Environmentalists and like-minded citizen activists have long recognized the inherent health and safety risks posed to people and to animals in the day-to-day consumption of plastic. These groups have successfully spearheaded legislation to ban retailers from using plastic bags. Seattle’s plastic bag ban is on par with similar bans in other progressive areas: San Francisco, CA, Banned plastic bags in 2007; Los Angeles County, Banned Plastic bags November 2010 and included a 10 cent fee on paper bags; Portland, OR, Banned plastic bags in summer 2011.
Seattle’s plastic bag ban law addresses what is generally perceived to be a liberal cause in favor of environmentalists and public safety. In reality, the plastic ban law has no impact on the overwhelming abundance of plastic stocking the shelves of grocery stores, health and beauty aids, hardware stores, and many other retailers and medical device companies. The plastic bag ban law penalizes shoppers who don’t bring their own bags to the checkout line. By law, retailers are not allowed to give away free shopping bags and must charge five cents a bag. In the early days when the law first went into effect, retailers could only sell shopping bags made from 40% recycled paper. According to the law, small, greeting-size paper bags are permitted to be given away for free. Now that the law has relaxed, and shoppers are comfortable paying the five-cent surcharge, many retailers sell plastic sacks too. The five-cent plastic sacks do bear the retailers’ name and logo, and it is all perfectly legal.
Charging shoppers five cents a bag has provided large retailers a new revenue stream. Granted, a nickel is not much, but for retailers doing thousands of transactions a day, nickels add up to a tidy source of revenue. While the law does require retailers to classify bag sales as taxable income, it does not require retailers to track and audit how many bags are being sold to shoppers.
The message here is more than good plastic or not-so-good plastic. The story on a plastic bag ban that penalizes shoppers is a lesson about spin so cleverly created that it can barely be discerned. Local governments, including the Seattle city council, appear to be making good law by placing a monetary penalty on shoppers for forgetting to bring their own shopping sacks to the checkout. Politicians assert that they’ve created a financial incentive to encourage shoppers to forget about plastic and to bring reusable bags to the checkout counter. There do not, however, appear to be financial incentives to encourage corporations to use paper, wood, metal or glass to package food and beverages.
In reality, the price of banning plastic bags has become a new source of revenue for corporate interests and mega retailers like Safeway, Bartell Drugs, Rite Aid and Trader Joe’s, just to name a few. Popping a loophole in the plastic bag ban poses a piercing question: why aren’t wholesalers, manufacturers and retailers penalized for producing so much plastic?
For consumers to have to pay five cents a bag is just too HEFTY® a price to pay.