New York Banned Plastic Bags Two Years Ago. Why Are They Still Everywhere?

New York Focus visited five Family Dollar outlets in Brooklyn, all of which were distributing plastic bags as of early October. Beyond Plastics’ volunteers reported the same at a half-dozen other locations in and around the city in recent months.

Dollar Tree spokesperson Kristin Tetreault said that any plastic bags still in its New York stores were the result of a mistaken shipment to “a very small number of stores.” She said the chain had taken steps to correct the error and prevent it from happening again.

CITY LEGISLATORS have pushed for more muscular enforcement too.

“As of this moment, the plastic bag ban is not effective, it’s not being implemented, and it is not even something that I think most New Yorkers are aware of,” Councilmember Nurse told New York Focus.

Nurse stresses that outreach and education, not just penalties, are key to the policy’s success. Fostering a “culture of reuse” requires a neighborbood-level campaign that has so far been absent, she said. And while she would like to see the city play a role, she said it was incumbent on the state, with its larger pool of resources, to take the lead.

Requiring producers to take care of their own waste could unlock further resources toward this end; two contending approaches to doing so are being debated in the state legislature. Nurse also proposes taking enforcement up to the wholesale level, cutting off the supply of cheap plastic bags at the source.

In the meantime, plastic bags continue to litter the streets and clog up the city’s recycling facilities. New Yorkers aren’t supposed to put thin plastics like bags in the recycling, but many do anyway. When they get to the plant, they get tangled in the equipment that sorts paper, metal, glass, and the intended rigid plastics, slowing the city’s efforts to improve its low recycling rates.

“We spend a lot of time and effort extracting plastic bags from the stuff we want, just to then turn around and send [them] to the landfill,” Tom Outerbridge, the general manager of Sims Municipal Recycling, whose plants process the city’s metal, glass, and plastic recycling, told the City Council last month.

Outerbridge said he hasn’t seen any meaningful reduction in the number of plastic bags showing up at his plants. The city doesn’t keep regular data of its own on the city’s waste profile; its last study on the subject came out in 2017 and the next one isn’t expected until 2024, according to Department of Sanitation spokesperson Vincent Gragnani.

Carson, of NYPIRG, says the patchy implementation of the bag ban bodes poorly for future waste reduction efforts. The group is backing New York City bills to phase out a wider array of single-use plastics, and Carson worries these policies could fall into a similar trap without more resources to back them up.

“The DEC has not been able to operate at full capacity for quite some time,” he said. “I see this on bottle bill compliance as well, that DEC just doesn’t really have the capacity to answer complaints in a particularly timely fashion.”

As New York Focus reported last month, the DEC has yet to fully recover from major budget cuts that led it to lay off a fifth of its staff over a decade ago. Its workforce today is about 10 percent smaller than it was before the financial crisis, even as it has taken on a wide array of new responsibilities including enforcing the bag ban.

THE SLUGGISH IMPLEMENTATION of the plastic bag ban reflects a common dynamic in New York, where lawmakers pass ambitious, precedent-setting environmental laws, but are slow to match them with the resources needed to follow through. The state still has no plan to fund its sweeping climate law more than three years after it passed, for example.

On paper, New York’s plastic bag ban is the strongest in the country, out of 10 statesthat have passed such bans, Enck said. But in implementation, it’s been overtaken by states like neighboring New Jersey, where she sits on a plastics advisory council.

Plastic bags have environmental impacts beyond clogging up municipal infrastructure and polluting waterways. Most plastic in the US today is made with ethane, a component of fossil gas, that is “cracked” in a plant in order to be transformed into everything from bags to records. Most of that gas in turn comes from fracking, and US fossil fuel giants are banking on plastics manufacturing as an outlet for fracked gas as power plants and homes wean themselves off it.

“Plastic production is the plan B for the fossil fuel industry,” Enck said.

Advocates stress that simply switching to other single-use bags will not solve the problem. Paper bags are in many respects worse for the environment than plastic — except, crucially, that they break down easily and are widely recycled. Piling up tote bags is also a no-no: a single cotton tote bag needs to be reused dozens of times before it becomes more environmentally friendly than its plastic counterpart (though probably not thousands of times, as some headlines have suggested).

Enck compared pollution rules to health codes, where agencies don’t hesitate to crack down even against small businesses.

“Even if you’re a small mom-and-pop restaurant, you have to comply, just like if you’re a chain restaurant,” Enck said. Patchy enforcement, she added, is “unfair to the stores that are complying with the law.”