Residents urge council panel to ban Styrofoam, end proposed garbage handling site

(Note: This story has been altered since it was originally published to clarify that the Georgetown site is not a landfill, but rather a site for compacting garbage before it is loaded onto rail cars.)

Seattle citizens attending a packed City Council committee hearing Thursday found a way to reuse the plastic foam they find wasteful -- they made hats out of it.

		Grant M. Haller / P-I
	Ellie Rose of Foam Free Seattle, another activist who is leading an effort against foamed polystyrene trash, secures her foam-product hat at the committee hearing.

A dozen people wearing towering hats of plastic foam -- one even topped with a plastic-foam Space Needle -- joined about 150 other Seattleites at the hearing to encourage council members to pass an initiative banning foam products by 2008.

They also support Councilman Richard Conlin's proposal to end plans to build a site to compact garbage and load it onto rail cars in the Georgetown neighborhood.

One of the hat-toters who spoke in front of Conlin and five other council members was Eric Thomas of West Seattle. Thomas, with a plastic-foam takeout container hat whose lids moved like lips when he tugged on a string, said that when he and his wife go out to dinner, they hate to accept restaurant leftovers in "hideous Styrofoam takeout containers."

"They scream out, 'I'm wasteful,' " Thomas, 26, said. "It doesn't have to be that way."

San Francisco, Portland and Berkeley, Calif., are among other cities that have already banned plastic foam, which takes thousands of years to degrade and a great amount of energy to recycle.

San Francisco has also banned plastic bags in grocery stores.

The hearing was scheduled by Conlin, chairman of the Environment, Emergency Management and Utilities Committee, whose Zero Waste Strategy received widespread support from the speakers, most of them Georgetown merchants and residents wearing identical green shirts.

Some attendees toted large bags with 444 plastic bags inside, representing what they said was the number of plastic bags Seattle accumulates in one minute.

Many of the speakers said with a decrease in plastic and foam, there will be no need for the Georgetown garbage site, which would be the third in Seattle.

Georgetown resident Holly Krejci, 33, received loud cheers after serenading the council members with her song, "Waste Will Subside" to the tune of Aretha Franklin's, "I Will Survive."

Joel Ancowitz, 41, of Georgetown also strongly urged council members to stop the Georgetown garbage site, calling such places a "cancer on the planet."

Reciting a Mark Twain quote, he said, " 'Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.'

"Well, here's our chance," Ancowitz said.

Another public meeting on the issue will be held June 28.