Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and a trade association that represents more than 500 grocery stores in the Bay State today pledged to work together to cut down on the use of disposable and plastic grocery bags.

The five-year plan, devised as state lawmakers and municipalities have proposed bans or charges for the disposable bags, aims to cut the number of bags provided at supermarkets and grocery stores from the estimated 1.5 billion a year today to 1 billion a year in 2013, according to the environmental-protection department. The cuts will come from giving customers incentives to recycle old bags and from closer state scrutiny of bag purchases by supermarkets.

About 100 billion plastic bags end up in American landfills each year, according to Worldwatch Institute, an environmental-research group in Washington, D.C. Less than 1 percent of bags put in use each year are recycled, according to the group.

Other states are looking at ways to cut disposable bag use. In Maine, a legislator introduced a proposal to charge for plastic bags used to carry purchases. The proposal would require retailers to charge a dime per bag.

In Rhode Island, the bags can be recycled at all major grocery stores, the only state that has a unified free recycling program for plastic film and plastic bags. This is under the state's ReStore program, which provides plastic-bag-collection containers at more than 170 retailers.

The agreement signed today in Massachusetts calls for stores to reduce their use of disposable bags by offering customers incentives to bring in used bags, setting up stations near checkout counters where customers can recycle old bags, and requiring supermarkets to provide data to state officials about the number of bags they buy and distribute every year.

 Tags  environment Massachusetts plastic bag

Comments

joel rines said:

This just makes sense......Thank-you!

Link | March 19, 2009 11:19 PM
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