Over two years ago I wrote about my experience on a quick run to a nearby grocery store to pick up a few items. Seven items, to be exact—which were then placed in six plastic bags, flimsy because they were intended to be used only once and then tossed out. (It was a spur-of-the-moment trip on the way home that evening, so I didn’t have the usual reusable bags I would have given the grocery store to put my items in.)
Those six bags were among the approximately 10 billion single-use bags that the NYC Department of Sanitation estimates New Yorkers toss out every year—a whopping 19,000 every minute. Disposing these bags costs city taxpayers in excess of $10 million a year.
So it is welcome news today to learn that the New York City Council has passed legislation that will require stores, with “limited exceptions”, to charge five cents for every single-use bag they give shoppers. According to The New York Times, the legislation passed by one of the closest margins in recent years, 28–20. The mayor, Bill de Blasio, has expressed his support for the law.
But it’s not in the clear yet: former mayor Michael Bloomberg “offered a proposal in 2008 for a 6-cent bag fee — 5 cents for stores; a penny for the city — before dropping it several months later amid strong opposition. At the time, one of the opponents on the Council was Simcha Felder, a Brooklyn Democrat who is now a state senator. Last month, Senator Felder introduced a bill [S7336] that would prohibit the levying of local fees on bags; it passed a committee this week,” writes the Times.
And the fee itself is not perfect. Unlike the bag fee imposed in my former hometown, the District of Columbia, where the nickel collected on every bag helps clean up the heavily polluted Anacostia River, the stores will keep every cent they collect of New York’s proposed charge.
But, in the end, if the results in New York are anything like those in the nation’s capital and other cities that have imposed a charge on single-use bags, you can expect to see far fewer of them littering our streets and polluting our city very soon. A small fee can lead to big behavioral change.
Image: New York City Hall by Momos via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Dustin Tyler Joyce 