Frank DiCicco credits his mother, the street sweeper, for Philadelphia's latest green legislation, which would ban supermarkets from bagging groceries in plastic.
"I've always had a thing about trash - my mother made me that way," the councilman says. "It says a lot about who we are as a society, and we are a throwaway society."
It wasn't just the white plastic bags parachuting through the neighborhoods that made him mad. It's what happens to those bags when they get to the landfill. Nothing.
"They don't decompose for hundreds of years, and some say thousands of years," he says. "One issue we can all agree on is the environment."
Or so we'd think.
With DiCicco's legislation, and a sister bill also introduced last week by Jim Kenney that would ban polystyrene packaging (think: Styrofoam cups and take-out containers), I sought a minority viewpoint.
Ever see Thank You for Smoking?
Meet the Nick Naylor of plastics.
Among his arguments:
No one can know that plastic sticks around for hundreds or thousands of years. "Plastic," he says, "was only invented 60 years ago."
Environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic don't actually decompose, either.
Paper weighs more, so landfills would be exhausted faster.
It's actually good to have solid stuff like plastic in landfills because that makes a firmer foundation when the site is leveled and developed.
And - my favorite - what we really need to do is educate people to clean up after themselves. Particularly foreigners.
"We are a melting pot," Levy says. "We have a lot of cultures who are not used to disposing of anything."
Councilman Kenney wants to take a whack at that last one:
"I can tell him for sure the trash on the street comes from the native-born Philadelphians, not the newcomers."
