I think this is a great measure to reduce waste and encourage recycling. I have an enormous collection of plastic bags in my house and I hardly have a use for them. I’ve only recently begun to carry around my own reusable shopping bags. They’re washable too, which is great. Anyway, I’m excited to see this go into effect.
Cambridge MA enacted a plastic bag ban with a 10 cent fee on bags given out at stores (but those bags must be recyclable or compostable). I think it’s great and I’m seeing a lot more people with reusable bags.
I have a friend who is beyond furious about this. She says that New Yorkers don’t use cars to go grocery shopping, that many go grocery shopping after being out all day, and so can’t carry reusable bags with them all the time. She posted a rant on Facebook, and most of her friends have pointed out to her that plastic bags fold up pretty small and are lightweight and can be carried around. Although it is a funny thought to think of all those investment bankers walking around with plastic bags in their briefcases.
Also, many New Yorkers reuse their grocery plastic bags to line their trash cans. So now they’ll end up having to buy plastic bags for this purpose, which will be a net change of zero in terms of plastic bags used.
I always food shop with reusable bags – although it is true that they just live in the trunk of my car – and I carry one of those small nylon fold-into-itself bags with me when I go shopping to reduce the number of plastic bags I use. I think the intent behind this is good, but New Yorkers do have different challenges.
In California, there is a 10 cent charge for a bag, plastic or paper. We’ve been using reusable bags for a couple of years now. For weeks, I’d have to go back to my car to remember the bag, but now I am used to it. Trader Joe’s sells large sturdy grocery bags to reuse.
The bigger issue: has all this caused a decrease in litter? I have not noticed it. Fresh meat is still put in a plastic bag to put in your reusable bag. So is some fresh fruit and veggies. Plastic bags or paper are still in use for take out food. So grocery food, pay for the bag: take out food, no charge for the bag. But if a shopper goes to a store that sells food and other merchandise - like Walmart or Target - the bags will cost 10 cents even if you are not buying food. However, Macy’s or Nordstrom doesn’t charge for the bag because they don’t sell food. Get it?
I used to reuse the plastic grocery bags for trash. Now I have to buy trash bags which of course are plastic.
The 10 cent charge, BTW, goes to the grocery store. They must love it. Almost pure profit.
Hmmmm… I was charged 10 cents for a shopping bag at Neiman in Palo Alto. The SA apologized like crazy about that. When you buy a $200 dress, paying 10 cents for the bag to carry it out of the store is no big deal. 
Here in WA, some municipalities have plastic bag charge, some don’t.
I use the plastic bags to clean the cat boxes. I guess that’s a “reuse”?
I can’t remember when was the last time I got a plastic bag from any of these type of stores; they are always paper, which I can more easily recycle (except plastic garment bags when I buy a dress and they don’t want to fold it up). The other two stores I shop at most frequently (Athleta and Anthropologie) also provide paper bags - in fact I put those in the back of my car for runs to Costco, etc. When feasible now, I will even tell the sales person not to put stuff in a plastic bag if I can easily carry it out or put it in my purse (hardware store, drug store, etc.)
Regardless, if we somehow end up with plastic bags (the ones meat, veggies, fruit, etc. are wrapped in), I always return them to the grocery store.
I don’t like this legislation because it seems like a naked subsidy to the grocery shops. Why will the stores be permitted to keep the 5 cent fee? Shouldn’t that money be provided to the government and ultimately utilized for environmental projects? Will this be similar to the soda can deposit situation, where at one time the accumulated deposits amounted to multiple millions of dollars in New York State, but the government had no instruction as to how to use the money. Huh?
And not all plastic bags are created equal. You can’t compare the bags distributed by the major chains to the flimsy less than hair-thin bags your local bodega gives you.
Hate to burst your bubbles, but this is just another one of those “feel good” taxes that someone else pays, even if you think you are the one paying.
A tax is only useful if it affects consumption because consumption the only true measure of a person’s cost to the economy. If your consumption is unaffected by a tax, then the tax must be affecting something else, i.e. getting paid else in the economy. And this plastic bag tax is one of these types of taxes. Note that for all the posters above, their consumption at the store was not changed, so the tax has no effect on their economic behavior. They think it does, but it is an economic fallacy, but sure makes people feel good.
- The tax is, at its worst, a direct income reducer on the low income and the poor. And it hits them the hardest because they have smaller homes, less storage space, and, most of all, less income to spend at any one time. Thus, they make more trips to the store on average and use more bags than middle income and higher income families. Even a couple extra dollars per month makes a huge difference to them. Therefore, the low income families' consumption of food items is reduced, even though someone else Uptown paid a tax to save the environment. The Uptown person feels good, but the poor get less food stuff. it is the poor person who is paying the cost of the tax in real terms.
- There has been a rise in stomach-borne illnesses and food poisoning linked to recyclable plastic bags. People often place fruits and other items in the same bags in which they previously carried meats and other heavy bacteria carrying foods. Unfortunately, even washing the bags out, which people rarely do not do anyway, does not work because water is not a disinfectant and the hydration often allows the bacteria to survive even longer. Either way, there is more sickness than there would be. (This bacteria problem why it is illegal in the food business to reuse storage bags for food)
The results are lost productivity due to sicks days taken and higher medical expenses that then raises insurance rates. Therefore, the recyclable bags, in addition to having to pay for them, is costing the economy in terms of productivity. This loss of productivity shows up in as a slight decrease in GDP, in some places in less inventory, and a resultant rise in prices. Minuscule to the average person, but in the aggregate, the cost is in the hundred of millions of dollars per annum.
- Most interestingly, such taxes actually do the reverse of what people think, i.e., they contribute nothing positive to the environment. The environment takes a big hit as well because this tax actually increases consumption of plastic bags. How? By making people feel good that they are doing good (hey, I paid my tax to help the environment - I feel great), there is no conscious reduction of activity that truly reduces use of plastic bags. All that has happened is that people pay the tax and continue as is, even if that includes buying more and using more plastic bags.
So, the tax fails on its most basic reason for being by not affecting the amount of plastic bags in the environment, but it simultaneously reduces the food stuffs the poor can purchase, and the plastic recyclables hits the GDP because more people get sick and raises prices for everyone. Yet, people feel good about paying their little tax, even though it extracts exponentially more from the economy than the tax raises and has zilch effect on environment in terms of the amount of plastic in waste.
Meh, I live in Michigan where we have a 10c charge on all pop/beer bottles/cans. I see nothing wrong with this. To be completely honest, it’s always kind of baffled me why bags would be free when we pay for everything else we take out of the store.
“2. There has been a rise in stomach-borne illnesses and food poisoning linked to recyclable plastic bags. People often place fruits and other items in the same bags in which they previously carried meats and other heavy bacteria carrying foods. Unfortunately, even washing the bags out, which people rarely do not do anyway, does not work because water is not a disinfectant and the hydration often allows the bacteria to survive even longer. Either way, there is more sickness than there would be. (This bacteria problem why it is illegal in the food business to reuse storage bags for food).”
Can you please provide a link to the summary of these studies with references or a few links to the studies? Thanks.
I find that my reusable bags multiply in the dark and I always have too many of them in a pile somewhere. And I forget them.
My favorite ones are the little ones that you scrunch together like a sock ball. At least you can fit one or two of them in your purse.
Romani, you always paid for the free bags - they were included in the overhead like many other costs of running the business and passed down to the customer. Now, if you pay 5 cents and if it goes to the store… The cost is not in the overhead. (Or we think it is not - the store could be charging you twice). You simply bought the bag.
I disagree that this “tax” does not change consumption. It does - consumption of the plastic bags, not consumption of food. Second, only the bags at checkout are “taxed” - the plastic liners near meats and fruits are not part of this game. Those are the ones that prevent bacteria contamination, not the big carry out bags.
PCC, a local co-op store, has big signs by the doors and in strategic places in the parking lot that say “A bag in hand is worth ten bags in the car”’ or something like that.
@BunsenBurner yes of course. I should’ve been more specific. I meant that I always found it strange that we pretended it was free.
I know nothing’s “free” 
You can bet your butt that we recycle all of our pop/beer containers because we want that money back. When I visit friends in states that don’t have those incentives, they almost always just throw away the cans rather than recycle them. My thought process when I see them going in the trash is “WHY ARE YOU THROWING AWAY DIMES?!” and then I remember…
Those plastic bags cost the retailer between 3 and 7 cents per bag depending on the quality and the color/printing customization. As a (former) retailer, it irks the **** out of me that I am not allowed by law to be courteous to my customer and help her with her purchases. I am glad to hear that the retailer gets to keep the money – because if I’d continued to provide them and then had to send the bag tax to the government I would be plenty upset.
FYI – those paper bags range from 30 cents for the brown grocery sacks on up, again depending on size, quality, and customization.
It may feel like they are free when the bags come in cases of 500 – but they aren’t!
Post #5 - In California a shopper is charged whether they choose paper or plastic at the grocery store. But a large dress bag at Nordstrom or Macy’s is not charged and these bags can’t really be reused since they have that hole for the hanger in the top. Neither is the paper bag one gets at most clothing stores. Neither is the plastic or paper bag one gets at a fast food or take out restaurant (which seems to me to be the biggest generator of litter, if that is the motivation for these laws).
Post #7 - I wouldn’t call this a tax. The profits from charging 10cents for a bag that likely costs one-tenth of that is profit for the store.
The people most impacted seem to be the baggers who have a harder time fitting food into the reusable bags either because the shopper didn’t bring enough in or due to the different sizes and shapes.
I bet the larger chains are able to negotiate better prices for their bags due to high volume purchasing.
My market pays me $0.5 for every reusable bag I use. I have at least 8 - two of which fit in my purse. One fold up into a wee square and the other (which is insulated) to the size of a women’s wallet. I even get the cents off if they don’t need all 8 bags to pack my groceries.
Our beverage container have a $0.05 deposit charge. We always bring them back to the store to get our money back.
I will be irked if my state ever requires charging for grocery bags. I reuse all of mine as trash can liners, so no waste in my house.
If they do charge, then I hope they improve the quality of the plastic/paper bags because they really are quite flimsy and you can’t fit much in them for fear of tearing.
Tatin, that must have been a local regulation. It was one of those glossy paper Neiman bags with rope handles.
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2013/03/11/palo-alto-to-ban-plastic-bags-at-stores-restaurants
^^^Yup.