Chicago should ban plastic bags altogether and slap a tax on paper bags — anywhere from a dime to a quarter — in response to a ploy by major retailers to get around the city’s partial ban, an influential alderman said Thursday.
When the ordinance takes effect for large retailers on Aug. 1, Target and Jewel-Osco have no intention of banning plastic bags.
Instead, those giants and others plan to introduce a thicker plastic bag capable of holding up to 22 pounds and being re-used 125 times.
Jewel-Osco maintains that the “re-usable” plastic bags are tailor-made to comply with a partial ban on plastic bags that exempts mom-and-pop retailers, restaurants and non-franchise independent stores with less than 10,000 square feet of space and mandates affected retailers to provide “reusable bags, recyclable paper bags or any combination thereof.”
Ald. George Cardenas (12th), chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Health and Environmental Protection, strongly disagreed.
PAPER OR PLASTIC? Bag ban starts Aug. 1, but plastic won’t get sacked
He considers the thicker plastic bags a ploy to exploit a loophole in the 2014 ordinance.
“The intent was to get plastic out. If they’re not gonna implement it the way the intent was, it’s not gonna work. We’ll re-visit that and make it so we can remove plastic from the environment by doing a complete ban on certain types of plastic,” Cardenas said.
“This is a result of us being too practical and too reasonable. We left a loophole,” he said. “Instead of them doing something creative and environmentally friendly, they do the complete opposite. It disappoints you. But it hardens a little bit more.”
Last year, the Illinois Retail Merchants Association pushed hard for a 10-cent tax on paper bags that cost three times as much as plastic to allow retailers to recoup their costs and give consumers an incentive to bring re-usable bags on shopping trips.
But Cardenas, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Ald. Proco Joe Moreno (1st), chief sponsor of the partial ban on plastic bags, stood their ground against the tax idea.
They argued that there was nothing stopping retailers from imposing the tax, but the City Council was not about to do it for them and wear the jacket for nickel-and-diming Chicagoans.
On Thursday, Cardenas acknowledged that he had made a mistake. It’s time to impose the tax to change consumer behavior and, perhaps, help defray recycling costs, he said.
“The range goes from a dime to a quarter. We may be looking at something a little more severe just because of what happened in this case so we don’t have to go back again and rewrite this thing,” Cardenas said.
“A quarter sounds like a lot. It sounds like too much. But it can’t be so low that, year from now, we look at the results and find we didn’t change anything,” he said.
Moreno agreed with Cardenas — but only to a point.
“We’re trying to get rid of plastic. If they continue to go to the letter of the law, we’ll change the law by not allowing them to give away plastic bags,” Moreno said.
What about taxing paper bags?
“I’m not there yet, but I’m not opposed to it,” Moreno said.
“What we’ve seen from other cities that put fees in place is that, yes in the short term, it impacts behavior,” he said. “But long-term, consumers just swallow the costs” and continue to use paper bags.
Moreno acknowledged that the compromise ordinance approved by the City Council last year allowed retailers to bag store-bought items in thicker plastic bags. But those plastic bags must be strong enough to hold 22 pounds of merchandise and be re-used 125 times.
The alderman said he now plans to have independent testing done on the re-usable plastic bags offered by Target and Jewel-Osco to make certain they meet that standard.
Tanya Triche, vice president and general counsel for the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, said Washington D.C., Seattle and more than 100 municipalities in California already tax paper bags.
“What Chicago is trying to do is get people to change their behavior so they don’t take any bag,” Triche said.
“In other states that have imposed a fee, people have changed their behavior,” she said. “It has worked to get people to think twice about taking whatever free bag the store provides.”
Cardenas’ decision to embrace a tax on paper bags marks an about-face from what he said when the partial ban on plastic bags was approved a year ago.
“A fee is not on the table. There’s not enough support for a fee. It’s either ban it or don’t,” Cardenas said on the day the watered-down ordinance was approved.
“I’m the one who introduced a [nickel] tax on bottled water years ago because we wanted to drive down the use of plastic bottles when consuming water, which is something you can get off the tap,” he said then. “Initially there was a downtrend. But it didn’t budge. It’s now up in usage again. The financial incentive is not going to do it alone. It has to be coupled with education and good policy to drive those numbers down.”
