Source: Sanctuary Friends Foundation of the Florida Keys.
Do you have a plastic bag monster living in your house? For most of us, they reside in our kitchen cupboards, cabinets, or closets. They threaten to entangle us every time we reach in, feeding them our recent haul of grocery bags. But, the days of plastic bag monsters might be numbered if you live in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts could join California and Hawaii in statewide plastic bag bans starting August 1, 2018.
A ban on plastic bags is what Massachusetts needs. Plastic bags can cause costly damages and harmful environmental impacts. It’s also hard to do the right thing as a consumer when disposing of a plastic bag.
Only about 5% of plastic bags are actually recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. We keep these plastic bag monsters in our homes and then bring them all the way to grocery store “recycling” bins since they are not accepted at curbside recycling. In reality though, they often are not recycled because there is a minuscule market for recycled plastic bags. The plastic is collected and compacted into large blocks of plastic, and then land filled.
But if you don’t bring your plastic bags to these “recycling” bins, they may end up polluting our oceans and environment. Typical single use plastic bags are hard to control because they are so lightweight. They easily blow off of landfills and garbage trucks.
Plastic bags are the 5th most prevalent debris found on our Massachusetts coastline. These statistics are not so surprising given that we use 100 billion plastic bags every year in the United States.
Source: Mediterranean Association to Save the Sea Turtles
Plastic debris leads to the death of more than 100,000 marine creatures every year. Sea turtles are especially at risk around Massachusetts because five species of juvenile sea turtles come north to feed before returning to tropical southern waters. Sea turtles choke on plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish, their main food source.
Given the option of using reusable bags or biodegradable and recyclable paper bags, do we even need the “paper or plastic” choice?
Bill H.4168, the Plastic Bag Reduction Act, would implement a statewide ban of plastic bags and institute a ten-cent fee on recycled paper bags. This ban would only apply to large stores, like grocery stores, or chains with three or more locations, like fast food restaurants.
Right now, the bill is stuck in the House Ways & Means Committee, where it has been since April. This is the fate that befell a similar bill in 2013, which never made it out of committee. But, the outcome could be different this year.
California paved the way for statewide bag bans and has shown that businesses are supportive of one sweeping law. A major driving force behind California’s statewide ban was the confusion caused by 127 different municipal plastic bag laws. Businesses in California actually supported a ban because a ‘patchwork’ municipal approach to regulating plastic bags was more harmful to their business. Massachusetts has similarly become a ‘patchwork’ of regulations.
Jack Clarke, director of public policy at Mass Audubon, told the Boston Globe, “We’re either going to eventually have 351 municipal restrictions on bags, or we’ll have the commonwealth do one standard that all businesses and industries can match.”
Local bag laws in Massachusetts have been gaining momentum over the past three years, making this current bill’s future more promising than its predecessor. In the last three years, there has been almost an eight-fold increase in the number of municipalities passing bans or fees on plastic bags. This year, Cambridge was the largest city on the East Coast to ban plastic bags. Currently, the city of Boston currently has a committee working towards a plastic bag ban.
You can help keep up this momentum and push the Plastic Bag Reduction Act (H.4168) forward. Similar to 2013, the powerful Plastics Industry is lobbying against the current plastic bag ban bill in Massachusetts. We need to show committee members that this bill has more people lobbying for it than against it so it can finally move past the House Ways & Means Committee.
Contact your local representative and ask them to express their support for the bill to Brian S. Dempsey, the House Ways & Means Committee Chair, Stephen Kulik, Vice Chair, and Benjamin Swan, Assistant Vice Chair. For a list of talking points, here is a fact sheet by the Massachusetts Chapter of the Sierra Club on the impact of plastic bags. Not sure who your Massachusetts House or Senate representative is? Search for them here.