The Calabasas City Council has decided to wait on the results of a county environmental report before pursuing its ban on plastic grocery bags.

The Los Angeles County Public Works Department is developing an environmental study that would look at the impact of banning plastic and paper bags in the county’s 88 cities. The document should be completed by early 2010.

“For a small municipality, it’s not a good idea to enact one of these bans on our own,” said Councilmember James Bozajian at last week’s council meeting.

“If there’s a statewide effort to do something, I’d be supportive, but not if it means Calabasas is going to have one way of doing things and the surrounding cities have another way of doing things and we put a burden on our businesses and start chasing away our businesses,” Bozajian said.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors earlier voted to ban the distribution of plastic bags in the unincorporated areas of the county if voluntary programs by retailers in those areas don’t reduce use of the bags 30 percent by July 2010 and 65 percent by July 2013.

“I’m curious with what L.A. County comes out with in their (environmental report),” Council-member Mary Sue Maurer said. “I see so many people using their own bags and there’s so many cities in Europe people using own bag, I think we could easily adapt at some point.”

Mayor Jonathon Wolfson agreed the city should wait to pass an ordinance, but at the same time warned against “sitting idly” by.

“We do tend to be innovative here,” Wolfson said. “I wonder if there’s a way to work with major retailers, to see if there might be voluntary actions they are willing to take, whether its increased bag recycling . . . maybe come up with innovate ideas to decrease the use of paper and plastic bags.”

The council discussed how to promote the use of reusable bags and suggested the city’s environmental commission continue the talks.

In 2005, the United States Environmental Protection Agency estimated only 5.2 percent of the plastic bags in the municipal waste stream were recycled, compared with 21 percent of paper bags.

The California Integrated Waste Management board estimates that Californians use approximately 19billion lightweight plastic bags each year, with six billion of them used in Los Angeles County, according to information provided by Alex Farassati, Calabasas’ environmental services supervisor.

In March 2007, San Francisco became first city in the U.S. to ban plastic shopping bags in grocery stores and pharmacies. In May 2008, Malibu approved an ordinance to ban the use of plastic shopping bags at all retail stores.

In July 2008, Manhattan Beach voted to ban businesses from using plastic bags, but a Save the Plastic Bag Coalition filed a lawsuit, saying the city hadn’t developed a complete environmental report. The city lost the lawsuit and has appealed the decision.

Also last year, the Los Angeles City Council voted to prohibit plastic bags in L.A. stores by July 2010, but only if the state fails to impose a 25 cent fee on every shopper who requests the bags.