National Law Review. “More U.S. Cities Enact Plastic Bag Bans February 22, 2019.” The National Law Review, National Law Review, 22 Feb. 2019, www.natlawreview.com/article/more-us-cities-enact-plastic-bag-bans-february-22-2019.

 

In this article titled “More U.S. Cities Enact Plastic Bag Bans February 22, 2019” by the National Law Review, it discusses the cities that have recently joined the growing list of places that have banned plastic bags. Boston is banning bags at the checkout of stores and now they can only distribute bags that can be reused or composted. However, laundry cleaner bags, trash bags, and produce bags are exempt. Hoboken, Gainesville, Anchorage, Salem and Charleston all have enacted a similar bans. Some allow the remaining stock of bags to be depleted before they must comply. Others give more time to small businesses to implement the changes than larger corporations. They also differ on how much the reusable bags must be sold for. The prices vary from 5 cents up to 50 cents. Hoboken’s new ordinance also mandates that the paper bags they replace the plastic ones with must be made with 40% post consumer recycled materials.

 

I am so glad to hear that more cities are banning plastic bags that are unnecessary. I hope that one day all the states in the US will adopt similar bans. It seems like we are finally seeing some changes in policies in response to the anti plastic movement. I hope that this momentum keeps up, and we are able to see changes in other areas as well. As great as it is we are seeing changes, there are even bigger sources of plastic that need to be tackled. I found it interesting that they had to specify the exact type of plastic bag they were banning in each city. I never really stopped to think that a plastic bag ban would cover anything other than the bags that you receive at the checkout of a store, but at the same time that doesn’t make sense. Why just that specific bag and not the others as well. I think that the plastic checkout bags are low hanging fruit, but I hope to see even more done in the future.