Plastic Bags and Our Living River

Napa’s City Council members sit facing east, looking toward the Napa River, which flows through the city just a few blocks away.  That’s an intriguing, maybe not coincidental, fact.

 At yesterday afternoon’s City Council meeting, I watched as Napa Valley CanDo and several dozen supporters made a well-researched, informative and at times poignant presentation about the need to phase out single-use plastic bags in Napa, a city with deep historic ties to its river.

 Think about what our city and county have accomplished in recent years to preserve and protect the Napa River: we have a world-class Flood Control project that's a model for other river cities. Historic wetlands are being restored and we’re taking measures to bring back a thriving steelhead population. Vintners are sacrificing precious acreage to plant hedgerows and swaths of native California flora for pest and erosion control. More and more is being done to limit toxic runoff into the river’s water.  Areas that once were salt-rending ponds are being restored to wetlands. We have a lot to be proud of.

 And yesterday our City Council took another step toward ensuring a thriving, living Napa River. They voted unanimously to pursue a plastic-bag ban.

Our river is one of only 3 major rivers that flow into the San Pablo Bay/Estuary.  The Petaluma River and the Sacramento/San Joaquin are the other two. Ours is especially unique because before it empties into the bay, it flows through the 48,000 acre Napa-Sonoma Marsh, a nursery for wildlife and a natural sponge that soaks up and purifies flood waters.

 There’s a lot to protect here.

 What happens to the 50 million plastic bags used in Napa County each year? Fewer than 5% are recycled.  Some will stew in toxic landfills for hundreds of years, never completely decomposing.  And many end up on our streets and highways.

 From there they flow into storm drains, into our creeks, to our river, through those wetlands we’re working to restore, into the bay, through the Golden Gate and into the ocean.  There, they wreak catastrophic damage to wildlife and to our own food chain.

 Save the Bay reports that 14 communities around the Bay have already instituted bans on single-use plastic bags.  San Jose voted to ban them in part to protect their Coyote Creek.  I’m proud that our City Council feels that the River over which they watch deserves the same protection. Kudos to Napa Valley CanDo for making this happen.