Charleston County Plastic Bag Ban Starts Oct. 1

Peaking out of hillsides made up of debris still left over from Hurricane Hugo, garbage bags full of leaves that never started to biodegrade because they remain sealed in plastic still 21 years later are the best testament for why Charleston County Composting Superintendent Harvey Gibson hates plastic bags.

And the plastic is everywhere, not just in the mounds of Hugo debris. The bags come in the roughly 60,000 tons of yard waste the County's Bees Ferry Landfill takes in every year, and are shredded as the leaves, sticks, branches, tree stumps and grass clippings are processed to become compost.

"We used to bury 35,000 tons of yard waste a year," Gibson said. "We no longer bury any."

Overall, including the compost material, municipal solid waste and construction and demolition waste, the Bees Ferry Landfill takes in about 150,000 tons of waste a year, Gibson said. Since the county began composting though the landfill has been able to consolidate the C & D waste with the MSW and put the former C & D cell in a dormant state, saving both machine maintenance, fuel and operations costs and manpower.

The county sells the compost material for $10 a ton or $2 for a bag that holds about two cubic feet, but Gibson said because of the plastic, potential large commercial customers consider the compost tainted and won't buy it.

In May Charleston County Council voted to postpone the plastic bag ban from taking effect on June 30 until Oct. 1. The council initially passed the ban in February.

With each municipality responsible for collecting yard waste, also called vegetative waste, Gibson said the County has no say in how the debris is collected at the curb.

"The only thing Charleston County says is we won't accept plastic bags at the compost site," he said.

Gibson said his staff of 15 working on the composting operation attempted to remove all the plastic bags by hand, and even used some Charleston County inmate workers to sort the compost, but the process was so time consuming, labor and land intensive and inefficient that the only way to really keep the plastic out of the compost stream is to ban it from the beginning.

"To hand sort it you've got to spread it out so that it's only about a foot, a foot and a half deep so you can see all the plastic bags," Gibson said. "With several tons each day that takes up a lot of space and a lot of time, and then a lot of times when the guys pick up the bags the tops rip off and the rest of the bag stays in the pile."

The compost is piled in rows on one of the as yet unused landfill cells and after about 90 days is ready to be sold. Plastic, a petroleum based product that doesn't biodegrage, litters all of the compost. Gibson said the hope is that four or five months into the plastic bag ban the area will be cleaner and there won't be any more scraps of shredded of plastic blowing in the wind.

Gibson also said the current crop of plant based biodegradable plastic replacements, such as bags made from corn starch and other similar substances don't break down quickly enough for the composting operation and would pose the same challenges as plastic bags.

Charleston County Councilwoman Colleen Condon said one of the goals of the plastic bag ban is to turn out a better product that will raise more revenue for the county. She admitted however, that the county could have done a better job of explaining the reasons behind the program and its potential benefits to county residents.

She said she has heard complaints that using paper bags for yard waste is more expensive than using plastic bags, but she said she has also heard just as many positive comments about the switch.

Aside from earning revenue from the sale of the compost, cutting down on the use of plastic bags lessens the country's overall dependence on petroleum. And because the composting keeps tens of thousands of tons of waste out of the landfill each year, it prolongs the life of the site.