Dear EarthTalk: How effective have plastic bag bans and restrictions been on reducing plastic litter and other problems associated with their proliferation? And is it really better to use paper bags, which will just lead to more deforestation? — Peter Lindsey, New Canaan, CT

Plastic bags, first introduced in the 1950s as a convenient way to store food, have since developed into a global scourge, littering roadsides, clogging sewer drains and landfills and getting ingested by animals and marine life. And in recent years we’ve discovered how they are so prolific that they now comprise a significant portion of the plastic and other garbage that has collected in huge ocean gyres far from land.

A few countries around the world—Bangladesh, China, India, Australia, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Israel, South Africa, Taiwan and Mumbai, among others—have taken stands against plastic bags through taxing their usage or banning them outright. The environmental think tank, Worldwatch Institute, reports that China’s decision to ban free plastic bags in 2008 has cut demand by some 40 billion bags, reduced plastic bag usage there by 66 percent, and saved some 1.6 million tons of petroleum.

In March 2007, San Francisco became the first (and is still the only) major U.S. city to implement an across-the-board ban on plastic bags. Large supermarkets and pharmacies there had to ditch plastic shopping bags by early 2008 in favor of paper bags or those made from all-natural biodegradable cornstarch-based plastic. Environmentalists are particularly fond of the latter option for those who don’t bring their own grocery bags, as these cornstarch bags offer the biodegradability of paper without the deforestation as well as the convenience of plastic without the damage to ecosystems. San Francisco officials had originally tried to work with retailers on reducing plastic bag use voluntarily. But after a few years of little or no cooperation, they decided to just institute the ban on anything but biodegradable bags. The result has been a 50 percent drop in plastic bag litter on the streets since the ban took effect.

Los Angeles followed suit and its city council voted in 2008 to ban plastic bags beginning in July 2010—but the ban will only take effect if the state of California doesn’t follow through on a statewide plan to impose a fee on shoppers who request plastic bags. City council members in L.A. hope the ban will spur consumers to carry their own reusable bags and thus reduce the amount of plastic washing into the city’s storm drains and into the Pacific Ocean. Several other U.S. cities, including New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, have considered outright bans like San Francisco’s, but each settled instead on plastic bag recycling programs in the face of pressure from the plastics industry and retail commercial interests.

While increased demand for paper bags in the wake of plastic bag bans could lead to more deforestation, most paper grocery bags in use today are made from recycled content, not virgin wood. Also, an added benefit of paper over petroleum-based plastic is its biodegradability.

Americans go through some 92 billion disposable plastic bags each year, and only five billion paper ones. If the nation banned plastic bags it is likely that paper varieties would only make up a small part of the difference, in light of the proliferation of reusable canvas shopping bags as well as the availability of biodegradable cornstarch plastic.

CONTACT: Worldwatch Institute, www.worldwatch.org.

Dear EarthTalk: I pruned back an overgrown bush in my back yard last fall and now the soil around it is covered in dandelions and other weeds. Is there any way to get rid of these weeds without resorting to RoundUp and other chemical herbicides? — Max S., Seattle, WA

Weeds are nothing if not opportunistic. While you may not have bargained for getting one form of eyesore (weeds) by clearing another (an overgrown bush), dandelions and other fast-growing, quickly spreading plants know no bounds when some new territory opens up. They will colonize and spread out given the slightest opening—after all, that’s what defines them as weeds.

Of course, conventional herbicides such as Monsanto’s RoundUp will take down the weeds in a jiffy, but the negative effects on people, animals and the environment may be both profound and long-lasting. Independent studies of RoundUp have implicated its primary ingredient, glyphosphate, as well as some of its "inert" ingredients, in liver damage, reproductive disorders and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, as well as in cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, nerve and respiratory damage.

California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation reports that, year after year, RoundUp is the number one cause of pesticide/herbicide-induced illness and injury around that state. RoundUp is also blamed for poisoning groundwater across the U.S. and beyond, as well as for contributing to a 70 percent decrease in amphibian biodiversity and a 90 percent decrease in tadpole numbers in regions where it is used heavily.

Given that you’ll have to manually remove dead weeds from your yard after applying RoundUp (or any other "post-emergent" herbicide), why not just pull them up by hand in the first place? No doubt, the most eco-friendly way to get rid of weeds is to yank them out without the aid of poisons. Unfortunately, many weeds have long deep roots which need to be pulled completely if you don’t want them to grow back; if need be, use a metal weed puller with a hooked end or a mechanical grabber—available at any local garden supply or hardware store—if you don’t want to have to pull those very same weeds next year.

Garden expert Dean Novosat of the Garden Doctor website suggests giving the weed beds a good watering the night before you pull weeds. "…the soil will be softened and will yield the entire weed plant, root and all," he says. Another way to kill weeds, he says, is by pouring boiling hot water over them.

Of course, once you’ve killed or pulled up all those weeds—and make sure you’re thorough or else it’s waste of time—you’ll want to make sure new ones don’t start showing up in their place. Planting some regionally appropriate and ideally native plants in place of the removed weeds would be a good first step—check with a local nursery about what some good choices might be for your neck of the woods.

Once the area is cleared (and replanted), cover it with three to six inches of mulch. Mulch forms a barrier between the soil and the sun, depriving any new germinating weeds of the sunlight they need to photosynthesize. Mulch is composed of large chunky material such as wood chips and bark nuggets, and works well for weed control also because it is low in nutrients and thus won’t fertilize plant starts below.

CONTACTS: California Department of Pesticide Regulation, www.cdpr.ca.gov; The Garden Doctor, www.the-garden-doctor.com.

Organization is key for large companies, institutions, medical facilities, small businesses and even homes. Many Americans simply shove things into their desk drawer; some have their folders piling up with documents of all sorts stashed inside. What happens when you have to find something of importance in a short amount of time? For many of us, this means shuffling through our overcrowded desk drawers or various overloaded folders.  A filing cabinet is a good way of organizing, but how do you go about labeling the folders so you can find that one document in a short amount of time?

A product from The Monticello Corporation called The Paper Tiger Professional ($169) tries to tackle this problem. Once you purchase this product from their Web site and install it into your PC, its main focus is to create a database of all of your folders and filing cabinets where you can index and tag folders and documents inside for easy searching. In a nutshell, you tell the program where your folders are located and which documents reside in each folder. Then you can tag each document so that later when you need to find it, you can just search for it using The Paper Tiger’s built in search.

Installation was pretty easy. Once you download the software from their Web site, it takes about ten minutes or fifteen minutes to install, depending on the speed of your computer. Initially, when I went to download the product I thought it might be a scam based on the look of their site. The site didn’t feel welcoming at all and was very outdated.

Once installed, the Setup Wizard asked me to name my new database, choose an optional password, specify a location, and enter a capacity of folders for this location. I entered "Home" as my location and told it that I wanted it to only take care of ten folders. From here, it created a series of tabs for my ten folders and named them "Home 1-Home 10." It then instructed me to print out the tabs so that I could also place them on physical folders. Once complete, the program shows you every folder in your database and allows you to then edit each folder, so you can specify what documents are in each folder. After you choose the folder you wish to start with, a prompt asks you to enter a name for the folder, enter keywords, choose or enter a category and specify a date. After you tell the application what is in each folder, it brings up the browser- the index of all of your files. It displays the folder names, item names, any keywords you assigned, categories, dates and the status of the folder along with any notes.

I really like how this program gives you the ability to print out an index of all of your folders. This would be very useful to stick on a side of a filing cabinet or to keep in an accessible place as backup. The Paper Tiger also gives users the option to create and archive files and to back up the entire database. Other features I liked were the ability to transfer folders, toss folders, categorize folders and view folders in different ways (location view, category view, reminder view and a search view).

The user interface of this program is excellent! It incorporates the user very well by offering various ways of doing the same task but in a non-cluttered way. I do really like the large buttons at the top for common tasks and the search function makes the program. It will even search the notes section of a folder and the application has a wonderful advance search that allows for you to narrow down search options even more by entering a date range, category or location.

A few drawbacks of The Paper Tiger are that it is only available for Windows, the expensive price and the initial setup could take months depending on how many folders and files you have. For each folder, you must set up keywords, name the folder and tell the program what files are inside for it to be able to index the folders correctly. This could be a very difficult and time-consuming process for a large company or organization. If you have hundreds, thousands or more folders, expect to spend at least a weekend or longer importing all of your folders.

Would I recommend this product? Yes. I feel that it does the job very well and while the initial setup could be difficult depending on how many documents and folders you have, it does do what it advertises. Once everything is indexed within the program, it is a snap to locate even the smallest document. So get rid of that cluttered desk drawer or that piling up folder and try out The Paper Tiger.

The product is available for $169.95 from http://www.thepapertiger.com/

Dear EarthTalk: I came home today to yet another set of phonebooks at my front door. I feel they are a great waste of paper, especially in this electronic age. How can I stop getting these books? Better yet: How can we get the phone companies to stop making them? – Bill Jones, via e-mail

Many of us have little or no use for phonebooks anymore. While such directories are helpful for that occasional look-up of a service provider or pizza place, consumers and businesses increasingly rely on the Internet to find goods and services. Directory publishers usually do make their listings available online nowadays, too, but the books are still money-makers for them as prints ads fetch top dollar even though their effectiveness is waning and much harder to track.

According to the nonprofit YellowPagesGoesGreen.org, more than 500 million phone directories-nearly two books for every American-are printed and distributed every year in the U.S., taking with them some 19 million trees. Upwards of 1.6 billion pounds of paper are generated to produce the books from these felled trees, while 7.2 million barrels of oil are churned through in creating them (not including the gasoline used for local deliveries). Producing the directories also uses up 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and generates 268,000 cubic yards of solid waste that ends up in landfills (not including the books themselves, many of which eventually end up in landfills in areas where recycling is not available or convenient).

Unfortunately, there is no centralized way for consumers to opt-out of receiving the big books like the National Do Not Call Registry for telemarketing.‚ Most individual yellow and white page publishers have “no deliver” lists they can add you to, but they will not be held accountable if the books show up anyway. The YellowPagesGoesGreen.org website will find your local/regional directory pages publishers and ask them not to deliver on your behalf. The site warns, though, that there are no guarantees with this either.

For their part, directory publishers insist they have made great strides in recent years to operate in an environmentally responsible manner. The Yellow Pages Association (YPA) and the Association of Directory Publishers (ADP) have collaborated on formal guidelines calling for source reduction in the production of directories, environmentally sensitive manufacturing practices and enhanced recycling programs. About 90 percent of industry members have adopted the guidelines so far. Examples in practice include the use of water soluble inks and recycling-friendly glues, not to mention forsaking the use of virgin trees in their books (many books are made from recycled old phonebooks, mixed with scrap wood; see a previous column that discussed this: www.emagazine.com/view/?3651).

Because of widespread and increasing use of the Internet, many sources of information-from newspapers and magazines to newsletters and, yes, directories-are forsaking print for online placement. So it is really just a matter of time before phone directories follow that lead. In the meantime, asking to be removed from the delivery list of your local directory publisher can only help to hasten that inevitability.

CONTACTS: YellowPagesGoesGreen.org, www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org; Yellow Pages Association (YPA), www.ypassociation.org; Association of Directory Publishers (ADP), www.adp.org.

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve noticed a lot of beach erosion along the eastern U.S. coast. Beaches are virtually non-existent in places. Is this a usual cycle that will self-correct, or are these beaches permanently gone from sea level rise or other environmental causes? – Jan Jesse, Morristown, TN

Unfortunately for beach lovers and owners of high-priced beach-front homes, coastal erosion in any form is usually a one-way trip. Man-made techniques such as beach nourishment-whereby sand is dredged from off-shore sources and deposited along otherwise vanishing beaches-may slow the process, but nothing short of global cooling or some other major geomorphic change will stop it altogether.

According to Stephen Leatherman (“Dr. Beach”) of the National Healthy Beaches Campaign, beach erosion is defined by the actual removal of sand from a beach to deeper water offshore or alongshore into inlets, tidal shoals and bays. Such erosion can result from any number of factors, including the simple inundation of the land by rising sea levels resulting from the melting of the polar ice caps.

Leatherman cites U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of the sandy beaches along America’s coastlines have been eroding for decades. In many of these cases, individual beaches may be losing only a few inches per year, but in some cases the problem is much worse. The outer coast of Louisiana, which Leatherman refers to as “the erosion “Ëœhot spot’ of the U.S.,” is losing some 50 feet of beach every year.

Of particular concern is the effect climate change, which not only causes sea levels to rise but also increases the severity and possibly the frequency of harsh storms, has on beach erosion. “While sea level rise sets the conditions for landward displacement of the shore, coastal storms supply the energy to do the “Ëœgeologic work’ by moving the sand off and along the beach,” writes Leatherman on his DrBeach.org website. “Therefore, beaches are greatly influenced by the frequency and magnitude of storms along a particular shoreline.”

Besides collectively lowering our greenhouse gas emissions substantially, there is little that individuals-let alone coastal landowners-can do to stop beach erosion. Building a bulkhead or seawall along one or a few coastal properties may protect homes from damaging storm waves for a few years, but could end up doing more harm than good. “Bulkheads and seawalls may accelerate beach erosion by reflecting wave energy off the facing wall, impacting adjacent property owners as well,” writes Leatherman, adding that such structures along retreating shorelines eventually cause diminished beach width and even loss.

Other larger scale techniques like beach nourishment may have better track records, at least in terms of slowing or delaying beach erosion, but are expensive enough as to warrant massive taxpayer expenditures. In the early 1980s, the city of Miami spent some $65 million adding sand to a 10-mile stretch of fast-eroding shoreline. Not only did the effort stave off erosion, it helped revitalize the tony South Beach neighborhood and rescue hotels, restaurants and shops there that cater to the rich and famous.

CONTACTS: Stephen Leatherman, www.drbeach.org; National Healthy Beaches Campaign, www.ihrc.fiu.edu/nhbc.

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