Al's Morning Meeting

San Francisco is about to become the nation's first city to ban plastic grocery bags.

The mayor is expected to sign the ban into law after the city council passed the measure on a 10-1 vote.

Large markets and drug stores will have to offer customers a choice among recyclable paper bags, recyclable plastic bags made of corn byproducts or reuseable cloth bags.

The Associated Press carried a story that says:

"I think what grocers will do now that this has passed is, they will review all their options and decide what they think works best for them economically," said David Heylen, a spokesman for the California Grocers Association.

[Mayor Gavin] Newsom supported the measure. The switch is scheduled to take effect in six months for grocery stores and in one year for pharmacies.

Craig Noble, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it would be disappointing if grocers rejected the biodegradable plastic bag option, since more trees would have to be cut down if paper bag use increases.

The new breed of bags "offers consumers a way out of a false choice, a way out of the paper or plastic dilemma," Noble said.

California already requires retailers to provide a way for customers to recycle clean plastic bags. According to a 2000 Environmental Protection Agency report, Americans recycle 0.6 percent of plastic bags and 19.4 percent of paper bags.

The Film and Bag Federation has some quick, interactive tips on the plastic vs. paper debate. It points out that plastic grocery bags are easily reuseable (Hey, I bring my lunch to work in one every day.).

Here is the history of the plastic bag.

Here are some facts from the Web site for the paper-bag industry (The Paper Industry Association Council). Here is the history of paper.

The Environmental Literacy Council points out that the real question is not what biodegrades in landfills, because pretty much nothing biodegrades well in tightly compacted landfills. Plastic bags compress more easily and take up a lot less space in landfills than paper does. But a big selling point in the San Francisco debate was the effect plastic bags have on wildlife -- especially marine life.

That is a fairly well-documented threat.

Plastic bags pose a threat to marine life, because, if ingested, the bags can block the stomach and cause starvation. Sea turtles, for example, mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. In 2002, a minke whale that washed up on a beach at Normandy was found to have 800 kilograms of plastic bags in its stomach.

Stray plastic bags can also clog sewer pipes, leading to stagnant, standing water and associated health hazards. In 2002, Bangladesh banned plastic bags after drains blocked by bags contributed to widespread monsoon flooding in 1988 and 1998. Ireland has decreased plastic-bag consumption by placing a consumer tax on plastic bags. Perhaps the most strict plastic-bag regulations are found in the Indian province of Himachal Pradesh, where people caught with plastic bags are fined $2,000.

The Environmental Literacy Council passes along this data but unfortunately does not cite the source:

It is estimated that somewhere between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed throughout the world each year. In 1977, supermarkets began to offer plastic grocery bags as an alternative to paper bags. By 1996, four out of every five grocery bags used were plastic.

Of course all of this debate is of little value when we load our recycled-cloth grocery bags into our 15-miles-per-gallon SUVs.

New Inhalers Cost Lots More

By the end of next year, all asthma inhalers will have to use propellants other than the CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) that manufacturers use now. CFCs are believed to contribute to ozone depletion. The new inhalers use hydrofluoroalkane (known as HFA), and they will cost a lot more. The American Lung Association says:

There can be a significant price difference between the CFC inhalers and the new HFA inhalers, particularly if you currently use a generic CFC inhaler. The HFA inhalers cost from $30 to $60, compared with $5 to $25 for a generic CFC inhaler. The price difference is most likely to have an impact on patients without health insurance.

"Depending on your insurance, these new inhalers may be more expensive, but our hope is that as more people move to the CFC-free delivery method that the price will come down," says Norman H. Edelman, M.D., chief medical officer of the American Lung Association.

If you have questions about the transition to HFA inhalers or to learn about assistance programs that may help you pay for your prescriptions, including a coupon offer, call the American Lung Association Lung HelpLine at 1-800-LUNG-USA, and press "2" to speak to a nurse or respiratory therapist.

Al's Morning Multimedia

This might make newsies squeamish, but I thought you better take a look at it. It is the latest mixture of news and entertainment, only this time in a Web environment.

CBS.com has started producing and posting online so-called "Webumentaries," which are meant to complement the post-nuclear-disaster drama "Jericho," which has a huge online presence.

Even though they are linked to a fictional drama show, the five-minute, online-exclusive stories contain interviews with real experts about disaster readiness, radiation poisoning and similar topics, woven into a prequel about one of the show's characters. In other words, they look a lot like news.

The Chicago Tribune says:

In the mini-episodes -- posted online Wednesday nights after "Jericho" airs on the West Coast -- Robert Hawkins, a shadowy FBI agent, researches how to survive a nuclear attack in the weeks leading up to the blasts. While Hawkins is on the run from unknown assailants, he gets video transmissions over e-mail and on his cell phone that are actually reported pieces based on interviews with government officials and academic experts.

The result is an unconventional pairing of fiction and news, complete with product placement. (The logo of AT&T, which sponsors the series, crops up every time Hawkins turns on an electronic device.) The unusual hybrid offers a new model for "Webisodes," a genre the broadcast networks are scrambling to master in the YouTube age.

Poynter's EyeTrack07 Study Finds Online Readers Read Deeply

Make sure you spend time on the EyeTrack07 article we posted Wednesday with new results from our groundbreaking study about how people read online and print copy, photos, headlines and such. Among the findings is how surprisingly much readers actually read -- especially online.

You can see video of the findings, read the presentation and see the slides our presenters used.

This is just the first slug of findings -- more will follow soon.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.