After having a 5-cent tax on plastic bags for years, the Montgomery County Council in Maryland approved a partial ban on them at stores Tuesday.

The bill, first introduced in October, would prohibit plastic bags and would implement a 10-cent tax on new paper bags with a few exceptions for both categories. The law is meant to spur consumers to use reusable bags.

The ban passed the council unanimously and would go into effect in January 2026 once approved as law by Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, the Montgomery County Council said in a release.

The ban comes after a 2023 report by the Montgomery County Office of the Inspector General, which found that enforcement of the plastic bag tax was uneven and that the county could have lost out on as much as $8.2 million in revenue from retailers that weren’t remitting bag tax payments to the county.

The OIG report found that the county didn’t come up with a way to identify all retailers that should have been paying the bag tax.

Under the new bill, there are several exceptions to the plastic bag ban and the paper bag tax, according to a council staff report on the bill.

Plastic newspaper bags and bags intended for waste, bags at seasonal events like street fairs, yard sales and farmers markets, bags used for bulk packaging of things like fruits, candy and ice, garment and dry cleaning bags, bags used for prescription drugs or perishable or otherwise unwrapped food, and bags used to transport live animals will be exempt from the ban.

Paper bags used for prescription drugs, the wrapping of live fish, mollusks, crustaceans and bugs, for leftovers, drive-thru food, food truck fare, and food delivered by a third-party service will be exempt from the 10-cent tax.

Transactions involving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Women, Infants and Children Program benefits will also be exempt from the fee, the council said in its release.

Businesses will have to pay five out of every 10 cents taxed for bags to the county under the new policy. That money will go into the county’s water quality protection fund. Under the existing plastic bag tax, they pay four out of every 5 cents taxed to the county.

• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.