City considers future of plastic bags by Colleen Walsh
A recent proposal sponsored by City Councilor Rob Consalvo is hoping to limit the use of plastic bags in the city, which he argues litter the streets and harm the environment.
“This is a huge issue of trash and litter. Plastic bags are one of the biggest culprits,” said Consalvo, who plans to hold a hearing on the issue next month. “Plastic bags are an environmental nightmare they… take up tons of space in our landfill and contribute to our dependence on foreign oil.”
Yet even before the recent measure was proposed, local retailers said they’ve been encouraging their customers to adopt the popular European method of using their own bags to carry groceries.
Deluca’s Market on Charles Street and its counterpart on Newbury Street in the Back Bay use mainly plastic bags for their groceries, although they also offer customers the option of paper bags. But in February, owner Virgil Aiello said he ordered an advance shipment of canvas bags with the store’s logo, which quickly ran out.
“I think that anything that will encourage shoppers to use a canvas bag is a major step in the right direction,” Aiello said.
Aiello said his second shipment, which numbers in the thousands, should last the stores for some time and cover the scores of bags that are bought by tourists who want to take home a Boston memento. In addition, he said he would offer the bags to frequent shoppers at a discount and give them for free to repeat customers who spend over a certain amount at the store.
If a ban on plastic bags in the city was introduced, Aiello said he would “probably have paper bags on hand but we would encourage even more than now the use of the canvas bag.”
According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s
website, the debate over the benefits of paper versus plastic is still ongoing. It states that while paper bags “generate 70 percent more air and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags…most plastic bags are made from polyethylene, which is made from crude oil and natural gas, nonrenewable resources.”
When it comes to choosing one over the other, the website claims the answer is neither. Instead, it encourages the public to buy reusable bags or use their previously purchased paper or plastic bags when shopping.
Christopher Flynn, president of the Massachusetts Food Association, which represents the state’s grocery and supermarket industry said eliminating bags isn’t the right approach.
“The bag isn’t the issue, the issue is what people do with it after they are done,” said Flynn, who supports a program that would educate people about the right way to dispose of a plastic bag rather than a crack down on their use. “We don’t need to threaten people, we don’t need to tax people more…it’s an education process, we certainly have a role to play.”
Whole Foods Market on Cambridge Street currently only offers plastic bags to its shoppers but also sells and encourages the use of recyclable bags in its stores.
“Any bag that you bring in is 10 cents off when you reuse it and fill it with groceries,” said Whole Foods Market spokesperson Fred Shank. “We also sell reusable bags. We want to encourage customers to use reusable bags.”
Shank said shoppers can also recycle their plastic bags at the store’s customer service center.
Consalvo said he hopes to have an active dialogue at the city’s hearing about the issue with members of retail and environmental groups as well as concerned citizens.
“I am looking forward to having a thoughtful discussion,” he said.
Chestnut Street, the absolute best street by Suzanne Besser
It took Boston magazine’s Michael Blanding three months, 1,200 miles of driving around Greater Boston and the help of hundreds of Hub real estate brokers to come up with what we already know: Chestnut Street is a great street to live on.
But, it’s only the fourth best street in the city of Boston if you take into account Blanding’s six criteria: aesthetics, environment, amenities, public services, affordability and access to transit. Affordability?
Yes, wrote Blanding, because unlike some of its tonier neighbors — presumably that means Mount Vernon Street, Walnut and the like — Chestnut Street still has one-bedroom condos available for less than $500,000. Blanding did admit that all you get at that price point is a glorified closet, but nonetheless, if you live there you get to be near Charles Street and the T stops, not to mention the “black-shuttered brick townhouses, vintage gas lamps and the prestige of a blueblood Beacon Hill address.”
Mount Vernon Street actually scored better than Chestnut Street but it wasn’t our Mount Vernon Street. It was the West Roxbury one, which Blanding considers the second best street to live on. That one received similar accolades to Chestnut but presumably you can get a slightly larger closet for your $500,000.
Number one went to none other than Waltham Street in the South End, where historic row houses are priced around $600,000 for a two-bedroom condo and $1 million for a townhouse but they are also close to Barbara Lynch’s B&G Oysters and her Plum Produce that just happens to sell $5 heirloom tomatoes.
Of course, Waltham Street isn’t near to Barbara Lynch’s first and foremost restaurant, No, 9 Park. We’ll take that one any day.
CAPTION:
Mayor Thomas M. Menino declared this year’s Boston Shines a successful citywide clean up effort, although some projects rained out last Friday have been rescheduled and will still go on.
According to this year’s official Boston Shines 2007 Report Card, approximately 6,000 volunteers from 187 organizations worked on 181 projects. The final tally of trash picked up included 18 televisions and monitors, 69 street sweeper loads, 82 dump trucks, 247 tires, 1,817 bags and 320 tons of trash.
Corporate sponsor Suffolk University pitched in on Beacon Hill, working with businesses, residents and community service participants to clean the Hill on Saturday.
#1 Joe Green, district manager of Store 24 and vice-president of the Beacon Hill Business Association, took a broom to the streets during Clean Up Day.
# Beacon Hill Civic Association Chair Jeannette Herrmann and Clean Beacon Hill Committee member Joe Mari worked together on South Russell Street.
Vagrants’ trash contribute to Longfellow Bridge fire by Suzanne Besser
A lighted cigarette is thought to have ignited trash and debris left by vagrants and homeless people in the underpinning below the Longfellow Bridge last Tuesday, causing a two alarm fire that shut down traffic on Storrow Drive and the Longfellow Bridge for more than two hours.
The Boston Fire Department discovered a mattress and other signs that homeless people frequently take shelter in the crawlspace between two sections of girders under the bridge, said Boston Fire spokesman Steve MacDonald. Besides the mattress, the area had a tremendous amount of junk, newspapers and other combustible materials that caught on fire and spread quickly.
“If you looked underneath the bridge during the fire, you could see a huge arch-shaped fire,” he said. “The smoke worked its way through the roof of the underpinnings and came out where the train tracks were. The smoke became very thick when it caught onto a fiber optic cable bank under the superstructure of the bridge.”
Firemen, who ran 600 feet of hose to get to the fire from Storrow Drive, were forced to shut down the electricity on the bridge, which stranded three train cars that were crossing near and on the bridge. MacDonald said the heavy smoke started filling up the cars, and more than 425 people had to be evacuated. No injuries were reported.
Traffic was shut down for two hours while the fire was doused, and bus service was provided by the MBTA between Park Street and Kendall stations.
The Red Line returned to service Wednesday. Department of Conservation and Recreation spokesman Wendy Fox said that the major damage, estimated at $100,000, occurred to the fiber optic cable bank, and that no structural damage occurred to the bridge.
Trash and construction debris left by the DCRS and the MBTA near Charles Circle has plagued residents in the recent past. State Representative Marty Walz contacted the two agencies last year, and improvements had been made to the area.
But, Walz said she had not received complaints about homeless individuals camping out in the area. “I have focused my efforts to deal with encampments of homeless people near the Mass Avenue and Charlesgate bridges in the Back Bay,” she said, noting that a shantytown in that area had been moved.
The Beacon Hill Times gets its information from John Lepore, Mass. Highway’s project manager, and from direct observation.
Plantings: The soil has been approved and was scheduled to go in yesterday. Should be finished by Wednesday. Trees should be put in by tomorrow. As soon as the trees are in, they will install the drip irrigation system, followed by the ground cover. Once the median is complete, they will plant sidewalk trees.
Street lights: Best Electric is scheduled to come today to finish the Joy Street lights.
Street and sidewalks: They patched sidewalks where old traffic lights were. They put in rubble strips at the end of the median at Blossom and Joy streets. By mid-week the trailer will be moved and the sidewalk there will be finished.
The Mayor is talking about tearing down City Hall and building another one in the Seaport District. The consultant for Suffolk is speculating that the university could demolish the state’s Hurley Building and the Lindemann Center and rebuild a major university complex in that location. The new buildings would, of course, be green.
Now, except for a few architects trained in the 1960s and their cohorts, most Bostonians would not be sad to see these buildings demolished. Both are pretty much detested, partly because it is hard to see any beauty there. Furthermore, they function so poorly. For example, in the hearing rooms at City Hall, you can’t hear. And at the Erich B. Lindemann Mental Health Center, they say that if you’re not crazy when you enter the building, you will be after you’ve tried to find your way around in it.
Both of these buildings should be a lesson for architects and their patrons. Good architecture should be able to survive through differing decades of trends and fashions. Otherwise the buildings become trash. Tearing down a small house is one thing. A large building makes a lot of landfill.
So the idea of busting up all that concrete is not prudent. Concrete can be recycled, of course. So can doors, hardware, fixtures and other items. But still. A lot of stuff still has to be thrown away. And that doesn’t seem very responsible.
Perhaps we should return to an earlier time in the environmental movement. Before buildings were called “green,” there was a mantra for the environmentally conscious. It was: “reduce, re-use, recycle.
So before we do something rash, we should consider how to reduce our need for City Hall. (Columnist and Back Bay resident Tom Keane had an intriguing piece about this one recent Sunday in The Globe.) We should consider how to re-use the rooms in City Hall (and the Hurley Building/Lindemann Center and redecorate them so they are not so grim. We should figure out how to recycle the inside of City Hall so it becomes the indoor garden as it was intended.
We’ve thought a lot about change in Boston and how much of the time it is good. When the Back Bay was built, all kinds of public buildings, including churches, moved out of downtown to points west. At some point, the Seaport District could seem as accessible and as attractive as the 19th-century area of expansion. Some of us might move there if services and shops became available.
But there is something gratuitous about the idea of razing City Hall. Tom Menino just doesn’t like his office or the plaza, and who can blame him? It’s not the elegant digs that Governor Patrick enjoys.
But there must be a way to re-make City Hall into a building that is acceptable to this mayor and attractive to all of us. And then we wouldn’t have to finish off the building with trucks going to the dump.
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