Wearing bright purple nitrile gloves, Yuan Wang tears another produce bag off the roll and begins to select some apples. “You know, I was happy that they brought the plastic bags back,” she says as she puts the fruit into her cart. “With the pandemic and everything, it’s just safer.”
In July 2019, Mayor Michael Soriano signed a new ordinance into effect. Starting in February of this year, the law prevented retailers in Parsippany Troy-Hills from distributing any single-use plastic carryout bags. Instead, customers were required to bring their own bags or to purchase recyclable paper bags.
Wang, along with many other locals who shop in Parsippany, was concerned about cross-contamination – the possibility that COVID-19 might be brought into the store on reusable bags and spread to surfaces or staff. Plus, she says that the reusable bags are difficult to sanitize – an important consideration for her family, which has several higher risk members.
She wasn’t the only one worried about the potential risks – the New Jersey Food Council, a committee that represents independent and chain grocery stores across the state, also voiced their concerns. At the start of the pandemic, President and CEO Linda Doherty reached out to the 32 municipalities that had enacted a plastic bag policy. Citing health risks and also pandemic-related paper bag shortages, Doherty pleaded for the ban to be lifted.
In the midst of the world halting to a stop, the pandemic brought about one positive: the biggest decline in global CO2 emissions since before WWII. According to a paper published in Nature by Zhu Liu, emissions have reduced by almost 9% this year, primarily due to a reduction in transport. However, plastic usage has gone in the opposite direction, with hygiene efforts greatly increasing the use of food-related single use plastics such as takeout containers and utensil packaging.
Further to that effect, Parsippany suspended their bag ban on March 17th. Even the Denville Farmers Market, normally a welcoming community for the environmentally conscious, started distributing more plastic due to the pandemic.
Ina Braun, also known by her moniker “The Bagtivist”, is a vendor who teaches sustainability and usually helps customers make reusable bags out of old shirts. Since the pandemic, she has entirely shifted her business to selling cloth masks. “People just aren’t willing to bring reusable bags anymore," she says. And even if they did, the new systems for contactless shopping are based around pre-bagged orders, rendering reusable bags pointless.
So how much damage does reversing these plastic bag bans do to the environment? It’s less than one might think. Rebecca Taylor, a University of Sydney economist, found that while effective at reducing plastic bags, the bans ultimately resulted in a massive increase in the sales of garbage bags. In an NPR article, Taylor is quoted saying that “30 percent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker bag.” Not to mention that production of the paper bags that are often used in place of plastic can be worse for the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
Indeed, one of Wang’s chief complaints about the plastic bag ban is the extra cost and inconvenience it introduced. "It's just common sense. We reuse shopping bags as garbage bags and so does everyone I know," she explains before further lamenting the fact that she will now have to purchase bags from the store.
And according to Julia Orlofski, who spent the summer working in a local grocery store, people find their own ways to circumvent the ban. “Customers would just bring extra produce bags to the checkout line," she noted, which effectively negated the goal of the ordinance.
So, while lifting the ban during the pandemic may not be the worst thing for the environment, it prompts a discussion about its future: How can we ensure that the ban is as environmentally friendly as it was intended to be? In the meantime, customers like Wang will have to move past their disfavor of reusable bags. Starting in mid-October, it seems that the plastic bag ban is back and here to stay.
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