City Council to adopt partial plastic bag ban this week?

This is the plastic bag recycling bin at the south entrance to the Jewel-Osco at Harlem and Foster on Chicago's Northwest Side.

The Chicago City Council is expected to vote Wednesday on an ordinance that would prohibit this Jewel store and other chain grocery stores in the City from giving out plastic bags to their customers after August 2015. A "compromise" worked out with the ordinance's sponsors will give smaller retailers (stores with under 10,000 square feet of space unless part of a chain of three or more stores) a reprieve from the ban until August 2016. The Chicago Sun-Times Politics Early & Often site provided the text of the proposed ordinance:

Plastic bag ordinance

Retailers subject to the ordinance would be required to provide paper, cloth or "compostable" plastic bags that meet specified standards of biodegradability.

This is touted as a great environmental victory instead of just another regressive tax. It might be beneficial to the environment if the use of plastic bags would really be eliminated, but the proposed ordinance is also a regressive tax.

Bags are not free. I had a post on Page One back in 2011 that looked at the differences between the costs of paper and plastic bags. Paper bags cost significantly more than plastic ones; that's why grocers started using plastic. If this new 'environmental' ordinance passes, the costs of switching back to paper or using "compostable" plastic bags will be passed along to consumers. More well-to-do consumers may already be using cloth or other reusable bags (that they pay for). But, under the proposed ordinance, everyone will have to buy them, or pay increased costs at check-out to cover the costs of new bags. This will raise prices for rich and poor alike. It is for this reason that this new tax, like the sales tax, is regressive.

And the plastic bags have their uses. For example, dog owners will still have to have something to dispose of what dogs do, only now they will have to pay for their doggie-doo bags. It would be best, of course, if the dog owners used "compostable" bags, but the ordinance won't guarantee that.

Plastic bags are also helpful when carrying meat home from the grocer, even in enviornmentally-sound cloth bags. If blood from fresh meat contaminates those cloth bags and the bag owners don't launder them properly, what sort of public health concerns will that create? The ordinance doesn't consider that either.

The environmental benefits of the ordinance were touted by Ald. George Cardenas (12th), who chairs the Health and Environmental Protection Committee. He was quoted in a recent post on the CBS2 Local site. Cardenas said said plastic bags by the hundreds and thousands litter city streets in many wards.

“You see litter, and you see plastic, and you see plastic bags. That’s what you see,” he said. “And we clean it up on a daily basis. Every week we have a task force from the Streets and Sanitation [Department] to go out and clean.”

But that's why they have bins like the one pictured above, at my local Jewel, so people can recycle the plastic bags, not let them blow away in the breeze. We just passed the 44th anniversary of Earth Day. Weren't we supposed to have eradicated litter bugs by now? Wouldn't the truly "green" solution be to encourage recycling?

And it's quite interesting to note that, despite the concerns of aldermen that plastic bags are winding up as litter, the City of Chicago does not even accept plastic bags for recycling. Chicago residents finally have their blue bins -- but plastic bags are not permitted in those bins (from the City of Chicago website, highlighting supplied):

Will my local Jewel still collect plastic bags when it can no longer issue them? Will anyone?

I don't know if the ordinance will really kill jobs, as some of the more strident critics charge. It will presumably give a price advantage to stores just outside the City limits -- bad news for my local Jewel, located just inside the City boundaries. The bag ordinance is a regressive tax, hurting poor people more than rich ones, and yet not contributing one thin dime to the City coffers for the benefit of either rich or poor. Instead of a ban, the environment might be a lot better served if people would just pick up after themselves and use the recycling bins already at their local groceries.

I hope the City Council will again reject this proposal. I'm not, however, holding my breath.