On the first day Honolulu’s plastic bag ban took effect, in July 2015, the need for tweaking was apparent.
Shoppers were puzzled when checkout-counter options seemed no different than the pre-ban choice: paper or plastic. A loophole in the ordinance had cleared the way for businesses to stock up on “reusable” plastic sacks that are thicker than the filmy bags, which are now banned for most uses.
The City Council is now weighing Bill 59, which rightly aims to reduce — though not eliminate — that
loophole as well as scrap permitted use of so-called “compostable” bags as Oahu lacks the commercial composting facility needed to cleanly break down the sacks.
A recent amendment to the proposal calls for charging shoppers a 10-cent fee for each bag, plastic and paper. That’s a good move in that as those dimes add up to dollars, more shoppers would feel the pocketbook pinch and then take care to bring their own bags to stores.
Also, stores collecting the fee could use it to offset costs tied to maintaining environmentally friendly checkouts.
The bill serves as a course correction for Honolulu’s plastic bag ban, which is the weakest among the state’s counties.
Honolulu’s thickness threshold for reusable plastic bags is now 2.25 mils — one mil is one-thousandth of an inch. City Councilman Brandon Elefante wants to see that bumped up to at least 3 mils — roughly the thickness of a heavyweight contractor trash bag. According to environmental groups watching bans elsewhere, 4 mils seems to be the point at which retailers find little economic sense in distributing such bags. The hope is that by the time stores stop offering plastic bags for most purchases, customers will have adopted bring-bags-from-home habits.
Neighbor islands are pushing ahead at a faster pace, with a current standard of 3 mils on Maui and Hawaii island. Kauai County has the toughest ban with a minimum thickness of 2.25 millimeters, or 88.5 mils. (A credit card measures 30 mils — so, the Garden Island’s store-issued bags must have the thickness of nearly three stuck-together credit cards.)
The problem with compostable bags is more of a glitch than a loophole. Until a composting or recycling facility that can handle the flow of bags opens, the city should shelve the compostable option.
Through composting, bags undergo degradation by way of biological processes and leave behind no toxic residue. But currently compostable bags are burned at HPOWER, the city’s waste-to-energy plant, which processes more than 700,000 tons of waste annually and produces up to 10 percent of Oahu’s electricity. The plastics incineration emits toxic ash and smoke. Consequently, most of the potential environmental benefit is lost.
Last week, during a meeting of the Council’s Public Works, Infrastructure and Sustainability Committee, Elefante proposed a January start date for the 10-cent-fee, which drew support from the city Department of Environmental Services and the Surfrider Foundation, which advocates for beach and coastline protections. The nonprofit noted in testimony that more than 400 marine species have been documented to ingest or become entangled in plastics.
The Hawaii Food Industry Association, which represents more than 200 food retailers, favored the fee but opposed any other change to the law due to costs. It argued that businesses are already shouldering hefty compliance-related expenses. That perspective is understandable. But as the law now stands, it’s too easy for customers to use the thicker bags as single-use disposables. And that does nothing to reduce our litter pile.
Back in September when Bill 59 was introduced, Elefante said: “Our current law doesn’t go far enough in terms of having a paradigm shift or change in customers’ mindsets to reduce, reuse and recycle in the sense that they bring their own cloth bags or recyclable bags to the store and (thereby) reduce the amount of plastic-type of waste that could potentially be out there harming our environment.”
He’s right. Here’s hoping that the City Council passes this measure as a means to a more effective plastic bag ban before the law wraps up its second year this summer.
