RECYCLING IN STATE
Momentum builds for bans or fees on plastic shopping bags.
Momentum is building across Connecticut to ban or charge fees on the estimated one billion plastic shopping bags used in this state every year – many of which end up being incinerated, littering the landscape or floating in Long Island Sound.
Westport banned single-use plastic bags in 2009, and Greenwich recently followed suit. Environmentalists say several towns along the Connecticut shoreline – including Stamford – appear poised to enact similar prohibitions or try the approach of Suffolk County on the other side of the Sound, which is now charging shoppers 5 cents for a plastic or paper bag.
But it’s not just shoreline residents who are increasingly worried about the environmental and financial impacts of plastic bags. Communities that include Middletown and Mansfield are also considering local action and there are other inland municipalities weighing their bag options.
“Lots of towns are looking to do something,” Wayne Pesce, president of the Connecticut Food Association that represents food retailers and wholesalers, said of the growing anti-plastic bag movement in this state. “This issue has just snowballed in the last two years,” he said.
Pesce said his group, which once opposed legislative action on plastic bags, is now working to build a coalition with environmental and consumer groups to push the 2019 General Assembly to come up with a statewide solution.
One financial reason for the increased concern over disposable plastic bags is they get stuck in recycling machinery, and towns are now being charged by processing companies if there are too many plastic bags mixed in with the glass, paper and other recyclable materials.
The regional recycling facility serving the Hartford region is forced to shut down for three hours a day to allow workers to get rid of the plastic bags tangled in the machinery used to sort out glass, paper and other recyclable materials.
Environmentalists are warning that plastic pollution, particularly in the oceans, is now a major global crisis. “The issues are so massive in scale,” said Louis W. Burch, program director for Connecticut and New York’s Citizens Campaign for the Environment.
Industry experts say the average American family uses 15,000 plastic shopping bags a year, and that barely 15 percent of those bags are properly recycled. A study by the New York State Plastic Bag Task Force concluded that more than 100,000 single-use plastic bags end up in Long Island Sound every
year.
In 2017, volunteers with the Save the Sound’s Coastal Cleanup program counted 1,288 plastic bags among the 8,563 pounds of trash they picked up along Connecticut’s shoreline, coastal marshes and beaches.
Photos and news stories about whales, dolphins, turtles and birds tangled in or dying from plastic bags and once-pristine beaches and ocean waters choked with plastic waste are contributing to rising public concern.
Pesce’s organization is pushing for statewide action to forestall what they fear will be piecemeal and inconsistent local responses to what Pesce calls “a global problem.”
“I’m telling local officials, ‘We’re not here to stop you… But we need leadership on the state level,’ ” Pesce said.
Rather than a ban, Pesce’s group would prefer to see the state require all stores to charge for bags as a way to change consumer behavior in favor of reusable shopping bags. If that doesn’t work, the association argues, Connecticut could then move to a statewide ban.
Pesce argues that simply switching to paper shopping bags isn’t an answer. “Paper bags take seven times more energy to create [than plastic bags],” he said.
Efforts to pass plastic bag legislation in the Connecticut General Assembly haven’t gotten far in the past couple of years. Some Republicans called attempts to place fees on or charge for plastic shopping bags just another tax, and several inner-city lawmakers insisted bans or fees would hit poor people the hardest. Gov. Dannel Malloy’s administration opposed using bag fees for a dedicated recycling educational fund.
Pesce said in a recent interview that a coalition is now being formed among industry, environmental and consumer groups to push for state legislative action in 2019. “I personally believe this is a winning issue for legislators,” Pesce said.
Plastic bag manufacturers argue in favor of more intensive recycling efforts, warning that banning their products would put thousands of people out of work.
Connecticut last year launched a pilot plastic bag recycling campaign in the Hartford region, urging consumers to return plastic shopping bags for recycling to stores like Price Chopper, Target, Stop Rite and many other stores. Kim O’Rourke, Middletown’s recycling coordinators, said that she supports the effort but adds, “I think it has had limited success.”
State officials reported that the pilot program resulted in an 11 percent increase in the amount of plastic bags collected, but the final report didn’t include any concrete collection statistics to back up the claim.
Numerous major cities across the U.S., from San Francisco to Boston, have already banned single-use shopping bags. Other cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago and New York City, have placed 5-cent fees on single-use bags.
Most consumers who throw their plastic bags in recycling bins with paper and glass assume the bags will be recycled, but that’s seldom the case. Connecticut officials say the bags often get separated out and sent to trash incinerators or become tangled up in recycling sorting machinery.
“All it does is hinder the whole operation,” Bill Petrone, a marketing manager Berlin-based Automated Material Handling. “The plastic bags get wrapped up in the [recycling] screens,”
Petrone said, adding that there isn’t current technology to separate out those bags from the rest of the single-stream recycling materials.
Tom Gaffey, head of the Hartford-based MIRA regional recycling program, said the sorting machinery has to be shut down every day so workers can remove the plastic bags from screens and rollers. “It really causes a lot of down time… It absolutely gums up the works,” Gaffey said.
Workers have to climb down into the giant sorting machines, strapped into safety harnesses and carrying hammers to knock the balled-up plastic bags loose from the machinery to they can rip the bags out.
Gaffey said there are “literally thousands of plastic bags” sent from MIRA’s recycling facility to be incinerated in the Hartford regional trash-to-energy plant.
“They are starting to fine us for contaminated recycling materials,” said Virginia Walton, Mansfield’s refuse and recycling coordinator, said of the company that sorts out her town’s recyclable materials. “Plastic bags, that’s the number one problem.”
Walton said many of Mansfield’s plastic bag problems are connected with apartment houses, often occupied by UConn students, where lots of those disposable bags end up in recycling bins. She said the town is going to start issuing fines to multifamily building owners that keep putting plastic bags and other prohibited items in their recycling bins.
Gaffey and Walton agree with many Connecticut environmentalists that what is needed is a statewide ban on single-use disposable bags. “I would love to see a ban on plastic bags and a fee for paper bags,” Walton said.
“The state should really have a statewide policy… that takes these bags out of the recycling stream,” Gaffey said.
Educating people and landlords about what shouldn’t go into regular recycling bins is an ongoing effort, Walton said, adding that “It doesn’t stop with education.”
“There also has to be motivation… People need to be committed to recycling,” Walton said.
O’Rourke said consumers who are educated about the problems caused when plastic bags get mixed in with recyclables do change their behavior by simply putting those bags in with regular trash.
“Ultimately, it always ends up in the garbage,” O’Rourke said. In Connecticut, most garbage and trash is incinerated in trash-to-energy plants to make electricity. But environmentalists argue that burning plastic bags simply adds to this state’s air pollution problems.
There are even problems finding buyers for plastic bags that are properly returned to retailers like Price Chopper, Target or Stop & Shop, according to Petrone. “There are not enough end users to take the material,” he explained, saying major markets like China are no longer accepting recycled plastic bags from the U.S.
Mona Golub, a Price Chopper spokeswoman, said the chain is now seeing 50 percent of all plastic bags it hands out to shoppers being returned for recycling. The chain operates 130 stores in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
Golub said that all of the plastic bags and other materials returned to the stores are currently being recycled into composite materials for use in decks and benches.
Plastic straws represent only about 9 percent of the plastics consumers use every day, experts say, but straws have recently become a new target of the anti-plastic effort. But there have been some protests from groups representing handicapped individuals warning that banning such straws could cause difficulties for people with certain types of disabilities.
Corporations that include Starbucks, American Airlines, McDonalds and Hyatt Hotels Corp. have announced plans to end the use of plastic straws and stirrers.
Individual institutions like the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk are also banning almost all plastic straws and other single-use plastics.
“There has absolutely been an increase in awareness around this issue,” Burch said. He said industrial users of plastic bags and straws are now moving toward eliminating those products “because states and municipalities are pushing them in that direction,” Burch said.