A better bag

When discussing the growing trend of ordinances meant to curb the use of single-use plastic bags, Roxanne Vaughan is quick to clarify that the term “plastic bag ban” is incorrect. To Vaughan and her colleagues at Roplast Industries Inc., whose primary function is the manufacture of plastic bags, it’s more than a matter of simple semantics.

“We try to make it explicitly clear that the intent with these ordinances is to reduce waste and encourage reuse,” Vaughan, the company’s sales director, explained during a recent tour of the Roplast factory in south Oroville. “Single-use, light plastic bags have been targeted as being difficult to capture and recycle, and they’re commonly thrown away. It’s really more of a visible waste problem and more of a packaging regulation and not a ban on all plastic bags.”

Roplast’s focus is on manufacturing thicker-gauge, reusable polyethylene bags, and the company—founded in 1989—does make some bags for food and product packaging, but Vaughan said more than 70 percent of Roplast’s production is focused on reusable grocery and retail bags.

“We started off making reusable bags way before it was popular, which people kind of laughed at because they thought it was more of a commodity product, and something that was done more in Europe,” she said.

Now, Chico has joined more than 100 other California communities in adopting ordinances to regulate single-use bags, and California is considering statewide limitations (Senate Bill 270) for the fifth time in seven years. Conservation organization Californians Against Waste, which tracks such ordinances, lists Fairfax as the first community to adopt a measure, in 2008. There are also similar ordinances in cities in Washington, Oregon and Texas.

The Roplast website (www.roplast.com) contains news updates and information about specific ordinances, and marketing is geared toward helping companies comply.

“We actually send people into stores to educate them on how to be compliant and get them set up with everything they need,” Vaughan said.

Some ordinances are stricter than others, and Vaughan said Roplast makes products to comply with the most stringent. The strongest bags, such as those specified in L.A. County’s ordinance, must pass what is known at Roplast as the “walk test,” which means they need to be able to carry 22 pounds 175 feet, 125 times.

“The Chico ordinance is drafted in the same spirit as most, requiring a certain gauge and carry weight,” she said. “The local ordinance will encourage reuse, and we’re supportive of that.”

A number of area grocers, including locally owned Chico Natural Foods Co-op and Ohio-based Food4Less, already carry reusable Roplast bags. Vaughan expects more local companies to make use of Roplast’s products when the ordinance takes effect in large grocery stores Jan. 1.

In addition to producing ordinance-compliant materials, Roplast works to make its operations environmentally friendly, which Vaughan explained further as she conducted a tour of Roplast’s sprawling 130,000-square-foot facility.

A few dozen of Roplast’s 140 employees were working in the production area that morning, attending to the lines of huge machinery that birth the bags. At one end the plastic is extruded, or melted from the recycled aggregate, which looks like small plastic pebbles. The “plastic lava,” as Vaughan called it, is formed into sheeting, which is then formed into bags with blown air. A long, continuous sheet runs through more machines, where it is printed with the desired logos and cut into individual bags. More workers check the quality of each run before the bags are transported to another part of the floor to be packaged. Completed, packed bags are shipped by truck or train—another part of the building contains loading docks for trucks, and part of the company’s 12-acre property serves as a rail yard.

The bags are made completely of recycled content, including about 30 percent post-consumer recycled plastic. After obtaining the recycled plastic, every other part of the process—including printing with water-based ink rather than less environmentally sound metallic inks used on some imported bags—is done in-house, greatly reducing the product’s carbon footprint. Roplast is certified by Sustainable Green Products Inc., a membership organization that helps plastic, paper and consumer-product companies be more green.

Vaughan said Roplast’s efforts don’t stop once the bag is shipped, either.

“We try to do our best to educate the public to make the best use of plastic bags,” she said. “We make sure all of our bags have recycling logos, and when possible print instructions on how and where to dispose of that bag. We try to follow the bag through its whole life cycle.”

Vaughan noted that plastic has a bad rap, environmentally speaking, but that paper bags, by comparison, aren’t necessarily as green as people assume.

According to a Washington Post report, it takes four times more energy to create a paper bag than a plastic one. Each year, 14 million trees are cut down to create the nearly 10 billion paper bags we use. In contrast, four out of five bags used are plastic—we use 100 billion of those each year—and we use about 12 million barrels of oil to produce those bags.

Vaughan countered that plastic is not always tied to oil production.

“That’s a misconception,” she said. “In America, our plastic bags are made from polyethylene, which is derived from ethylene, a byproduct of natural gas that, unless we capture it to use for plastic, just gets burned off.”