City to Ban Styrofoam Containers, Limits E-cigarettes
Amid a flurry of last minute activity, New York City lawmakers paved the way Thursday for an eventual ban on plastic foam containers and added electronic cigarettes to the city’s already stringent smoking bans.
From the Associated Press:
The flurry of activity — more than two dozen introductions and resolutions were passed — came on the city council’s last legislative session of the year. Twenty outgoing council members cast their final votes on high profile bills only after spending hours making tearful farewell addresses in what one councilwoman likened to the last day of high school.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who leaves office Dec. 31, is likely to sign both the e-cigarette bill and the polystyrene foam bill, environmental and health achievements he has pushed throughout his 12 years in office. The laws will take effect four months after his signature.
“Foam pollutes the waste stream, making it harder to recycle food waste as well as metal glass and plastic,” the mayor said in a statement after the vote.
The foam bill allows lawmakers to ban the product if after a yearlong study the commissioner of the Sanitation Department finds the material can’t be recycled effectively. If banned, it could add the nation’s largest city to a list of localities that prohibit the foam, which the food-service industry has long valued for keeping food warm or cool but environmentalists see as a landfill-clogging, litter-generating scourge.
“Once the ban takes effect, it will be much easier and more economical to collect and separate recyclables,” Bloomberg said.
At a news conference before the vote, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn warned against the environmental hazards of the material, particularly its presence in landfills, saying the only things that last longer than the foam containers are cockroaches and the performer Cher.
“If you could recycle it for real, that would be great. But we’re not going to wait forever to get the answer to that,” said Quinn. “If within a year a conclusion is not affirmative that foam can be recycled, it will be banned.”
New Yorkers toss out about 23,000 tons of plastic foam per year, accounting for a fraction of the 3 million tons of trash the city spends $310 million annually to bury, but city officials say the foam also muddies efforts to compost food waste.
San Francisco and dozens of other U.S. cities already have nixed takeout containers made from what’s technically called expanded polystyrene foam (the Styrofoam brand isn’t used in food packaging). It takes a long time to break down in landfills, and there’s debate over how readily it can be recycled once it’s soiled by food. City plastics recycling contractor Sims Municipal Recycling has said it can’t currently process and market plastic foam.
Also Thursday the council moved, by a vote of 43 to 8, to prohibit the use of e-cigarettes in locations like restaurants, bars and city parks where smoking is already outlawed.
E-cigarettes heat a nicotine solution and emit a puff of vapor that manufacturers say is harmless. But there’s sharp disagreement within public health circles about how to treat the devices.
Most scientists agree that e-cigarettes are substantially less dangerous than tobacco but they are still highly addictive, and some anti-smoking activists say it isn’t clear whether they are truly safe.
Several states, including New Jersey, Arkansas, Utah and North Dakota, have already expanded their indoor smoking bans to include e-cigarettes.
Quinn said before the vote that allowing the devices into places where cigarettes are now banned also could “renormalize” smoking and undermine the public perception that the habit is now acceptable only in the privacy of one’s own home.
“We don’t want a step backward with that,” she said.
An online database to track the use of Sandy funds already exists and is operated by the Bloomberg Administration. Thursday’s bill will update the website, creating a searchable, interactive online tool that allows users to look-up by zip code information about how federal Sandy dollars are being spent.
The council also approved a bill that would create an online registry for people convicted of abusing animals, the creation of a commercial composting program at large restaurants and grocery stores and a requirement that the mayor’s office provide annual reports on poverty.
Oye!
As if these two things were the biggest problems new york is facing!!!
Milhouse
Quinn warned against the environmental hazards of the material, particularly its presence in landfills,
Hazards?! What hazards? Nobody even claims it’s harmful to anybody, in any way at all. Yes, it lasts a long time; so what? Why is that a problem? That’s what landfills are for. And it’s a huge planet, there’s millions of times more than enough room for all the landfill we will ever need. So why should we care whether it can be recycled? Why should we give up its many benefits just because it can’t be?
But there’s sharp disagreement within public health circles about how to treat the devices.
“Public health circles” means fascist busybodies who want to run everybody’s lives. They pervert the very concept of public health, which is supposed to be about chlorinating the water and quarantining people with infectious diseases. It has no legitimate concern with the health of individuals per se. Therefore smoking is none of the business of anyone who works on public health.
Most scientists agree that e-cigarettes are substantially less dangerous than tobacco but they are still highly addictive
So what? What’s wrong with addictive, so long as it isn’t bad for you? Caffeine is also addictive, but it’s good for you (in reasonable doses).
, and some anti-smoking activists say it isn’t clear whether they are truly safe.
Why should it have to be “clear” that anything is “truly safe”? The onus is on them to prove that something is unsafe. If you can’t prove something is unsafe, what gives you the right to ban it, or to interfere in any way with the business of those who produce or use it?
K
e-cigarettes are the gateway to real cigarettes, which drain our health care system
plastic foam containers contain poisons that leach into the aqua-system, and also material which is 100% treif – and leaches into hot food or a dovor chorif.
let's be careful not harmful
Usually I agree with you. But here, you say: “That’s what landfills are for. And it’s a huge planet, there’s millions of times more than enough room for all the landfill we will ever need.”
Well. G-d created this planet “Laasos – Lesaken”, not to polute.
Milhouse
KKK, you’re making up stories. What is a “gateway”? People have been claiming for over a century that this is a gateway to that, and the other is a gateway to something else, but it’s all just made up. How do you know e-cigarettes are a gateway to anything?
And how do real cigarettes drain “our” heath-care system? Do you own a health-care system, and are cigarettes somehow “draining” it? You might as well say that anything which promotes an appetite is “draining our food-production system”, or anything which attracts people to other places is “draining our transport system”. There is no “our” system. There are people who are sick, some through their own doing and some not, and there are people who earn a living by healing them. Nobody is forced to do this.
And what are these “poisons” that foam contains? Please tell me exactly what they are, and how you know they are harmful. And what exactly are these treifos that you claim are in foam?
“Let’s be careful”, Hashem created the world for us to use, and one of the uses we have for it is to dump our garbage. We always had ashpos where we dumped whatever we couldn’t use. That’s just one of the things the earth is for. And landfill is not “pollution” at all; on the contrary, when it’s used to create more land that is a “takonoh”.
K
Milhouse is disputing the opinion of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Thomas R. Frieden, MD, MPH, who states that e-cig is the gateway to smoking:
“many kids are starting out with e-cigarettes and then going on to smoke conventional cigarettes.” But I guess Milhouse thinks he is a greater expert or else he is simply misleading the public with wrong information. See: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/811616
K
Regarding Styrofoam utensils: a non-kosher material is used during the processing of the cups. During the manufacture of Styrofoam cups, polystyrene “beads” are mixed with zinc stearate and filled into molds. The zinc stearate is used as a release agent that enables the cup to detach from the mold after the beads have been melted and fused together. A component of zinc stearate is stearic acid, which may be tallow based from a treif animal.
So the food may be glatt kosher, but the keli may be treif due to the tallow in it.
Once again, Milhouse is leading the way with misinformation that can be machshil yidden.
Milhouse
As usual, KKK is spouting nonsense.
Yes, I do dispute the unfounded claims of Frieden, who is a political operator with an open agenda. He has no evidence to back up his claim, which is indistinguishable from the similar claims that have been made for over 100 years, none of which have had any evidence for them. The whole concept of “gateways” is without foundation. You could with equal logic claim that orange juice is a gateway to all sorts of crimes, because just about every criminal has a history of drinking orange juice.
And yes, polystyrene contains small amounts of zinc stearate, which can (though it doesn’t have to) be made from tallow, but this is not a kashrus issue at all, both because it’s tasteless, and because the amount that could possibly get into the food is so tiny that it’s definitely botel.
SORRY TO DISAPOINT YOU
BUT THESE ISSUES ARE ALSO IMPORTANT,JUST AS MUCH AS CRIME,AND ALL THE OTHER ISSUES OF THE CITY
SEREL CHANA MANESS