SOURCE:
https://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-plastic-bags-20191212-mnnamdooanhrjh53gwarb4f4hu-story.html
By ELIZA FAWCETT - December 12, 2019
In this photo from July, Stop & Shop employee Sonja Foxwell shows some of the reusable bags available in the Wallingford store. Stop & Shop eliminated single-use plastic bags at checkout at its Connecticut stores as of Aug. 1. (Dave Zajac/Record-Journal via AP)(DAVE ZAJAC/AP)
At a Stop & Shop on New Park Avenue in Hartford on a recent Tuesday morning, Althea Lockhart, 62, carried her groceries out of the store in a reusable bag.
“I have about 50 of them," she said.
That may be the simple and somewhat unexpected result of Connecticut’s 10-cent fee on single-use plastic bags, which was expected to raise $27.7 million in revenue this fiscal year.
A shift in consumer behavior — combined with a decision by major supermarkets to eliminate plastic bags from their stores — means the state now expects to raise only $7 million, just a quarter of the earlier projection.
The fee on single-use plastic bags, which went into effect on Aug. 1, will lead to a total ban by July 1, 2021.
“The policy goal was to get rid of the bags, and this wasn’t necessarily a tax or a fine levied for the purpose of revenue, otherwise we wouldn’t have built in such a fast acceleration and prohibition,” said Chris McClure, a spokesman for Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget office. “We wanted to get the bags out of the water, out of the environment.”
But what accounts for the $20 million difference in the two projected revenues?
McClure said that the underlying assumption of the $27.7 million figure was that consumers would keep using plastic bags — and paying the 10-cent tax.
That’s not what happened.
At the beginning of the year, Big Y Foods announced that it would phase out plastic bags by 2020, but accelerated the timeline to eliminate the bags from its 81 stores in Massachusetts and Connecticut by Aug. 1. Stop & Shop also eliminated single-use plastic bags from its 91 Connecticut stores by that date.
Those decisions significantly diminished plastic bag sales, McClure said, in addition to the fact that consumers adapted to the law far more quickly than anticipated.
“People are using the reusable bags, almost uniformly,” McClure said. “It was the dynamic we wanted to happen, it just happened at a much faster rate."
According to Wayne Pesce, the president of the Connecticut Food Association, plastic bag use has dropped over 80% since Aug. 1 within the organization’s grocery store membership. He added that the law’s success was due, in large part, to grassroots organizing around the issue.
“This was organic and growing in towns and cities across the state already, and we’d seen a move to reusable as well. You take those factors and put into account that they’re putting a 10-cent fee, it’s not gradual; it’s immediate,” he said.
Louis Rosado Burch, the Connecticut program director for the Citizens Campaign for the Environment, called the shift in consumer behavior “a very significant response” that was “almost overnight."
In Connecticut, the plastic bag fee was never meant to be a sustainable revenue stream for the state, Burch said, but rather was a way to reinforce sustainable consumer behavior.
“If it comes down to people not wanting to pay the dime, we’re okay with that, if it’s less plastic bags ending up in the environment in our waste stream,” he said.
The American Progressive Bag Alliance, the U.S. plastics industry lobbying group, argued earlier this year that eliminating plastic bags would be counterproductive.
“You can ban this product … but the alternative is worse, both economically and environmentally,” Matthew Seaholm, an alliance spokesman, said before the General Assembly considered banning bags.
The industry argued that thicker, reusable plastic bags or paper bags are more expensive to make, take up more space in landfills than single-use bags, and note that single-use bags are made from natural gas byproducts, not oil.
Elsewhere in the country, plastic bag fees have yielded similarly dramatic results as in Connecticut. In New York’s Suffolk County, where a 5-cent fee on single-use plastic bags was instituted on Jan. 1, 2018, the county’s plastic bag use dropped by more than 1 billion bags in a year.
Connecticut continues to face major recycling challenges, including how to remove glass from the waste stream and how to help towns across the state deal with recycled materials no longer accepted by Chinese processing plants. But some say that consumers’ ability to shift over to reusable bags within just a few months is a victory that should not be overlooked.
“From a revenue perspective, the state’s not recouping the revenue they thought they’d get from it, but from an environmental perspective, keeping it out of solid waste streams, it’s a huge win,” Pesce said.