Dive Brief:
- On Friday, Boston’s plastic bag ban began for retailers with 20,000 square feet or larger and will roll out to other businesses over the next few months, according to Boston.com. Stores that have at least 10,000 square feet have until April 1 and smaller stores have until July 1. The ban only applies to checkout bags with handles.
- Shoppers are encouraged to bring their own reusable bags but if they forget them, they will be charged a 5-cent fee for each paper bag they use. Retailers can still offer recyclable paper bags, compostable bags or reusable bags but must advertise the charge near the checkout aisle.
- Grocers including Stop & Shop, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Roche Brothers and Shaw’s and Star Market will be some of the first grocers in Boston to implement this rule. If grocers violate the ban, they will receive a warning for the first violation, a $50 fine for the second, and a $100 fine for the third. The city will perform inspections to ensure compliance.
Dive Insight:
Boston isn’t the only city to ban plastic bags. More than 80 other municipalities in the country have put this ban into place in order to help reduce pollution and keep the city’s streets clean. California has completely banned them statewide while Hawaii has a de facto ban and others require retailers to offer a bag recycling program to customers.
The new ban in Boston comes during the holiday season when grocers are busier than ever, creating customer service headaches for retailers that aren't prepared. According to CBS News, some store managers say they’ve trained their cashiers to explain the new policy to shoppers without slowing down checkout service.
The busy season isn’t the only difficulty grocers will have. Although grocers with a smaller footprint have more time to roll out this ban, it's still difficult to bring in reusable options in a timely and cost-effective manner. On the plus side, small grocers can use the opportunity to develop branded bags that shoppers love. As H-E-B has shown with its wildly popular Selena bags, the right design for the right audience can do wonders for business.
Earlier this year, Kroger announced it will phase out single-use bags in its 2,800 stores by 2025 and offer reusable bags for purchase. In 2008, Whole Foods announced it would go plastic-free but the grocer still uses single-use paper bags.
According to a statistic cited by Kroger, 100 billion single-use plastic bags are thrown away in the U.S. every year and the country generated more than four million tons of plastic bags a year with only 13% recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. From an environmental perspective, the effects of a plastic bag ban have been shown to be successful by some measures. A year after California’s ban, the amount of plastic bag litter on beaches dropped considerably, according to the LA Times. Last year, plastic bags account for 3.1% of litter found on beaches during the 2017 Coastal Cleanup Day. This figure is down from 7.4% in 2010.
Bag bans could be seen as a way for grocers to keep pace with consumers' demand for sustainable options. On the other hand, it could also temporarily frustrate consumers who aren’t used to carrying around their own bags. As plastic bag bans continue to spread across the country, retailers should figure out where their consumers stand on the issue and research supply options so they're not caught unprepared.