Cities and towns across Massachusetts started banning plastic bags around 2015, and environmental organizations won’t be happy until residents in all 351 are lugging home groceries in paper or reusable bags.
“The Commonwealth is behind where it should and can be when it comes to reducing plastics,” said Lydia Churchill of Environmental Massachusetts. “Nothing we use for a few minutes should pollute our environment and threaten our wildlife for hundreds of years.”
Agreed.
Though estimates differ on how long it takes a plastic bag to decompose – 20 years or 500, no one wants to see them litter the landscape, or wind up damaging marine life in our oceans.
But what happened to the recycling option?
A visit to mass.gov leads to the “how and where to recycle” page. It says: “Most supermarkets and numerous other retailers accept plastic bags and wraps for recycling at no cost. Visit the Wrap Recycling Action Council to find a nearby drop-off location.”
A click from there leads to plasticfilmrecycling.org, one more click and you’re at bagandfilmrecycling.org. Here it notes that “Store drop-off programs have been the primary means of recovering clean and dry bags, film, and wrap for more than 20 years. Retailers usually consolidate the material with other film like pallet wrap at their distribution centers and then sell the material to companies making products like composite lumber, bags and film, containers, crates and pallets.”
Type in your zip code, and up pops a list of stores to drop off your plastic bags. The site notes that you should confirm first, in case anything has changed in the store’s policy.
Why hasn’t this option been as touted as outright bag bans?
Banning items deemed harmful for the environment comes with the imprimatur of planet-friendly progressives, hence the move to do away with plastic bags altogether.
As State House News reported, representatives from ten environmental organizations gathered last week on Beacon Hill to promote bills that would ban the distribution of plastic shopping bags at retail stores statewide.
The Joint Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources heard more than 40 bills last week designed to limit single-use plastic consumption.
The bills encourage shoppers to use their own reusable shopping bags but stores could sell recycled paper bags to customers for ten cents. Stores would remit five cents from each paper bag purchase to the state, and all revenue would fund environmental projects in the municipality where the bag was purchased.
Paper bags are OK – for now. Walmart has been including them in its bag-bag across several states. Paper bags are popping up on hit list, because, as CNN reported, they are carbon-intensive to produce.
So we’ve probably got that to look forward to.
For now the state is looking at bans over recycling.
Should the state ban single-use plastic bags, establishing a unified standard would be important, according to Bill Rennie, vice president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts. The standard should include a reworked fee per bag, he said.
“Paper bags cost significantly more per unit to produce, purchase and ship into the Commonwealth, meaning the cost for retailers and our customers significantly increases,” Rennie said.
As always, consumers will be left holding the bag.
