The City of Boston could soon join Cambridge and other Massachusetts municipalities by banning plastic shopping bags at checkout lines. And as goes Boston, so may go the rest of the state.
City Councillors Matt O'Malley and Michelle Wu have put forward a proposal to ban the most common kind of plastic shopping bag and charge five cents for paper and other recyclable bags. The idea is that a ban will reduce litter and encourage the use of reusable bag. O'Malley based his plan on similar ordinances around the country.
"We've seen what’s worked elsewhere and we’ve emulated that. We’ve seen what hasn’t worked elsewhere and avoided that," O'Malley said at Wednesday's City Council meeting.
The plastics industry says there isn't enough data to prove plastic bags are all that bad for the environment. But as more and more cities and towns approve different bans, the bag, grocery, and retail industries could appeal to Beacon Hill lawmakers to craft a statewide law instead of dealing with a patchwork of regulations.
"Banning or taxing 100-percent recyclable, highly reused plastic retail bags — which make up just 0.3 percent of the nation’s U.S. municipal solid waste and 1.2 percent of litter in the Northeast — won’t create any meaningful environmental benefits in Boston, but it will create a number of unintended negative consequences," Mark Daniels, the chair of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a coalition of plastic bag manufacturers, wrote in a statement responding to Boston's proposal.
One of those concerns councilors will have to mull over is if the nickel charge for bags could hurt poor and elderly Bostonians.
Shortly after O'Malley filed the proposal, a paper industry group, the American Forest & Paper Association, rejected the West Roxbury councilor's proposal to place a 5-cent surcharge on paper bags.
“A 5-cent paper bag fee will cost Bostonians millions of dollars, hitting hard-working families at a time they can ill afford it,” Gretchen Spear, packaging director for the group, wrote in a statement.
Only one community in Massachusetts has ordered a fee for paper on top of a plastic ban, the paper industry group pointed out that. As the most-recycled product, Spear insisted, paper bags are a cleaner alternative to plastic.
The ban is meant to reduce greenhouse gas emission from bag production, the solid waste created by disposing of bags, and marine and terrestrial litter, according to O'Malley's proposal. The intention is to encourage the use of reusable bags in the city.
O'Malley's proposal calls for all stores that provide bags to charge no less than 5 centers each, whether the bags are recyclable plastic, paper or reusable — a big sticking point. Stores would retain the additional charge.
Stores could face a $50 fine for a first violation and $100 for subsequent offenses. The proposal does carve out room for exception at the discretion of city officials for stores facing "undue hardships."
At-Large Councillor Annisa Esabi George says she appreciates the environmental benefits of a ban and is looking forward to the public hearing process where business owners and other will get to weigh in.
"I also want to hear from the business owners," George said. "As a local business owner myself, how that's going to impact the process of doing business positively and negatively. Take all of those examples and situations and really have a thorough understanding of them before we get to a vote"
The threat of a looming ban has caught the attention of the plastics and paper industries, whose lobbyists have been involved in negotiations. They also foresee a situation where dozens of different municipal laws complicate their businesses.
“Particularly the lobbyists in the plastic bag and paper bag industries have very deep pockets," O'Malley commented from the floor Wednesday.
“They would argue that it doesn’t make sense to change the status quo," O'Malley said.
The state Senate passed a similar statewide ban this year. But the proposal went nowhere in the House, where the 2017 fight will most likely occur if Boston passes a ban.
O'Malley hopes the proposal will get through the Government Operations Committee before the Council's last meeting of the year on December 14. The ban would go into effect within one year of its passage.