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A look behind Philadelphia’s postponement of its plastic bag ban.

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Bring Back The Ban

Story by Siobhan Gleason

A look behind Philadelphia’s postponement of its plastic bag ban.

Single-use plastic bags are designed for a simple purpose: They carry purchased items from a store to a place of residence. After that they are no longer needed, but unlike paper bags, plastic bags do not quickly decompose. Instead, they linger in our environment—on our streets, in our local rivers and streams, and in our parks and fields.

Though most plastic bags are thin and fragile, their effect on the environment cannot be underestimated. According to the Clean Air Council, Philadelphians use about 1 billion plastic bags per year. 

In 2014, Mount Airy resident Brad Maule conducted a project called “One Man’s Trash” in partnership with the Friends of the Wissahickon. Once a week Maule collected all of the trash he found on his long hikes through the Wissahickon Valley Park. 

“I picked up all the trash I could carry,” Maule says.

Single-use plastic was an abundant source of litter, including plastic bags. Maule recorded 3,768 total pieces of trash. He found 40 plastic grocery bags, as well as 190 dog waste bags during the course of his project. 

Plastic waste usually ends up in the Wissahickon in two ways. Visitors littering is a major problem, but plastic is also carried into the creek through stormwater runoff, which then flows into the Schuylkill River.

“In Philadelphia we are drinking the Schuylkill and the Delaware,” Ruffian Tittman, executive director of the Friends of the Wissahickon, says. Removing plastic waste from our drinking water is an endless task and just another example of how much of it surrounds our environment.

When plastic waste becomes clogged in the sewer system, “It can act as a magnet for other materials and cause a partial or full obstruction of flow,” Lisa Copeland, public relations manager for the Philadelphia Water Department, says. “These obstructions can lead to sewer backups and result in the discharge of sanitary sewage to streets, rivers and streams.” 


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This ongoing environmental hazard has been a concern of lawmakers for at least 13 years. Councilmembers made two attempts to ban plastic bags in 2007 and 2009, but progress was elusive. After the second failed attempt, the issue was placed on the backburner.

In 2015, Councilman Mark Squilla proposed a 5-cent fee on all single-use bags. Squilla’s work with environmental groups Clean Water Action and PennEnvironment, among others, inspired him to push for this legislation. At the time, other issues were considered more pressing. 

“The administration, they were in the process of putting together the beverage tax. We certainly had a bill that would be supported by a majority of council, but we were asked to put a hold on it,” Squilla says. “We decided to hold off and not move forward until we saw how the beverage tax would play out.”

In 2019, Squilla worked to craft a new piece of legislation. He introduced the “Bring Your Own Bag” bill on June 20, 2019. The bill amended a Philadelphia law that regulates city businesses and banned single-use plastic bags at the point of sale or for a delivery. In the original version of Squilla’s bill, retail establishments would also charge customers a fee for any single-use bags customers used to transport  purchased goods from a store, including paper bags. Customers who used a reusable bag would not be charged a fee.

“We had pretty good support for the fee on both plastic and paper. The administration would not support the fee. They thought it would be better to have a plastic ban, and no fee, for people who may have concerns of the city charging a fee to make it harder for residents to purchase products,” Squilla says. Squilla is waiting to see if a fee can be added at some point in the future.

On December 12, 2019, City Council passed the revised bill, and on December 30, Mayor Kenney signed the bill into law. The law was set to go into effect on July 2 of this year.

However, the COVID-19 crisis has created new impediments to the “Bring Your Own Bag” law. On Earth Day, the City pushed this initiative back to January 1, 2021, saying the original effective date was no longer realistic. On April 1, 2021, retail establishments will be prohibited from providing single-use bags to customers.

“This is not an announcement we want to make during Earth Week,” Mayor Kenney tweeted. “The climate crisis and plastic pollution remain very serious threats to our planet and society.”

Not all Philadelphians agree that the initial fee on plastic bags should have been abandoned.

While city officials have been laser-focused on COVID-19 since March and the health crisis has been dominating conversations about how the government can best serve citizens, PennEnvironment clean water advocate Stephanie Wein believes it was a mistake to delay the ban. 

“The longer we put it off, the longer this is a problem. This is a unique suspension of an environmental protection,” Wein says.

In response to Kenney’s statement, Wein and David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment, issued a press release challenging the delay decision. Masur and Wein were surprised by Kenney’s decision to move forward with a delay without consulting any environmental or community groups.

Wein considers a fee to be a practical idea for both customers and business owners. 

“Paper bags are a little more expensive than plastic,” Wein says. “This is a way for retailers to recoup that cost. It gets the average person going to the store to think twice and bring the reusable bag, and it makes sure that retailers aren’t really hit. There has been a call for this policy from every income level in the city.”

Jeff Brown, CEO of Brown’s Super Stores, Inc., which owns 10 ShopRites and two Fresh Grocers in the Philadelphia area, took issue with how the fee would have been collected. 

“When the government sets the fee, I think that’s smarter,” Brown says. “It seems like without a fee, it just doesn’t work properly.” 

In 2008, certain ShopRite stores, including its Roxborough location, implemented a 2 cents-back bag initiative, which gave customers 2 cents back for each reusable bag they brought to the store. This program was later disbanded due to a low participation rate from customers. “Some consumers liked it, but most consumers didn’t use it. When confronted with a 10-cent fee, that would be a huge motivation to use reusable bags,” Brown says.

Still, Nic Esposito, the former Director of Philadelphia’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet, believes that although the delay was announced suddenly, the decision to delay the ban was the right one. (Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before the city announced the elimination of the cabinet in the wake of COVID-related budget cuts.)

“With the delay, it stinks that there are going to be more plastic bags that are going to turn into litter and be on our streets, but if we tried to push this thing through and roll it out, given all the restraints we have dealing with COVID, it would have gotten swallowed up and not implemented the way it needed to be. The reason for the delay is to do it right,” Esposito says. 

Philadelphia is not the only city delaying a plastic-bag ban during the coronavirus crisis. Delays have also occurred in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Bellingham, Washington. San Francisco has gone one step further (or rather, backward), temporarily banning the use of all reusable bags in stores.

According to Wein, the delays are a result of a claim spread by the plastic industry that plastic bags are safer than reusable bags—an opportunistic narrative used to push back against the recent wave of anti-plastic legislation.

“The plastic industry nationwide is cynically using this health crisis to wedge their foot in the slamming door on single-use plastics,” Wein says. 

The Bag the Ban campaign, a program created by the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance (ARPBA), has been pushing the message that plastic bags should not be banned during the current crisis. 

The Bag the Ban website tracks pending plastic-bag bans by state. Visitors to the website are urged to take action by signing a petition or sharing how they reuse their own plastic bags. The Bag the Ban website asserts that plastic bags are the safer option during the coronavirus outbreak, but it also claims that plastic bags are better for the environment than reusable and paper bags.

The websites of both the Plastics Industry Association and the ARPBA say plastic bags are the most environmentally friendly choice, claiming the bags “are 100% recyclable.” This is a highly dubious claim, considering the fact that Philadelphia does not recycle plastic bags. Plastic bags have even caused damage to the city’s recycling equipment.

According to Esposito, plastic bags and other plastic films cause about “10,000 hours of lost staff time” per year in the city’s recycling plants, due to
the need to shut plants down about three times a day to remove plastics from the equipment. 

However, when the Alliance claims that plastic bags are recyclable, it is referring to recycling programs in participating stores. According to their “Find My Recycling Center” tool, Rite Aid, Wawa, Target, Pathmark and Superfresh all have plastic-bag recycling in Philadelphia. 

This information is outdated because Superfresh and Pathmark have been out of business since 2015, after supermarket chain A&P filed for bankruptcy. Rite Aid and Target did not respond to a request for comment about plastic-bag recycling. Wawa’s customer service department says it does recycle plastic bags, handled by Wawa’s vendor, though it is unable to share the vendor’s name. 

Esposito does not see these company initiatives as effective methods of recycling bags. 

“Only 1 percent of plastic bags will ever get recycled,” Esposito says. 

When the ARPBA calls a plastic bag “100 percent recyclable,” they mean that in ideal circumstances, a plastic bag could be recycled. This may be confusing, since most plastic bags are marked with a recycling symbol around a number 2. The number surrounded by the three chasing arrows on a plastic bag classifies the type of plastic it is made of. Though the three arrows seem to indicate that a plastic bag is recyclable, in practice that is often not the case. 

Esposito considers these recycling symbols “confusing by design.”

Both the Plastics Industry Association and the ARPBA did not respond to a request for comment.

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Concerns about reusable bags are shared by some in the city. “There is a big fear that there might be COVID-19 on the bags,” Brown says. At Brown’s ShopRite and Fresh Grocer locations, customers who bring reusable bags are required to bag their groceries themselves.

For M’Annette Ruddell, a resident of Mount Airy and a self-described “bag lady,” these concerns are reasonable during this tumultuous time. 

“In this era, being very cautious should be the norm,” Ruddell says. “Ultimately the safety of everyone—the workers and the customers—is the most important thing.” 

Ruddell is not worried about her reusable bags carrying germs. She takes care to keep her bags clean, washing them after “every second or third use.” While Ruddell has been using her own bags for 50 years, she has noticed more customers using reusable bags in recent years. When she used to bring her bags to the grocery store years ago, cashiers would sometimes give her looks. 

“It would sort of be eye rolling, like, ‘What kind of weird person are you?’ I don’t get that much anymore,” Ruddell says. “It’s much more commonplace now for people to bring their own bags.”

According to Dr. Julie Becker, an environmental health specialist and member of Pennsylvania Physicians for Social Responsibility, there is no definitive evidence that reusable bags are any less clean than plastic. 

“It depends on how the plastic is treated and handled. You can’t say that plastic bags are better than cloth bags. It comes down to who’s packaging the bag, for example the people on the front lines of the checkout. There have been virtually no studies that looked at virus transmission with regards to the coronavirus and plastic bags,” Becker says. “This is a virus that is transmitted human to human. If you’re smushed in the [grocery store] aisle and not practicing social distancing, that’s the issue.”

One store that has not abandoned its focus on reusable bags during the coronavirus outbreak is MOM’s Organic Market, which stopped using plastic single-use bags in its stores in 2005. 

At MOM’s nineteenth location, in Center City, paper bags are the only single-use option for customers, though many shoppers bring bags from home instead. Alexandra DySard, environmental and partnership manager at MOM’s Organic Market, says the chain decided early on “to be a grocery store that protects and restores the environment.” 

In 2008, MOM’s implemented a 10-cent credit to encourage customers to bring in reusable bags. Customers get 10 cents back for each reusable bag they use while shopping. 

“Our customers bring in about 7,500 bags a day,” Dysard says. Dysard believes the 10-cent credit helped shape shoppers’ behavior early on. “I think in the beginning, having those monetary pieces is a great use to get you to start doing it. The monetary incentive is there in the beginning and then it becomes habitual,” Dysard says.

The real question is whether Philadelphians can change their habits even when they are not forced to by local government. 

Shortly after announcing the ban’s delay, Mayor Kenney’s office also announced that the pilot street-sweeping program will not be expanded due to budget cuts. The street-sweeping program was supposed to eventually collect waste from all neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

Esposito believes the cut to street sweeping will not exacerbate litter accumulation for now. “I don’t view street sweeping as a solution to our issues,” Esposito says. For the time being, if street sweeping would have helped to combat plastic litter, Philadelphians won’t be given the chance to find out. Similarly, the city announced a week later that Esposito’s Zero Waste office would disband June 1.

Tittman anticipates a buildup of plastic waste in the Wissahickon, which will be compounded by the delay, the lack of street sweeping and the necessary suspension of trash pickup by crews of volunteers in the park. 

“There’s going to be a lot of trash,” Tittman says.  At the same time, Tittman also trusts that many Philadelphians will do their part to reduce litter. “There are always some folks in every neighborhood that are committed to cleaning up,” Tittman says.

The title of the “Bring Your Own Bag” bill may be a message Philadelphians can take to heart before the law goes into effect. The act of bringing a reusable bag to the store is an extremely simple and cheap one. By using reusable bags “we’re not reinventing the wheel,” Ruddell says. 

Likewise, Squilla believes the law will still be effective if Philadelphians begin using reusable bags now. 

“If we can build on the mindset of how can we do things in a way that doesn’t create so much litter, we’ll be in a better place,” Squilla says.

How can we convince Philadelphians to make this choice? Maule has an idea. He has a few reusable bags, but he often uses the same two bags again and again. 

“I usually only use the coolest ones. I think that’s the key—to make bags that appeal to somebody, like the Philadelphia Eagles that dudes from South Philly would be okay with taking to the Acme.”

Reusable bags that serve as another way to rep Philly pride? Maybe it’s worth a shot.

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