council votes to require stores to recycle plastic bags
9 January 2008

The legislation requires that each plastic bag carry a printed message, at least three inches in height and in capital letters: “Please return this bag to a participating store for recycling.” Supermarkets will be required to place “easily accessible” bins for customers to drop off their bags and will also be required to sell cloth or durable, reusable plastic bags.

The supermarkets will have to record the weight of the plastic bags they recollect, transport and recycle and submit annual reports to the Sanitation Department including such data. The Sanitation Department would be required to provide reports to the mayor and the City Council every two years, starting on July 1, 2012, about the effectiveness of the program.

The legislation applies to all stores with more than 5,000 interior square feet and all chains that have more than five offices operating in New York City.  The legislation passed on a vote of 44 to 2, with 5 members absent.

“We are looking for the most environmentally friendly positive solution over all,” the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said in an interview after the vote. “We use a billion plastic bags per year in New York City.” Ms. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat who is considering a run for mayor in 2009, introduced the measure with Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., a Queens Democrat.

A recycling requirement was a far more effective way to address the problem of plastic in landfills than an outright ban, she said, noting that the production of paper bags, like that of plastic, also results in carbon emissions. “Recycling is something that New Yorkers have, more and more, as part of their psyche,” she said, noting that the city had one of the most extensive programs in the country for recycling metal, glass and plastic.

Several people also opposed the provision requiring stores to weigh their bags twice a year and report the figure to the Sanitation Department. Weighing plastic bags could be difficult, some argued; others said their stores already had existing recycling programs and that having to separate their plastic bags to weigh them separately would be a cumbersome burden.
Plastic bags, introduced in 1977, make up 90 percent of all grocery bags, according to the Progressive Bag Alliance, which represents plastic bag manufacturers. The United States goes through an estimated 100 billion plastic bags a year.

New York City is not the first jurisdiction to impose such requirements. The city bill would originally have applied only to stores greater than 5,000 square feet, so the corner grocery stores, bodegas and delis that are fixtures of the urban streetscape would largely be exempt, but the bill was amended to all chains that have more than five offices operating in New York City, so that drug store chains like CVS and Duane Reade, which tend to occupy fewer square feet than supermarkets, would be covered

Anne Barnard, New York Times, www.nytimes.com