Alison Toback hopes she can help save the planet one plastic bag at a time.
Evanston passed an ordinance banning the use of single use plastic bags in grocery stores and other retail outlets in May and Toback said she’s now bringing her own bags when she goes grocery shopping.
“Every little bit makes a difference,” she said outside of an Evanston grocery store. “I think it’s the least we can do. The climate crisis is so inflamed right now we’ve got to make a difference on every front we can.”
The Evanston City Council prohibited single use plastic bags earlier this year and the ban went into effect on August 1. It was enacted as part of the north suburb’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan that seeks to eliminate petroleum-based, single-use products by 2025 and achieve carbon neutrality in the city by 2050, said Evanston Sustainability and Resilience Manager Cara Pratt.
More Top Picks When Does The Winter Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022 Start
“A couple of grocery stores were not compliant on the first day but they are at this point,” she said.
Pratt also said the city is continuing to field questions regarding the ban and if it receives a complaint that plastic bags are still being used by stores, inspectors with the city’s Health Department investigate and educate retailers regarding the ban. If they continue to use the bags, they can be ticketed.
“We’re all doing our best to educate people about it,” Pratt explained. “The City Council voted on it so we’re trying to implement the legislation based on what they told us they wanted.”
As part of the ordinance, the city also imposed a 10-cent tax on paper bags, a charge stores are passing on to customers. Pratt said five cents of the tax is being returned to retailers, three cents to the Evanston’s Solid Waste Fund for education and two cents to the Health Department to help fund enforcement on the ban.
“That’s meant as a nudge so customers will bring their own bags,” she said. “In our research, most taxes like this have some funding going back to the businesses so they could change the type of bag they’re offering from plastic to paper, which is more expensive, also (to) change their point of sale system, which has some expense tied to training and software.”
This funding helps make the businesses a partner in the system, according to Pratt.
The city sent postcards to businesses explaining the new ordinance and Pratt said she has spent weeks pounding the pavement visiting retailers explaining the changes.
“We were ultimately given three months to educate folks about this change and so we did as much work as we could to make sure people were ready for it,” she said. “I was out on weekends. We went out to businesses directly trying to help them comply ahead of time.”
According to the Environment America website, Americans use more than 100 billion plastic bags each year, and although the bags are used for an average of 12 minutes, a single plastic bag has a life expectancy of up to 1,000 years. The Center for Biological Diversity website says that plastic bags start out as fossil fuels and end up as deadly waste in landfills, waterways, the oceans and the Great Lakes.
“Birds often mistake shredded plastic bags for food, filling their stomachs with toxic debris,” it says. “For hungry sea turtles, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish between jellyfish and floating plastic shopping bags. Fish eat thousands of tons of plastic a year, transferring it up the food chain to bigger fish and marine mammals. Microplastics are also consumed by people through food and in the air.”
States like California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon and Vermont as well as many municipalities including Chicago, have enacted single use plastic bag ban. Despite that, Pratt said some Evanston retailers see the ban as a nuisance and they blame her.
“I’m the face of this ban,” she said. “I would like not to be the face of this.”
She said there are more than 140 goals in the city’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan and banning single use plastic bags is only one of those actions.
“It’s a decision of the elected officials,” Pratt explained. “If people have complaints about legislation, those should be directed to elected officials because they’re the ones who dictate what staff of the city government does.”
“Business owners have been pretty hostile,” she added. “People are pretty mean about it. I had one person call me a communist. There’s just a lot of negativity about this type of legislative change. Many other communities have done this and have quickly gotten over it. That’s what I hope happens with us too.”
Pratt won’t get an argument from Evanstonian Sarah Frieman, who uses saddlebags on her bike to transport her groceries.
“I think it’s a good thing for sure,” Friemn said outside of an Evanston’s Trader Joes grocery store. “It may seem like an inconvenience now for a lot of people but I think with climate change we need to start taking serious steps to prevent it from happening further.”
Brian L. Cox is a freelance reporter with Pioneer Press.