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By CHRISTOPHER ARNOTT - July 1, 2021
Connecticut’s ban on single-use plastic bags took effect on July 1, and this time, those flimsy receptacles are gone for good.
If you forget to bring your own bags to the store, there’s no stack of plastic single-use ones you can get for a dime each.
The 10-cent fee was a temporary way to transition consumers away from the allure of those plentiful free — yet environmentally unfriendly — single-use bags. The fee went into effect in August of 2019, as part of the same state legislation which sought to ban the bags for good by July of 2021.
The State of Connecticut Department of Revenue issued a bulletin for retailers about “the sunset of the single-use plastic bag fee,” providing guidance on how to report the final fees collected on the bags for tax purposes.
A single-use plastic bag is defined not just by their construction but by their availability. State statutes specify that they are “bags with a thickness of less than four mils that are provided by a store to a customer at the point of sale.”
The pesky bags, known in some cultures as “witches’ knickers” for their propensity to fly through the air and get stuck in trees, have been a bane of environmentalists for decades. Single-use bags, they assert, don’t just add to general litter but can take thousands of years to decompose completely, emitting hazardous chemicals while they do. They also cause tangles in single-stream recycling machinery since they’re often used to bag actual recyclable items.
The fees and ban concerning the plastic bags were complicated by the coronavirus crisis, which led to a suspension of the 10-cent bag fee for three months last year, when there were still concerns about whether the virus spread through surface contact. When the suspension was lifted, the state noted that “according to guidance from the Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH), given the most current scientific information available, reusable bags do not serve as a significant source of infection for COVID-19.”
Louis Rosado Burch, Connecticut program director for the Citizens Campaign for the Environment, says the COVID crisis “definitely caused some setbacks, some mixed messages. There was no uniformity, a lot of fear and confusion around whether the virus could be spread through reusable bags, which we soon learned was not the case. It was frustrating, because we had already made so much progress.”
Rosado Burch notes that “Westport was the first municipality on the East Coast to ban plastic bags,” in 2008. Around 20 municipalities in Connecticut already had banned single-use plastic bags before the state ban began. Hartford instituted a citywide ban on the use of the bags in December of 2019, starting with large retailers, then had to suspend the ban due to COVID in May of 2020 shortly before the second phase (all retailers) was set to begin.
There is no statewide ban or fee on the use of paper bags, just the thin plastic ones, but some stores are charging for the use of them, citing the higher cost of using them, and it is within the power of individual Connecticut municipalities to restrict the use of them as well.
The main point of the anti-single-use-bag legislation is to reduce use of disposable bags altogether by normalizing using reusable bags.
“It’s a shared goal to connect the environment, to protect Long Island Sound,” Rosado Burch says. “The ban on reusable bags is most definitely a victory for the environment. It’s also a vital step for solid waste recycling.
“We want to focus on the positive. Advocating for reusable bags will encourage more responsible consumer behavior. For common sense policy that protects our environment, this is low-hanging fruit.”