Last Friday, Maryland legislators introduced a bill in the House of Delegates of the Maryland General Assembly that would impose a 5-cent fee on both paper and plastic disposable bags, the first tax of its kind at the state level. Modeled after D.C.’s own 2009 bag tax, the proposed fee would both reduce pollution of Maryland’s waterways and provide a useful source of income for underfunded green initiatives.
Maryland’s Community Cleanup and Greening Act of 2013 is part of a larger wave of legislation across the U.S. to eliminate wasteful consumption of disposable bags, with 11 other states considering taxes or outright bans, all thanks to the precedent set by the District. The widely touted D.C. bill reduced monthly bag consumption by over 86 percent and generated $150,000 in revenue after its first month, with most of that money going to public environmental education and the cleanup of the Anacostia River. As of last July, the bag fee had raised $5 million for the Anacostia River Cleanup and Protection Fund.
The allocation method for Maryland’s proposed bag tax would work similarly to D.C.’s. Retailers would automatically retain 1 cent from each 5-cent fee, and could be refunded up to 2 cents if they establish a customer bag credit program that incentivizes customers to bring their own bags. The remaining income would be evenly split between the Chesapeake Bay Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, and county-level community greening projects like litter cleanup programs and storm water control systems.
More importantly, the bill creates an infrastructure for full elimination of disposable bag usage by forming public-private partnerships to provide reusable carryout bags for seniors and low-income residents, those most disaffected by the new fee and least likely to switch to reusable. By creating long-term incentives for full blown eradication of single-use bags and devoting the majority of the funds to conservation efforts, Maryland’s version of the bag tax is more focused on environmental protection and less on tapping into a new revenue source than the D.C. bill. This is admirable, even if it could make the bill less palatable to Maryland business lobbies, who were instrumental in defeating Prince George’s County’s proposed bag tax bill in 2012.
All the more reason to press onward. Maryland is a state with rich water resources: the Chesapeake Bay is North America’s largest estuary and is home to over 3,600 species of plants and animals. And while environmentalists can rejoice that the bay’s infamous “dead zone” has been shrinking, problems related to plastic pollution persist.
Maryland needs to do more to invest in cleaning up its water resources, and while eliminating plastic won’t correct all of its environmental woes, a bag tax is an effective step in improving water habitat quality. The state legislature would do well to enact the tax as soon as possible, and other states should be quick in following suit.
