Ditch Plastic Shopping Bags, Connecticut

Connecticut has to wean itself off plastic bags, and that means either banning them or charging for them. As Courant writer Gregory B. Hladky reports, this state uses a billion — with a

“B” — plastic shopping bags every year. They don’t just kill wildlife and pollute Long Island Sound, which is bad enough. They also jam recycling machinery, and towns are getting fined for that.

There’s talk about a statewide ban on the sort of shopping bags that are used just once and tossed. Or charging for bags at stores, which is common practice in Europe. A charge on supermarket bags has cut their use by 80 percent in England.

This year, eastern Long Islanders started paying 5 cents per plastic bag at checkout counters.

Even the Connecticut Food Association, which represents food retailers and wholesalers, is calling for the state to regulate single-use plastic shopping bags, though it prefers charging for them over banning them. (To their credit, Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and other stores give discounts to shoppers with their own reusable bags.)

Clearly, public education on plastic bag disposal isn’t working in Connecticut. The state’s warning that “plastic bags and plastic film, also known as shrink wrap, should never be put in curbside or transfer station single stream recycling bins” goes largely unheeded. Recycling plants have to stop every day to pry out the bags that are mistakenly thrown into the recycle bin. Those bags are literally gumming up their works.

State lawmakers haven’t been shy when it comes to regulating other plastics. The legislature, in 2015, told cosmetic companies to phase out microbeads, which are so tiny that they pass through water treatment systems, accumulate in Long Island Sound and end up in the food chain. The beads can absorb toxic chemicals and therefore act as poisoning agents.

But Connecticut lawmakers have stopped short of regulating single-use shopping bags, though they pose a much bigger problem than microbeads. Plastic bags can take many years, possibly hundreds of years, to decompose. Meanwhile, they are death sentences for animals unlucky enough to eat them or get entangled in them. They also clog storm drains, litter the landscape and end up in Long Island Sound.

Yes, single-use plastic bags are convenient. What dog owner hasn’t used them on walks with Fido? What cat owner hasn’t relied on them to tidy up Tiger’s box?

But many places are learning to live without them. California has a statewide ban. So do towns like Greenwich, Westport, Aspen and Telluride, Colo.

Not all Connecticut residents can afford reusable bags as easily as Westport residents can, of course. California has tried to address that problem by exempting people on food stamp programs from its plastic bag ban. It’s also exempted restaurants, deli counters and other food preparers that use plastic for health-safety reasons.

Changing behavior isn’t easy. But consumers do come to realize that they can do without many harmful things they once took for granted, such as cigarettes, DDT — and yes, even plastic shopping bags.