http://www.thestreet.com/story/12037191/1/why-you-cant-count-on-the-plastic-bag-anymore.html
Why You Can’t Count On the Plastic Bag Anymore
BY Laura Kiesel| 09/19/13 – 07:45 AM EDT
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BOSTON (TheStreet) — They can be found everywhere: in the hands of shoppers, blowing down the streets, entangled in trees and even congregating as part of massive makeshift islands floating around our oceans. They are the single-use plastic bags offered to us with every purchase, which we often take and discard without a second thought. The plastic bag is so prevalent it was even named “most ubiquitous consumer product” by Guinness World Records in 2009.
There is an indication the decades-long popularity of the plastic bag here may be waning, though.
This past summer Los Angeles, the second-most-populous U.S. city, became the largest municipality in the country to pass a ban on plastic bags, of which it reportedly uses and disposes of 2 billion annually. The ban will go into effect early next year for stores larger than 10,000 square feet and in June for smaller stores. The ban is a follow-up to a 2010 ordinance in Los Angeles County banning plastic bags in unincorporated areas with more than 1 million residents and requiring stores to charge 10 cents per paper bag. The American Progressive Bag Alliance, the lobbying arm of the plastic-bag industry, is fighting the ban.
Large cities such as Chicago and New York City are considering measures to restrict or ban plastic bags. New York City, for instance, is considering a measure that if passed would mandate that retail stores charge a dime per disposable bag (whether paper or plastic) distributed. About 100,000 tons of plastic bags are transferred from the city to landfills in other states annually, costing the city $10 million a year.
New York City might be hoping to achieve what Dublin, Ireland, did when it implemented a tax on plastic bags in 2002: reduce plastic bags in the city by 94%, to the ultimate approval by retailers and their patrons.
Many other towns and cities in the U.S. have outright banned plastic bags in the past several years, including San Francisco, Seattle, Aspen, Colorado, Southampton, New York and Brookline, Mass. (Nantucket, Mass., was the first town to ban plastic bags, back in 1990.)
This momentum on the municipal level has translated to six states — California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington — that are considering full-on bans. Another eight states – Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — are considering more moderate legislation to charge for bags.
In Massachusetts, state Rep. Lori Ehrlich sponsored a bill that would effectively ban disposable plastic bags in large retail shops and grocery stores statewide but allow business to use compostable bags instead. If it makes it out of Ways and Means, it could come to the floor for a vote this year.