NJ to Ban Plastic Carryout Bags
By Albert B. Kelly
It is one of those things that’s out there and you know it’s coming, but it somehow manages to sneak up on you anyway. I’m talking about New Jersey’s ban, which goes into effect May 4, 2022, on those single-use plastic carryout bags routinely used in supermarkets, convenience stores and similar places of business. In addition to those single-use bags, there is also a ban on polystyrene foam food service products.
We’ve known about this upcoming change for some time, but when it gets here, it will still take some by surprise myself included. As someone who has spent a good deal of time picking up loose litter in my community, I wholeheartedly support seeing those single-use bags go the way of the buffalo. A not insignificant amount of the litter I’ve picked up over the years was in the form of those bags.
We also know that those bags are not exactly biodegradable and left to their own devices, a single-use bag might well take some twenty years to break down depending on conditions. Plastic being what it is, you can imagine the damage being done to marine life in our waterways whether these creatures are getting tangled up in the bags or through ingesting the plastic.
For all those reasons, banning these single-use plastic bags is a necessary thing. Yet even as I say that, I know I’ll struggle with changing my behavior when the ban goes into effect. What I mean to say is that I will need to get used to carrying around reusable bags, probably made of hemp with handles. This will require getting enough of them and then remembering to bring them back out to my vehicle for the next trip to the grocery store.
I know at some point I’ll forget my re-usable hemp bags with handles and then I’ll wax nostalgic about the good old days of single-use plastic. But on balance, I’ll remind myself that this ban is good and necessary because in terms of the environment, we’re at some sort of tipping point and if what I’m hearing is correct, we have about 10 years to get our collective house in order so that our grandchildren won’t curse us for being so damned reckless with their lives.
For the record, re-useable carry-out bags must be made of polypropylene fabric, PET nonwoven fabric, nylon, cloth, hemp product, or other washable fabric, (i.e., RPET fabric, polyester, cotton, etc.); and these bags are to have stitched handles (traditional, conventional or ultrasonic stitching, T-Shirt style are acceptable); and be designed and manufactured for at least 125 reuses, but I’m hoping for more.
Consistent with all such regulatory efforts, there are certain exceptions and anyone wanting to examine these in more detail can do so by visiting https://nj.gov/dep/plastic-ban-law/docs/list-of-establishments-banned-items.pdf . In addition to the bags, polystyrene foam food containers are also banned effective May 4th and like the single-use bags, there are specific exceptions that have been made.
As suggested above, May 4th feels like a long time from now, but it will come fast. I thought about this recently because it also occurred to me that at some point in the not-too-distant-future, I will have purchased or leased my last gas vehicle. While all-electric vehicles have the feel of being sometime in the future, I am amazed at the progress that has been made over the last 15 years.
Some of that progress has been in the actual nuts and bolts of the technology, which I don’t really understand. Perhaps equally important progress has been in how we think about and perceive electric vehicles. Go shopping for a car these days and a hybrid vehicle is as much of a choice as gas powered vehicles. That tells me that soon enough, all-electric vehicles will be as common as automatic transmissions and that gas powered vehicles will be phased out in the same way standard transmissions are being phased out.
All of these changes will require us to adjust and adapt. For us older consumers and those who don’t like change, we can complain and grumble about the inconvenience of it all if that provides some therapeutic value, but when all is said and done, perhaps we owe it to our young people to do what is in our power to do in terms of mitigating global warming and climate change- one bag at a time.