Plastic bags tough to recycle, tougher to ban

MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

In Lake County, members of a recycling task force are brainstorming ways to reduce plastic bag waste in Illinois, but unlike the city of San Francisco, Bangladesh or even China, an outright ban on the petroleum-based bags is not likely.

"You're going to put the retailers on the defense, and the Illinois Retail Merchants Association is a pretty strong lobby," said Peter Adrian, a member of the task force and recycling coordinator for the Solid Waste Agency of Lake County.

The last attempt to impose a bag ban in Chicago came from Alderman Edward Burke (14th Ward), who in May introduced an ordinance to ban plastic bags at establishments with more than $2 million in annual sales. Burke's ordinance never made it out of committee.

At the same time however, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Plastic Bag Recycling Act, calling for a voluntary, two-year pilot program in Lake County to determine the cost to retailers who implement plastic bag recycling programs. A task force of state officials, retail representatives and waste management groups was assigned to study the results, and will have its first meeting within the next month.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates more than 380 million plastic bags, sacks and wraps are consumed in the United States each year. Many of the plastic bags are recyclable, though Adrian estimates less than 10 percent of bags are returned to stores such as Jewel-Osco and Meijer where they can be salvaged.

Neither the City of Chicago nor the non-profit Resource Center recycling company recycle plastic bags because they are too difficult to clean, said center owner Ken Dunn. He said paperclips or food scraps in plastic bags prevent them from being put through incinerators, and that they had poor market value compared to materials like paper. But even he disagrees with imposing a bag ban on stores.

"Any program that targets a single item is a bit misguided. It's hoping to find a scapegoat," said Dunn, who instead suggests consumers make a habit of bringing leather, mesh or canvas bags with them to the grocery store.

Plastic bags bring small market returns, and Dunn suspects some grocery chains actually toss the bags they collect for recycling. Programs in places like San Francisco, which became the first U.S. city to ban petroleum-based plastic bags last year, aren't well suited in cities like Chicago, where there aren't comparable citywide composting programs for biodegradable bags, Adrian said.

"When you go and do what San Francisco did, you can throw a wrench in the whole system," said Adrian. "The logic of biodegradability does not work in Illinois."

Critics contend that biodegradeable bags don't decompose as well in landfills, where they are placed under heaps of trash and out of the sun.

Likewise, programs like Ireland's "Plastax," which charges shoppers 15 cents per bag at the checkout, would add a "cumbersome" task to retailers and likely not be appropriated correctly, Adrian said.

But some, like Vincent Cobb, are inspired by Ireland's example and think it could be implemented in the United States.

"Retailers were resisting it initially, but at the end of the day they're going to save a heck of a lot of money," said Cobb, who founded Chicago-based Reusablebags.com, which sells its own line of reusable shopping bags.

"Some city is going to have the chutzpah to use the plastax model," said Cobb, a self-described political pragmatist who doesn't always favor taxes. "It's going to be hard to do it. It's going to take political will."