to do this.”

“Rather than have these individual bans, it would be better to have a statewide policy on the types of bags that are permissible, and the recycling infrastructure that would take care of them,” Moore says. “But we haven’t had that conversation, so we’re fighting amongst ourselves, when really what we should be doing is understanding this new material and creating rational technical solutions for the problem.”

The in-fighting to which Moore refers is exemplified locally by the lawsuit being brought against Long Beach by the Save The Plastic Bag Coalition, an ad hoc organization formed in June 2008 by attorney Stephen L. Joseph under the “belie[f] that banning plastic bags is unjustified based on the true facts.”

Among those facts, says the Coalition, is that people “should be encouraged to choose plastic over paper because it is the environmentally superior choice. … The fact that plastic bags do not degrade in landfills ‘for a thousand years’ is an environmental benefit … [b]ecause the CO2 is trapped in the bags.”³

Deputy City Attorney Amy Webber calls the Coalition “essentially a plastic-bag industry group,” and BagMonster.com has published the Coalition’s “public member list,” which includes numerous individuals working for plastics’ manufacturers. Moore says he considers lawsuit “a frivolous lawsuit … designed just to slow down the legislative process. The quality of the lawsuit is low. It approaches what we would call a frivolous waste of our judicial system.”

Joseph declined to be interviewed for this piece, saying only that information about the lawsuit is listed on the Coalition’s Website. However, Long Beach is not mentioned there.

Moore reports that at one point Long Beach was not supportive of such bans, either. “[W]hen I spoke to [Councilmember] Suja Lowenthal at an e-waste recycling event down at that little park at Ocean [Boulevard] and Alamitos [Avenue] three years ago, she was not in favor of any kind of ban. But she’s completely changed her position. …  And I think that’s a response to the fact that it’s become such an environmental problem. … Because there’s no universal policy, because we’re not organized as a society to deal with the plastic waste that’s being generated, people are desperate to do something about the persistent litter that’s comprised of plastic. And the bags is one of the most visible symbols.”

Moore hopes to further advance the conversation on this issue with his book Plastic Ocean, which comes out Oct. 27. “I’m looking forward to exploring these issues in more depth and letting people know some of the serious consequences of not having the conversation about plastic,” Moore says. “We’ve entered the age of plastics with having that conversation. Plastic is a unique material in the environment, lasting beyond anyone’s lifetime. … I grew up here in Long Beach, and I remember ‘Tin Can Beach.’ Well, those tin cans go away; they rust away to nothing. But you can’t have a Tin Can Beach with plastic, [because] the bags will be around for goodness knows how long. … There’s a place for different plastics and rational ways to use them, but the throwaway containers is not one of them.”

Next on the list of disastrous environmental issues that Moore believes society must address is Styrofoam.

“I have my vessel tied up here in Alamitos Bay,” Moore relates. “I was doing some work, and I just pulled out the detritus that had accumulated in about a four-inch space between two of my floats, and I got two pie-tins full of Styrofoam pellets. It’s a horrible type of pollution.  … It’s populating the entire ocean realm, from the deep bottom of the ocean to the water column to the surface. And it’s gotta be next. I definitely see Styrofoam bans on the horizon.”

¹ Capt. Moore and I are not related.
² http://enviroplumbing.com/pdf/Plastic_Oceans_.pdf
³ http://www.savetheplasticbag.com/UploadedFile/STPB%20letter%20to%20Manhattan%20Beach%202.pdf