Plastic Bag Disposal Ban
Raising public awareness and involvement - plastic bags cause very visible pollution and are a tangible example of consumption and waste.
Enforcing Organizations Governments are the primary organizations that establish these plastic bag bans. In the U.S., implementing governments are limited, to date, to cities and counties, although some states have introduced bag ban legislation. In Canada, several provinces have developed related policies. Globally, there are numerous countrywide programs (e.g., Denmark, Ireland, Taiwan, Italy, Bangladesh, Rwanda), and many more local government bans. To a much lesser extent, some individual retailers have also adopted bag reduction policies without government involvement.
Implementation by Businesses Regardless of who initiates a plastic bag ban policy, businesses are targeted for actual implementation. As a result, they eliminate the cost of purchasing plastic bags but may face new costs associated with changing their bag inventory, training staff, educating the public, purchasing/selling alternative bags, providing refunds for use of reusable bags or reconfiguring sales systems to accommodate bags fees (explained below). These costs may be off-set by reduced purchase of single-use plastic bags (most of which are exported from off-island).
Types of Policies Single-use bag policies in general include the following primary components:
Materials targeted - may be plastic bags only or in combination with other singleuse, disposal bags (paper bags).
Mechanism - can be a bag ban, fee or hybrid.
Many ban/fee programs target both plastic and paper bags. Reasons for this approach include the assumption that banning or adding fees for one type of bag would only increase the use of the other type of disposable bag. Life cycle environmental analysis of paper and various types of plastic bags has found that there are significant impacts associated with all types of disposable bags (Boustead Consulting, 2007). Bag bans have some advantages over fee programs in that they make greater progress toward meeting diversion and litter goals, easier to enforce, expand public awareness, and reduce retailers’ costs. They do not, however, generate any revenues that governments and retailers can use to off-set education and implementation, can garner public opposition (perceived as eliminating public choice), are often opposed by plastic bag White Paper D-6
June 2013