Santa Monica city officials, hoping to put an end to the blight of discarded take-out boxes and beverage cups on their beach, are gearing up to implement a ban on nonrecyclable foam and plastic early next year.
Facing a Feb. 9 deadline, most of Santa Monica's restaurants have switched to biodegradable food containers. For many, however, the switch has been a struggle, with some small-business owners saying they are still scrambling to find affordable material to replace cheap polystyrene, or plastic foam.
Josephine Miller said she sent nearly 700 letters to vendors offering supplier contacts and biodegradable options after she was hired in July to help the city's Environmental Programs Division implement the ban.
"Food providers have to learn new habits, and they're already exhausted during the holiday season," Miller said. "But we're sitting down with businesses and doing a lot of hand-holding."
Most of the waste on Santa Monica's beach comes from foam containers, said Mark Gold, chairman of the city's environmental task force. On each side of the Santa Monica Pier, visitors often encounter clumps of trash, bottle caps and cigarette butts half-buried around lidless garbage cans, and remnants of foam and plastic containers obscuring bird tracks in the sand.
Because the material breaks into small pieces but does not decompose, cleanup tractors retrieve only a fraction of foam trash. The rest is swept out to sea or buried in the sand, causing illness or death in animals that mistake the foam for food.
City facilities and events stopped using foam and plastic food containers in February. Private food vendors have until Feb. 9 to comply with the ban. First-time violators will receive a written warning, followed by a $100 fine for a second violation and $250 fines for each successive violation.
Miller's division has budgeted $15,715 for a new employee to monitor the city's restaurants, and $31,000 for supplies and public education for two years. Although the division is responsible for citing violators, Miller said she expects the community to help pressure restaurants to comply.
Officials said Santa Monica is playing catch-up to nearly a dozen other California cities, including Calabasas and Malibu, that have banned plastic foam from city facilities or private vendors.
Since Malibu adopted its ban in 2005, most businesses have switched to biodegradable materials without trouble, said Jennifer Voccola, the city's environmental programs coordinator. But Malibu has to keep track of fewer vendors than Santa Monica, she said.
