Petaluma is on the verge of throwing out the use of plastic carryout bags by grocers and retailers for good.City Manager John Brown said the City Council will have two options before them at Monday's meeting: join the county's plastic ban or draft legislation specific to Petaluma that outlaws plastic bags."There are some cities that have said they want to do it themselves, and other cities that said they want the county to handle it for them," said Brown. "Now it's the council's time to decide."Banning plastic carryout bags from grocery and retail stores has been a goal of the Petaluma City Council for quite some time. It's a move that has become increasingly popular across the county, as many cities join the effort to keep plastic bags out of landfills and the environment.Some bans are citywide, others countywide. Many bans also carry a mandatory 5- to 10-cent fee charged to the customer for using paper bags, all in an effort to encourage customers to purchase reusable shopping bags.
The development came as Times columnist Ben Macintyre claimed in an article that Spain's ambassador to London, Federico Trillo, had been summoned by the Foreign Office over the bag incident.If correct, that would mean that Ambassador Trillo was called in by the British Government twice within the space of a week, the first time over a 22-hour incursion into British waters by the Spanish research ship Ramón Margalef.The Foreign Office would not comment further on the matter or on the claim in the Times newspaper. Earlier this week it said two UK government bags had been opened at Gibraltar border in error by a junior Spanish officials and that the British Government had received assurances it would not happen again."We made appropriate representations to the Spanish authorities at senior levels, and we have now received an explanation from the Spanish Government and been assured that we will not see a repeat of those actions," it said.In related issue Gibraltar ans South West England MEP has asked the European Commission to clarify whether Spanish proposals to stop vessels carrying building materials from entering Gibraltar would be permissible under EU law.