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Those familiar plastic bags are soon to be a thing of the past in major Somerville stores. ~Photo by Doug Holder
By Amy Swain
September will bring with it the official start of the ban of plastic bags at Somerville checkout counters. Large stores will no longer carry plastic bags as of the first of the month; smaller stores and operations will be allowed to carry them through December. Smaller operations, the city believes, should have a little more time to exhaust their supply of plastic bags and secure a suitable alternative.
Legislation for this act has been in process for some time now, and was formally passed last year. Environmental concerns have been paramount in this decision, as well as the presumed benefit to the city on a more superficial level – less litter and trash. While some residents have voiced their grief with the ban, others believe it will simply take some getting used to. Cambridge adopted the same policy earlier this year and has seen no upset, only a lesser amount of waste. City officials will be monitoring retailers to enforce the policy, especially for the first year. This is less for policing purposes and more of a means of assistance in the transition.
Information sessions will be held September 13, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m., and September 29, 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. at City Hall, in the second floor Alderman’s chambers. These sessions will help business owners as well as shoppers understand the specifics of the ban. The basics though, are that no plastic checkout bags will be given at registers. This does not include produce bags, or anything similar or specifically unique.
It will be up to retailers to decide the alternative. Star Market will stop carrying plastic September 1, and from then forward will offer paper bags with handles for ten cents. Target will begin giving away reusable shopping bags beginning August 24, and continue until their stock is depleted. At that time, whether the first has come or not, they will no longer carry plastic, and will have free non-handled paper bags. The options are many and different. Check your regular grocer’s policy, but bringing reusable bags will always be a good idea.
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Bringing reusable bags is fine, provided you know how much you are going to buy in a given trip to the store.
Sure, you can buy extra as you need them, but I wonder how many will wind up with more bags than they need at some point, especially if they are the forgetful type.
Why do we also have to pay for paper bags because of this? Should we all be penalized for not bringing reusable bags, especially when many of us recycle plastic bags for other purposes?
There are places to drop off bags for recycling, and if the city simply put one of these programs in place, there would be no need for stores and customers to have to get used to anything. It just seems that the city prefers to put the burden on stores and its customers.
It’s good to be environmentally responsible, but unless everyone is doing it, it’s not really the solution. We’ll just have to wait and see just how much of a difference it makes over time.
Good to see this finally taking hold. Too much is too much. Time to grow up and do what’s right.
Plastic bag ban is optically a good political move because it is visible, everyone can see the change and the city is not required to lift a finger or pay a cent. But the real impact is not significant at all. More trash cans on the street, including residential areas, that are actually emptied regularly to not overfill would be greatly more impactful than a plastic bag ban. But that costs the city money and a plastic bag ban only cost the store and the customers money.
1.Single use plastic bags make up small a fraction of a percent of the waste stream created in city. There are bigger culprits to target in order to reduce garbage creation.
2. Plus while single use, they are reused for other things, like carrying sandwiches to work or lining bathroom trash cans. Now, other single use bags will be used in their place so the net saved is not as much.
3. Further, the process to create a reusable bag requires an order of 100x more energy and material than a single use bag, so for every single use bag, you will need to make many more trips to get the environmental benefit.
4. Reusable bags need to be cleaned often as bacteria can easily be deposited from raw foods and contaminate food and make people sick. The cleaning takes away from the perceived environmental benefit.
Yes, banning single use bans will prevent them from being blown in the wind when littering, but on my walk today from work, I saw dozens of pieces of little on the sidewalk and not one of them were a single use bag. I saw pages from unwanted newspapers that are continually left on doorsteps, business, flyers, liquor bottles, plastic cups and so on.
While the plastic bag ban, might provide some small benefit, do not kid yourself. in the grand scheme of things it is nothing more than a ice cube in an ocean.
Agree completely. People like to make excuses for holding back progress, but most folks smell B.S. when it’s presented and this is no exception. I’m proud that our city is leading the way once again. Others will soon follow.
To the author of ‘Our View Of The Times’, August 24, who wrote about
plastic bags: “Well said.” For those of us born in the 1950s or before,
we remember our grandparents going to the local grocery store with
their shopping bags. And how they talked about doing this before
supermarkets, and plastic bags, became commonplace. It’s not so difficult
to go back to this behavior again, and even though it doesn’t solve our
trash and recycle issues, it does help. When this topic of plastic bags went through Legislative Matters at City Hall, Katjana Ballantyne gave her
“girl on a bicycle” speech, and where she reminisced about being a kid
and going on her bicycle to get groceries carrying her shopping bags.
So this is what we do today: it’s easy to keep a shopping bag or two in
a backpack; it’s easy to keep several in a car trunk; maybe it’s not so
easy to remember to take them all the time we go to the market, but we
learn to do so over time. My gripe is that the City of Somerville wouldn’t
take plastic bags through recycle, and said that it wasn’t economical
to do so, though other cities did it. But that’s academic now. So welcome
to life with shopping bags again, and some of you can tell your kids and
grandkids about the good old days when plastic bags flew around and
lived in the trees.