10-cent bag fee will promote use of reusables

The Honolulu City Council will soon make a final decision on a bill to encourage the use of reusable bags. The bill works by imposing a penalty of at least 10 cents on those who forget to bring their own bags, in the hopes that next time they will remember to bring their own bag. In an effort to compromise, this bill would also ban compostable bags, a request from some testifiers, because Honolulu doesn’t have a facility to compost them.

The City Council isn’t intending to charge customers; its hope is that customers will instead bring their own bags. The fee simply allows customers to make the choice to buy a bag when needed.

Time and again, all over the world, fees like this have proven to work as a powerful incentive to get customers to bring their own reusable bags. We believe this bill will help consumers remember to bring a reusable bag, which was the intent of the original bill passed by the City Council. Unfortunately, without a fee, the law has simply shifted consumers from taking one type of bag to taking a different type of bag, increased food and commodities prices and done next to nothing for the environment.

Ireland instituted the first PlasTax in 2002 and reduced single-use bags by 90 percent in the first year. London instituted a 5-pence fee (about 15 cents U.S.) at the beginning of 2015 and saw an 85 percent drop.

In Australia, one study found that in stores with no bag fee, shoppers chose single-use bags 67 percent of the time, while grocery stores with a fee found that consumers chose single-use bags and reusable bags equally, about 31 percent of the time, while 39 percent of shoppers took no bag at all.

Other places, from India to Rwanda to Washington, D.C., show similar reductions of bag use and bag litter when a fee is implemented. This information has come from years of study of hundreds of stores in several countries. By looking at real data from places where mandatory bag fees have been instituted, we can see that if we want fewer bags being used on Oahu then a fee is exactly what we need.

Because the fee applies to any kind of bag used by customers at the register, it will help reduce all kinds of bag waste, including paper bag waste. Charging the fee per bag at the register enables stores to recuperate the costs of the more expensive paper and reusable bags without having to raise prices on groceries.

Bill 59 CD1 FD1 makes sure that customers will be using either reusable bags for their groceries or paper bags, which can be recycled or burned for power at Oahu’s HPOWER plant.

We all want to keep our islands clean, healthy and beautiful, and we know that reducing single-use bags is a part of that. Mandatory fees have been proven to work. The City Council has an opportunity to pass an islandwide fee and allow stores across Oahu to implement consistent fees and encourage people to reduce their bag usage.

Lauren Zirbel is executive director of the Hawaii Food Industry Association; Tina Yamaki is president of the Retail Merchants of Hawaii.