Protect New Jersey from Plastic Bags
By Noemi de la Puente, founder of NJThinkOutsideTheBag (NoemiDLP@yahoo.com).
The Chapter’s monthly Conservation Committee meeting, Feb 8th, was mostly devoted to a presentation reviewing efforts to limit New Jersey’s pollution by plastic bags. Here’s a synopsis:
Why is the disposable shopping bag such a big deal? The average American brings home 500-700 bags a year (estimates from the EPA, the plastics industry, and from trash-anthropologists in Garbology, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes). In Mercer County alone, for example, that’s about 220 million shopping bags (low estimate), and in New Jersey it’s 5 billion bags per year. Yes - billion. That’s an enormous amount of trash that can be easily eliminated.
Shoppers in America expect a complimentary bag with each purchase. Of course it’s not free - the cost is factored into the price of your items. Then you pay for it again when it’s discarded at home and your taxes are spent on municipal waste disposal. As a taxpayer you might even pay for it a third time if it ends up as litter that clogs a pump station, or recycling machinery, or has to be fished out of a wastewater treatment plant. There is also the cost to ocean life: whales, dolphins, and sea turtles eat plastic bags because they resemble jellyfish (food); the animals end up starving to death because their digestive organs fill with plastic, blocking the absorption of real food. Large sea animal populations are down 90% since the 1970s.
Many American communities now require a fee for disposable plastic shopping bags. Fees reduce bag usage 80-90% -- consistently and across cultures: in cities, counties, and entire states, in the USA, Ireland, and China. Fifty four percent of the world’s population now lives under some sort of plastic bag ban or fee. If people practice a small sustainable behavior like bringing reusable bags on shopping trips, they will be more likely to adopt other sustainable behaviors (Fostering Sustainable Behavior by Doug McKenzie-Mohr).
Communities that have enacted successful bag fee/ban legislation tend to be too big in area for an aggrieved customer to drive elsewhere to shop: San Francisco county and San Jose in California, Washington D.C., and all of Hawai’i. Mercer County (226 square miles) is probably large enough to support a successful bag/fee law What if the Mercer County Improvement Authority passed an ordinance saying, “no more complimentary bags, and merchants keep the fee as part of a solid waste reduction plan?”
We have to think outside the bag! Recycling will not help - it never has. According to the EPA Municipal Solid Waste Report, 2011, recycling rates for the average HDPE (#2) bag was about 8%. The recycling containers in front of our favorite grocery stores are almost always just an intermediate stop before the bags are landfilled.
Someone has to go first for the State of New Jersey to seriously consider a single use disposable bag fee bill. In 2013, Senate Bill 812 - the first bill of this nature to make it out of committee - was never posted for a vote, so it died with the last session.
Activists instrumental in getting legislation passed in California have given the same advice over and over: “You need a local victory for everyone around to see how well this works.” I think we can make Mercer County the first county in NJ to do this and pave the way for NJ to get rid of its 5 billion bags.
How you can help:
(1) use your reusable bags - tie your keys to them if it’s hard to remember them;
(2) post your bag stories and pictures on NJThinkOutsideTheBag;
(3) Reach out to your local merchants association
(4) Reach out to your township council
Comments, questions, or corrections, are welcome
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