For District residents, it just may be time to break out the sustainable shopping bags. Last Tuesday, Ward 6 council member Tommy Wells introduced a bill to the D.C. Council to place a five-cent consumer tax on all paper and plastic bags. The revenue yielded from the tax will go toward cleaning up the heavily polluted Anacostia River. Twenty thousand tons of trash flow into the Anacostia every year, much of it in the form of plastic bags. The proposed legislation could reduce that number by 47 percent. Mr. Wells should be applauded for his efforts to reduce D.C. pollution with a reasonable, simple solution.
Similar taxes have been wildly successful in cutting down on bag waste in urban centers around the world. For nearly two years, San Francisco has instituted a complete ban on plastic bags in grocery stores, which has resulted in the use of five million fewer plastic bags in the city every month. In Ireland, where a 15-cent bag tax was adopted in 2002, plastic bag usage is down by more than 90 percent. Following San Francisco’s lead, London and Paris passed similar bans, experiencing similar success in waste reduction.
By those standards, the District’s planned five-cent tax is cheap, but some have complained that five cents is too steep an increase in the slumping economy and that some consumers rely on the bags to hold other waste products. Wells’s bill adeptly addresses this, ensuring that free bags will be provided to low-income and elderly residents. Plastic and paper companies have an easy solution to the issue, too: produce and sell more durable bags that consumers can reuse again and again on their shopping trips.
The point of the tax is not to raise revenue, but rather to change behavior. Once shoppers get in the habit of bringing their own bags, they won’t pay a dime more than they ever did. Seeing as the bill is sponsored by 12 of the 13 council members, it will almost certainly pass. The United States is woefully behind the rest of the world on this issue (even China has instituted successful plastic bag bans), but now is the District’s chance to do its part in getting the nation up to speed in pollution prevention. Wells’s plan is clean, green, and hey, it makes money, too.
