Pandemic-paused plastic bag bans ripped anew by critics
Maine had set Earth Day 2020 as the kickoff date for its plastic bag ban. But after the pandemic hit, the state gave struggling businesses until this July to comply.
Now, with momentum already faltering, some lawmakers want to scrap the ban.
They seized on the delay to write three pieces of legislation that would kill the ban altogether. While the Environment and Natural Resources Committee voted to keep the ban in place, the issue will still go to the full legislature, fanning the flames of the repeal effort.
Maine Rep. Jeffrey Hanley, a Republican who opposes the bag ban, said the governor’s decision to delay implementation provided an example for opponents to build on.
“People who sponsored these bills realized that it had been curtailed for a year so let’s continue with it,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Pittston, Maine. He noted the “ban the bag” effort had been “going on for eight years” before it finally passed, and opinion is still split among lawmakers and constituents in the state.
“The argument is to make everyone panicstricken about something that’s not real,” he said, maintaining there’s not much of a problem with the bags in the rural northern part of the state that he represents.
The movement to eliminate plastic bags had been advancing in the past few years, with states from New York to California banning them. The bags — a source of pollution, a danger to wildlife and a jamming risk to automatic recycling machines — have been targeted by environmental groups as a menace.
But the pandemic gave fuel to critics and the plastic industry, who cited supply problems and fears of germ transmission early in the crisis, and who now argue that bag bans burden struggling businesses.
Zachary Taylor, director of the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, a plastics industry group, testified to the Maine committee that the state should “repeal its ban on plastic bags, evaluate alternative approaches to achieve the state’s sustainability objectives, and possibly consider a different policy when the pandemic is behind us.”
But supporters say Maine and other states should keep the bans because they are a significant step toward reducing reliance on fossil fuels and limiting climate change.
“In the middle of a worldwide pandemic it’s understandable that there will be temporary adjustments and priorities are reshuffled to deal with the immediate emergency, but over the long term the climate crisis is like a moving train that’s still coming down the track,” said Eric Goldstein, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group.
“There are multiple actions that need to be taken to slow things down and avert the worst impacts, and one of them is reducing the amount of throwaway plastics that are not only a major pollution source but also a financial anchor to the fossil fuel industry.”
A similar situation is playing out in Philadelphia, where it took more than a decade to implement a ban on plastic grocery bags.
Philadelphia’s ban, approved in 2019, was to begin July 1, 2020. But with businesses under tight restrictions and restaurants relying on takeout to stay afloat, city officials first pushed it to Jan. 1, 2021, and then to July 1. Spurred by the pandemic-induced delay, some state lawmakers want to crush the ban altogether.
The Pennsylvania legislature slipped a provision into an unrelated bill last summer prohibiting cities from unilaterally enacting a bag ban.
Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, a Republican whose district includes a plastic bag factory, has long fought the bag ban and during debate last summer used the pandemic to bolster his stance.
A spokesperson for Corman told local NPR affiliates that the senator thinks that “now is not the time to be banning plastic bags made from recycled materials when grocery stores have actually banned shoppers from bringing reusable bags into the stores due to concerns over spreading the virus.”