NJ's Single-Use Bag Ban Runs Into Some Problems

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Let's begin this last segment of the show today with part of a poem by Brian Bilston called Bags.

You have bags of bags

collecting bags must be your bag

because you have bags with nothing in them except for bags

inside of which are other bags full of bags

you have enough bags for a hundred lifetimes

if there was a prize for the total number of tote bags, you would have totes have it in the bag

It goes on from there, part of a poem by Brian Bilston who some regard as the unofficial poet laureate of Twitter, you may know. That may resonate with some of you, especially if you live in New Jersey right now. In May, Jersey implemented the strictest single-use bag ban in the country, banning grocery stores from providing or selling single-use plastic bags. The law also disallows grocery stores bigger than 2,500 square feet from providing or selling single-use paper bags, and this is where the story goes.

As NJ.com reported a few days ago, "New Jersey is considering amending the law because of some unintended consequences, too many reusable bags in people's homes," because you have bags with nothing in them except for bags inside of which are other bags full of bags as Brian Bilston, obviously, puts it. With me now is Bob Smith, New Jersey State Senator and chairman of the Senate Environment and Energy committee and one of the co-sponsors of S864, the bill that has banned single-use bags. In other words, he wasn't against it, he was for it. He sponsored it in the first place, but now he wants to take another look. Senator, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Bob Smith: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, especially those in New Jersey are you drowning in reusable cloth bags? Perhaps you've gotten creative when it comes to ways to reuse or get rid of your excess bags. Give us a call and tell us your tips for getting rid of unwanted bags, or tell us if you want paper bags to be returned to grocery stores as an option, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet at @BrianLehrer. Senator, has your office been getting lots of complaints from constituents who have too many bags piling up at home?

Bob Smith: No. Actually, you've somewhat misstated the issue. The issue is not about grocery stores. In grocery stores, people in New Jersey are using their reusable bags. The plastic bags and paper bags are out of the environment. The issue is about the delivery services. In other words, if you've hired a service to go to a supermarket and deliver groceries to you, you get those groceries in a reusable bag, and those are the bags that are building up. Across the spectrum, this issue doesn't affect 90% of the people that are in New Jersey, only those who have the delivery service.

Brian Lehrer: I see. From what I read and tell us if you don't think this contributes to it, maybe it doesn't very much, but my impression was that it had to do with grocery stores in the sense that, of course, that's who delivers even if it's a big box store like Target that also delivers groceries, but also that a lot of people go shopping at grocery stores, and they forget to bring their reusable bag, so they keep having to buy new ones, and then they're piling up in peoples homes for that reason too but not so much you think?

Bob Smith: No. Honestly, that's not the issue. By the way, I'm one of those people. I do 60% of the grocery shopping in my house. Even though I'm the sponsor of the bill. I've forgotten to bring them in from the car to the grocery store. What I do when I'm going through the checkout, I just put the groceries on the tabletop, they record it, I pay the bill, I put them back in the shopping cart, and I bring them to my car where I put them in the bags and that's when I bring them into the house with.

I've forgotten. I don't buy new bags. I have 10 bags in my trunk. By the way, once you do it once or twice, you now remember to bring your bags in so that's not turning into the problem. As long as you have the bags in your car, you're not going to end up with bags, bags, bags, bags, bags. The only place where that situation is occurring is in the grocery delivery business. You have third parties. Sometimes they're subsidiaries of the supermarket, but they're third parties.

What we didn't think of a big important bill like this, you try to get everything right the first time, but you don't always, so we're going to tweak it. There's three tweaks that are under consideration. The one is that the delivery service must take back the reusable bags, and if there was a charge for it, they have to give the party credit for it, and then the delivery service will sanitize them and reuse them. By the way, they're reusable bags, so it's not that big a deal and that way you do justice to everybody.

Second approach is for the delivery services, allow them to deliver the groceries in paper bags. Now, that's a little bit of backsliding but very little. The reason we took out paper bags in the first place was we're trying to reduce the waste stream. If you want to get the maximum bang for your environmental legislation, you try to clean up multiple props.

Paper is not as offensive as plastics which have huge health effects and they are compostable.

They're not the worst alternative, but we thought we'd try and clean that up. We're not adjusting that because you're talking about on the delivery side, maybe up to 10% of the people in New Jersey do that, and that might be a high estimate. If you said you were going to allow paper bags for just the delivery services, you're not going to get that much more waste in the waste stream. Then the third alternative is the Costco model. If any of your listeners have gone to Costco, Costco doesn't have a standard container that they give to the customers.

When you check out with your groceries, they have a large open area where they have their cardboard boxes that their products were delivered in and you are welcome to take any one of them and put your groceries in there and then take them out to your car. That would also be a form of second use of cardboard, so it has some advantages there. There's at least three decent alternatives. Our plan is to introduce the Cleanup Bill. This will be an amendment to the bill. 99% of the bill stays in effect, but we do want to deal with the delivery service issue and find a solution for that, and that's what we're focusing on

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call, Ken in Paterson, you're on WNYC with Senator Bob Smith. Hi, Ken.

Ken: Hi. For the bags, my opinion has always been that this is sort of a band-aid on a larger issue where there is much bigger offenders. I've also always found that it works its way into being almost attack from the middle class and the poor because the people who most often have to buy the bags are those people. The other thing for me is that for one person use the bags, I reuse them.

When I do my cat litter or when I'm putting away my recyclables, I use the bags that I got from the store. Now that those are gone, I find that I have to use more garbage bags which are thicker, and I'm assuming are worse than the thinner plastic bags that I was getting at the grocery store. I do like the idea of returning them, being able to return them to the stores, but I just think that we're fixing a problem that doesn't fix the overall problem if that makes sense.

Brian Lehrer: Senator?

Bob Smith: Well, let me tell you what the big problem is. The big problem is what these bags do. We do have to get them and other plastics out of the environment. The bill not only does the single-use plastic bags but also does the foam packing peanuts and the foam containers and takes out a whole bunch of plastics out of the stream of commerce.

If Ken would go to your local hospital, today, and ask for a blood test and ask in the blood test to check to see whether you have plastic microparticles in your blood, guess what they're going to find? They're there.

They're there because these microplastics are in the air, they're in the food that you're eating, especially fish, and in some places, they might even be in some of the water that you drink. They're ubiquitous. They're everywhere and we have to do our very best to get them out. I think Ken's argument is maybe this is overkill, it's not overkill. Normally people think of the plastics problem as this continent of plastic litter that's in the Pacific Ocean. It's not just that. It's not just the sea birds and the sea life that's affected by it, it's human health. These microplastics are showing up more and more in human blood and when they get into your body, they bring other chemicals with them. We have no idea what that impact is, but we know it's bad. Got to get the plastics out of the environment and you're right changing human behavior is not easy. I mentioned to our host, I've forgotten to bring my bags in and it's a pain but in terms of reducing the impact on the environment on your health, it's the absolute right thing to do.

By the way, if you're driving around New Jersey, New Jersey looks so much cleaner. These bags that have been blowing through the air on our streets, in our sewers, on our beaches, they're almost all gone at this point. It looks like a much cleaner and greener state. I'm going to say we need to find ways to make sure this works. Right now it's a relatively small problem. It's the delivery system that's the problem.

Brian Lehrer: In addition, the caller was saying that he has to buy plastic bags, therefore use more plastic bags to replace what he was reusing the paper shopping bags for after he brought them home. There's another unintended consequence, I guess. John in Monmouth County.[crosstalk] Go ahead, Senator.

Bob Smith: Maybe, maybe not but let me just tell you that there's always are alternatives. All right. In cat litter, is plastic the only disposal method that you have? Why couldn't she use, for example, a paper bag or putting in some way to dump the container into a garbage-related facility that will properly dispose of it? You don't have to do plastic bags.

Brian Lehrer: John in Monmouth County, you're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hi, Brian, longtime listener, multi-time caller. Hello, Senator Smith, John Weber here. I'm on the plastics advisory council that was created by this law. Probably the rest of the council is lighting up the board and they're on hold but thanks for taking the call. We're charged with evaluating the effectiveness of this law and coming up with changes and we are on the verge of that. I heard the three solutions that you had mentioned, Senator.

I just want to strongly say at least from my own standpoint, my opinion on this is that we need to solve this with reusables before we just jump and allow paper for delivery. When you think about when we started working on this law, grocery delivery wasn't that much of a thing as it is now. It's a much bigger share of supermarkets business. We are talking about it. We're working on it. There should be a way, as you said. If you get a reusable bag with your groceries, they need to go back. They need to get sanitized.

If there's a deposit system and you pay, and then you get the money back, it just becomes circular. I think that's far superior to just going straight to paper bags for delivery. I will say a couple of things finally, it wasn't the environmental groups that wanted to get rid of paper bags and groceries in the beginning. This was the idea of the Food Council for good reasons. There's an environmental cost of paper and they're much more expensive, so they didn't just want to have everybody switch over to paper and they would be bearing that cost. There's a good reason for it. The whole idea of this law is reusable. Let's try and stick with reusable. Let's solve this delivery problem with reusable.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you very much. Of those three solutions that you outlined at the beginning, Senator, I guess the question that I could follow up John's comment with is, might it be worth trying just implementing the recycling, the reuse of those bags, such that the delivery service has to take them back the next time they come?

Bob Smith: I think that's the best solution out of the three, quite frankly. I would rather not do "any backside" even if it's very, very small. John is a representative of the Surfrider Foundation who have been good stewards of the ocean, and they were with us on the bill all the way through and we do have a Plastics Council. One of the things that he didn't point out is that I'm hoping for input from the Plastics Council. We set them up as an advisory body but I do plan to introduce a bill in September and hold hearings on it in October because I think we should address it. I don't think you want to let a problem fester.

I'm hoping that the Plastics Council if they have any recommendations at all that they get it into us because we don't have a monopoly on solutions. If there's a better solution, those three IDs at least start the process and start the discussion, but we're happy to entertain any ideas that people have. Right now, I like the one, the best that we just discussed which is having the delivery services be required to take them back, give credit if there was a cost to it to the customer, and then sanitize them and reuse them. I think that's the best of all the solutions, but we're going to listen to everybody. We do public hearings. We do want to hear what the citizens of New Jersey want us to do.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Rita in Morristown, you're on WNYC with Senator Smith. Hi, Rita.

Rita: Hi. I just have a personal viewpoint on this. I like going to supermarkets. I have the time to do it. I make all decisions for various reasons. I have observed that this law has given permission for the cashiers to have you pack your own bundles. It's not just one supermarket. I have found it in the four supermarkets I go to, and it just seems to be up more or less the cashier. I see the cashiers stand there. I'm putting the goods on the conveyor belts. I'm getting out my debit card. I'm pressing in my telephone number and I notice they're just standing there.

Brian Lehrer: They don't want to [crosstalk] go for time. They don't want to touch your reusable bags. Have you heard that before Senator? Very briefly?

Bob Smith: Actually, no. I've had a different experience in my food shopping. There were times when the cashiers don't get involved, but that's in the situation where my wife and I are doing the food shopping. She's paying for groceries or putting them on the conveyor belt, I'm at the other end and I'm packing. It's like they don't even have to get involved because I will normally be involved, but I could understand it if you're a single person there.

One person representing the family that, that could be an issue. What I would suggest to the lady. First, I can't mandate the conduct of the checkers, but I think if she dropped a word to the store manager and say, "You used to do this service. I don't appreciate the fact that you don't do it." Supermarkets have to compete for your business like everybody else.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, listeners--

Bob Smith: I've had checkers actually packing the bags too. I've had some help from them. I have a slightly different experience.

Brian Lehrer: This debate goes on. I want to throw in one fact I didn't have time to ask you about it Senator but I want people to know about it if they don't. If you have all these reusable bags piling up, The Community Food Bank of New Jersey created a look-up tool so residents can find pantries accepting bag donations. They can use your reusables. There you go and we leave it with Bob Smith, New Jersey State Senator, chairman of the Senate environment and energy committee, figuring out what to do with the delivery bags piling up in people's homes. Thanks so much, Senator.

Bob Smith: Thank you so much.

 

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