Heal the Bay Blog

In a victory for sustainability, the nuisance lawsuit filed by Big Plastic against reusable bag entrepreneur Andy Keller has been settled. The SLAPP suit, designed to silence Keller’s small ChicoBag company in its claims that single use plastic bags are an environmental and economic nightmare, resulted in a settlement that requires both sides to provide citations for their stated facts.

Considering how fast and loose the plastic bag industry has been playing with the facts, there’s no question that the settlement favors Chico.

More important, the settlement demonstrates that the bag manufacturers bullying tactics will not succeed at intimidating California’s green businesses to stop fighting for a clean environment.

All too often, you hear rhetoric from corporate fat cats that we need tort reform to eliminate frivolous lawsuits to help businesses. Here is a case where anti-environmental businesses brought the frivolous lawsuit. I wonder if Big Plastic has learned that lawsuits designed to hamper start-up sustainable businesses only give their industry a bad name.

Supporting green businesses helps our economy and protects the environment. In this case, Keller has stood up to polluters with an unequivocal answer to the decades old question: “Paper or plastic?” Andy answered, “Neither. Buy reusable.”

Let’s hope that his courage is rewarded by record sales and a consumer population that agrees with him at the cash register.

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About six months ago, the city of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation (BoS) started setting up dozens of meetings with the public and the environmental  community on the city’s wastewater system upgrade plan and the need for a major increase in sewer service charges. After all, the BoS had frozen fee increases 14 out of the last 20 years. And it’s held the line the last three years at height of the recession, but wastewater infrastructure waits for no one.

BoS sought to demonstrate that the sewer infrastructure and its four sewage treatment plants (Terminal Island, Glendale, Tillman and Hyperion) are in danger of falling apart. The deteriorating pipes and plants pose a significant risk to public health and safety. Emergency repairs on the infrastructure may cost the city infintely more than replacing it. The delayed maintenance also exposes the city to costly litigation, enforcement and penalties. 

Heal the Bay was founded in 1985 on the issue of decaying sewer infrastructure.  Some Santa Monica Bay bottom-dwelling fish had tumors and fin rot, and there was a dead zone seven miles out in the middle of the Bay where Hyperion dumped its1200+ tons of sludge every day.  Also, million gallon sewage spills were commonplace.

After the city rebuilt Hyperion and major sections of the sewer infrastructure, the dead zone went away, the massive sewage spills decreased in frequency, and the Bay began to heal.

However, in the late 1990s, the frequency of sewage spills started to rise again.  Then Santa Monica Baykeeper sued the city and the end result was an agreement to repair and replace much more of the sewer infrastructure.  Just as important, the city ramped up its sewer inspection and repair program.  The end result was a more than 80% drop in sewage spills.  The days of students walking through raw sewage-filled streets on their way to school were a thing of the past.

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On Sunday morning, our family schlepped out to Rosemead for my niece’s 17th birthday. The destination for Isabel’s festivities was Sea Harbor, one of my brother Jonathan’s favorite dim sum places in the county. After all of these decades of grubbing with Jonathan, I generally don’t even bother looking at a menu or making an order. However, since it was a seafood palace AND the big vote on AB 376 is scheduled for today or Wednesday, I decided to see what shark fin soup went for on the menu.

Much to my dismay, not only did I see three different kinds of shark fin dumplings on the menu, but now the taste of extinction is affordable for all. The myth of shark fin’s availability for weddings and banquets is just that. In today’s society where shark fin dumplings have become a staple at dim sum, everyone can indulge in the consumption of the ocean’s apex predators. 

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How many pieces of trash do you think it took to make this frog? If you join us on Coastal Cleanup Day on Sept. 17, you can help rid LA’s waterways of this type of debris. Plus, you’ll be helping the real life frogs, which are very sensitive to pollution.

With more than 65 cleanup sites, there’s one near you. Learn more or sign up now ».

 “Where did the river go?”

So wondered Heal the Bay’s inaugural class of Creek Week students as they finished their trek along the Los Angeles River, moving from Big Tujunga Creek down to the river’s mouth in San Pedro.

Mere days ago they’d been eagerly wading barefoot,  hunting insects through clear waters. By day four, when they’d reached Compton Creek, they found the waters marred by pervasive concrete and trash and far less inviting for bare feet and insects, which had completely disappeared.

These 56 high school students — from the Pacific American Volunteer Assn. (PAVA) — learned firsthand how the river environment is dramatically changed by human influence and pollution. Kicking off our new summertime Creek Education Program, “Creek Week,” Heal the Bay staff led two sessions in mid-July, taking students through the L.A. River and its tributary creeks, allowing them to explore an environment many had never seen.

Along the way they learned how to perform field science, documenting changes in the habitat, water chemistry, and biology along the river caused by pollution and urban runoff. From that data and experience, students were asked to think about how they can be part of protecting this environment, performing further research or creating projects that address the issues they’d seen.

Creek Week is the perfect mix of personal scientific discovery and environmental stewardship. Students who participated this summer have taken what they’ve learned and shared it with their community, presenting their findings to their peers, and even testifying before the Los Angeles City Council about the urgent need to address these environmental issues. Next summer, the program will expand to a wider audience in the hopes that many more students can become environmental leaders.

This new Heal the Bay Creek Education program focuses on local neighborhood, storm drain, and fresh-waterway issues and how they affect the overall health of the watershed and environment. Creek 101, the school-year component of the program, sees Heal the Bay staff teach lessons in various science and social science classes as part of the classroom curriculum.

Both Creek Week and Creek 101 begin with some background on watershed and riparian science, and then focus on taking students out into the environment to teach them how to perform field assessments to examine and document environmental health and impairment.

The third component of the program, Creek Projects, asks the students to take what they learned in the class and out in the field and apply it to some service learning project aimed at improving the health of their local neighborhood, waterway, or watershed.

Learn more about Creek Week from a PAVA student’s perspective.

Human beings, stingrays and sea jellies share something: We all love to swim in warm water. But that poses some problems.

As more human swimmers enter the surf during the summer, it’s more likely that we will encounter a stingray or a sea jelly. Santa Monica Fire Department Mark Bridge told the Santa Monica Daily Press that since April 1, 18 people have been stung by a sea jelly or stingray in local waters. 

But just because you encounter a stingray or a sea jelly, that doesn’t mean you’ll get stung. 

It’s important to remember that these marine species call the ocean their home and it’s as if we are barging into their living room, advises Vicki Wawerchak, director of Heal the Bay’s Santa Monica Pier Aquarium. “When we walk into the ocean, we are unexpected visitors,” she explains. “They’re not looking for our feet or ankles and we can accidentally step on them.”

The top precaution you can take, she continues, is to “educate yourself on how to coexist in their environment, especially during the summer months when so many of us are in the water. Learn what these animals look like in the sand and sea so you can avoid them.” 

For instance, it’s good to know that sea jellies can’t swim on their own; they’re pushed by the current, so it’s up to you to avoid them. And to escape being stung by the usually docile and curious stingray, shuffle your feet side-to-side and avoid normal forward stepping though the surf. 

But perhaps the best prevention is to learn more about these marine species by visiting them in a safe environment, such as the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium, which features Round Stingrays and Moon Jellies, among the more than 100 local sea animals on display.

The plastic bag giants have filed nuisance lawsuits against reusable bag manufacturer ChicoBag, as well as Marin County and the City of Long Beach for taking a stand to reduce unnecessary single use bag litter and waste. Join Heal the Bay in saying “YES” to the reusable bag movement and “NO” to plastic bags. Tell the plastic bag industry to drop these intimidation lawsuits. Sign the petition today. 

Some California cities have been cautious to pass local ordinances banning plastic bags because of threatened litigation by the “Save Our Plastic Bag Coalition,” a group composed of plastic bag manufacturers and distributors. Industry litigation and huge lobbyist pressure derailed initiatives in several cities, including Seattle, Oakland and Palo Alto. 

Despite the bullying tactics, communities continue to fight back, with new cities and counties moving forward with plastic bag bans, including the cities of Burbank and Huntington Beach. In July, the California Supreme Court ruled that the city of Manhattan Beach did not have to conduct a full environmental impact report prior to adopting a plastic bag ordinance, which the Save Our Plastic Bag Coalition had challenged.

Learn more about small business ChicoBag’s battle against the plastic bag industry at Spouting Off, the personal blog by Heal the Bay President, Mark Gold:  “Andy vs. The Plastic Goliath.”