The town of Mamaroneck is working to gain support for an initiative that would encourage patrons of the community to bring their own reusable bags when shopping.
The Reusable Bag Initiative, RBI, hopes to prevent shoppers from using non-reusable bags in order to limit the amount of plastic and paper bags released into the environment, both for ecological and aesthetic purposes.
“It’s awful to see plastic bags in trees, on fences, on lawns,” Town Supervisor Nancy Seligson said. “But of course when it gets into the marine environment, it’s really dangerous for marine creatures.”
Seligson said that the conversation on cutting down the use of plastic bags isn’t a new one.
The town first looked into a plastic bag ban in 2012, but received backlash from the Food Industry Alliance of New York State, FIANY, an association that works to protect chain retail stores from laws that could harm their businesses.
The organization “basically threatened to sue us,” Seligson explained.
Jay Peltz, general counsel and vice president of government relations at the FIANY, said that a ban on plastic bags would be harmful to both the environment and businesses.
“If the ban [on plastic bags] leads to a surge in paper [bags] rather than reusable bag use, then the environment is worse off because paper is worse for the environment than plastic,” he said.
But Peltz also believes that a ban on both paper and plastic bags would be hard on shoppers as well.
According to Jennifer Romer, founder and director of Plasticbaglaws.org, a website that gathers legal information for places considering bans on plastic bags, placing small fees on plastic and paper bags used by customers has been the, “most effective way to get people to bring their own bags.”
Romer said that it’s important to make it clear that the point of charging customers for plastic and paper bags is to encourage them to bring their own, rather than collecting a fee.
In the past, according to Peltz, the FIANY hasn’t opposed plastic bag laws that don’t outright ban plastic, but instead charge a minimum fee of 5 cents on paper and plastic bags.
By charging 5 cents for such bags, stores are able to compensate for the fees they pay for those bags, while also encouraging customers to bring their own bags.
Peltz said that since a law charging 5 cents per bag went into effect in Washington D.C. in 2010, the use of plastic bags has reduced significantly in the city.
Currently, the villages of Larchmont and Mamaroneck, and the city of Rye have bans placed on the distribution of plastic shopping bags.
Although a public hearing hasn’t been scheduled, Seligson explained that town officials are in the beginning stages of discussing how a law limiting the use of paper and plastic bags would be written. “I think ideally you would want to have some kind of law that really encourages people to use reusable bags,” she said.
Seligson is hoping now will be the right time to put the proposed law into action for the town, saying that she want to pose the initiative as something positive for merchants as well.
“We’d like to offer them the ability to put the names of their companies and products on the reusable bags that we would give back to the community,” Seligson told the Review.
The RBI was first revisited by the Sustainability Collaborative, the town’s environmental committee, in January 2017. Currently, the group is working on getting signatures for a petition supporting reusable bags in the town of Mamaroneck. Seligson reported that as of press time, the petition has more than 35 signatures.
The group is also asking members of the community to take part in the “RBI Challenge” by creating a slideshow or video presentation that explains the effects of plastic bags on the environment. These presentations should be no more than three minutes and must be submitted by Thursday, June 1 to sodierna@townofmamaroneckny.org.
