The Co-op is tossing out plastic bags.
Joining a growing number of businesses and municipalities that are banning or voluntarily giving up the use of plastic shopping bags and other plastic packaging products, the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society will begin to phase out plastic grocery bags over the next 12 months with the goal of completely eliminating them by the spring of 2020.
The Co-op’s decision comes as both New Hampshire and Vermont lawmakers are weighing several bills that would ban or restrict stores and restaurants from dispensing so-called “single-use” plastic bags and plastic straws that end up in the waste stream and landfills. A handful of Vermont municipalities, including Norwich, are also in the process of adopting their own local bans.
“We are clearly moving toward a world in which plastic bags may not have much of a future,” said Ed Fox, general manager of the Co-op, in a statement to the Co-op’s board at its meeting on Wednesday. Regardless of the plastic-ban measures currently before Twin State lawmakers, “I want us to be proactive and do this right away,” Fox said.
Fox’s announcement follows a recently concluded survey the Co-op undertook to gauge customers’ opinions about the use of plastic bags. Although the Co-op hasn’t detailed the results of that survey — about 1,000 customers participated — Fox said, “What we’ve learned is the widespread use of plastic bags, and the potential it does for our planet, is something a lot of people care about.”
Some of the worst environmental damage caused by plastic bags and refuse has been witnessed by state Rep. George Sykes, D-Lebanon, when he spent two years working for the American Red Cross in Haiti.
As a onetime resident of Nantucket, Sykes, a former city councilor and firefighter, had always been familiar with how plastic washed up on shores and marred beaches.
But it was the stagnant flotilla of plastic bags and refuse that choked a harbor in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince that left him with an indelible image that he has never been able to forget.
“The experience in Haiti showed me what happens when you don’t do something about plastic waste,” said Sykes, who campaigned for his House seat last year on the issue of banning single-use plastic bags in New Hampshire. “I felt there was something we had to do.”
Sykes voted with the majority of New Hampshire House lawmakers March 19 on bills in favor of both banning single-use plastic bags and plastic straws by retail stores and restaurants.
Discarded plastic is one of the most insidious forms of pollution. Although plastic refuse degrades over time, it does not fully dissolve, leaving toxic plastic microparticles to enter the food chain. Plastic straws pose a deadly threat to birds because they often misidentify the particles as food.
The action by the New Hampshire’s Democratic-controlled House follows the Vermont House and Senate, where lawmakers last month introduced bills that would ban or restrict retail and service businesses from providing single-use plastic bags, plastic straws and polystyrene food containers to customers.
New Hampshire and Vermont are hardly alone in weighing laws to combat plastic pollution. New York state on Thursday became the second state, after California, to impose a statewide ban on most types of plastic bags.
Since January, at least 91 bills have been introduced in legislatures around the country that would ban or place a fee on plastic bags, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. California became the first state in 2014 to impose a ban on single-use plastic bags at large retail stores and, subsequently, 12 states plus the District of Columbia have enacted anti-plastic bag laws.
To be sure, the proposed measures in New Hampshire and Vermont are a ways from becoming law in either state. The New Hampshire House bill has yet to be taken up in the Senate, and one of the Vermont bills passed on Friday and now needs final approval before going to the House.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu has not taken a position on the issue, but Vt. Gov. Phil Scott has said he is “not opposed” to proposed legislation but he also voiced reservations about a 10-cent fee on single-use bags.
Some Vermont communities aren’t waiting for Montpelier to act.
Last summer, Brattleboro became the first municipality in the state to ban single-use plastic bags, and at Town Meeting this year voters in Burlington, Manchester and Middlebury approved ballot items to “advise and encourage” their respective selectboards to ban single-use plastics bags.
Even kids want to see action.
In Norwich, fifth-graders from the town’s Marion Cross School have drafted — albeit with some adult help — a civil ordinance to prohibit businesses in town from using single-use plastic bags and petitioned the Selectboard to adopt the measure.
The proposed ordinance — which includes a penalty of up to $10 for each violation and up to $25 for each succeeding day — also would allow businesses to charge customers 10 cents per paper bag.
The Norwich plastic bag ban already has been discussed at two Selectboard meetings and could be up for action at either of the board’s two April meetings, according to Town Manager Herb Durfee.
But some businesses in Norwich aren’t waiting for the Selectboard to vote on the ordinance and have already taken it upon themselves to eliminate or move away from the use of plastic bags, including Dan & Whit’s general store.
“We just decided to remove them now. It’s a step in the right direction,” said Dan Fraser, whose family has owned and operated the Norwich business for three generations. The transition was eased by a $500 check from The Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation, whom one of the fifth-graders wrote to ask for money to buy out Dan & Whit’s stock of plastic bags so the store would not suffer a financial hit.
While customers have long heard the high school students manning the registers at the checkout counter ask, “Paper or plastic?” the store stopped offering a plastic bag option on March 13.
Going green — or at least greener, because paper bags do not easily decompose if they end up in landfills — comes at a price, however.
Fraser said the store was going through about 1,000 plastic bags per week. At a cost of $53 for a box of 1,000 bags, that comes out to 5.3 cents per bag. But a box of 400 paper bags costs $55, or 13.7 cents per bag, with the 8.4-cent-per-bag difference coming to an extra $84 per week in expense for the store.
For now, Dan & Whit’s is not charging customers the 10 cents it would be allowed to under the ordinance until it is adopted by the Selectboard. At least one member expressed concern that charging customers for paper bags is “overreaching,” according to the minutes of the March 13 meeting, and Fraser said he wants to know how it will shake out before passing any cost on to customers.
Although some elderly customers have expressed a preference for the plastic bags because of the handles — Dan & Whit’s purchased paper bags with handles, too — Fraser said the transition has been smooth.
“Most of the people in town are aware the school kids are behind” the elimination of plastic bags, he said. “So they are fine with it. There haven’t been many people who are really upset.”
At Fogg’s Hardware & Building Supply on Route 5, general manager Jeremey Whitney said the hardware store has gone through only two 1,000-bag boxes of plastic bags in the past 12 months and he doesn’t foresee any problem in switching over when the Norwich ordinance goes into effect. Bulky hardware items don’t always fit easily in a flimsy plastic bag.
“Contractors like to use boxes,” Whitney said.
“If the town puts out the word, we’ll stop,” he said, noting that he can simply send the remaining stock of plastic bags to the other two Fogg’s stores in Fairlee and Woodsville.
But until then, he said, “I don’t have any plans to stop using them unless the town says to.”
In Brattleboro, where the ban on single-use plastic bags took effect on July 1, 2018, merchants have transitioned to paper and reusable bags without much complaint, according to Kate O’Connor, executive director of the Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerce and a former chairwoman of the town’s Selectboard.
The Brattleboro ordinance, like many, exempts plastic dry cleaning bags, plastic newspaper sleeves and the plastic wrap over meats and vegetables at grocery stores.
“We have two large supermarkets, Hannaford and Price Chopper, and it was really seamless for them,” O’Connor said. “It wasn’t something that was a huge controversy here.”
Eric Blom, a spokesman for the Maine-based Hannaford chain, said the company operates markets in about a dozen communities in New England where plastic bag bans have gone into effect. He said the company’s “goal is to move people to reusable bags” because even paper bags “take a great deal of energy to manufacture and transport.”
Hannaford tries to encourage customers to adopt reusable shopping bags by tying purchases of “Fight Hunger” and “Hannaford Helps” bags to a $1 donation by the supermarket chain to a local hunger program or other charity and by offering low-cost 50-cent totes for sale at the checkout counter, Blom noted.
“Hannaford is committed to a significant reduction in the amount of plastic in our stores,” Blom said.
Upper Valley restaurants are increasingly weaning themselves off plastic food service materials, too.
At Mexican restaurant Gusanoz in the Miracle Mile Shopping Plaza in Lebanon, owners Nick Yager and his wife, Maria Limon, last fall eliminated styrene snap boxes for takeout orders and switched to a “biodegradable wheat fiber” container, Yager said. He also stopped automatically handing out plastic straws and gives them out only on request as he draws down his remaining supply before switching to biodegradable straws in April.
“We used to go through five boxes of a couple hundred plastic straws per week,” Yager said. “Now we’re down to maybe one box at most.”
Gusanoz stopped using plastic bags for takeout several years ago and now places to-go orders in brown paper bags.
“It’s important to my wife and I to try and reduce waste,” Yager said.
Sometimes the push to reduce relying upon plastic comes from the restaurant’s staff.
“Team members were really upset about us using plastic straws,” said Anthony Barnett, the former operations manager who with his wife, Erin Barnett, last year acquired both Molly’s and Jesse’s Steaks, Seafood & Tavern restaurants in Hanover from longtime owners Marc and Patty Milowsky.
Now servers carry straws in their apron pockets and ask customers if they would prefer one but they no longer automatically provide one when serving a beverage.
“It’s completely nonjudgmental,” Barnett said, adding that servers are not to debate with customers the merits of forgoing the use of plastic straws. “It was a good change.”
At the Salt hill Pub locations in the Upper Valley, the restaurant group began serving biodegradable straws with beverages last September, co-owner Josh Tuohy said. To promote the switch, the restaurant has placed paper “tents” on tables with a red circle and line “stop” graphic overlaid on a bunch of plastic straws that announces: “No straws at the hill or landfill … or ocean. Cocktail stirrers and recycled, bio-degradable drink straws available on request.”
Tuohy said the switch has resulted in a 25 percent reduction in the number of straws Salt hill is dispensing to customers. But he said it’s really not so much about how much money the restaurant might save as it is about making people aware of things that can be done, no matter how seemingly small, that are helpful to the environment.
“This isn’t going to save the world, but hopefully it gets people to think about it in a slightly different way,” he said.
The Co-op’s Fox acknowledges that eliminating plastic bags might face resistance from some members — the Co-op’s durable plastic bags are far superior in quality to flimsier single-use bags favored by many supermarkets. The Co-op dispensed 1.25 million plastic bags last year and customers favor them by a 5-to-1 ratio over paper bags, Fox said.
“It’s a very good product,” Fox said. “Arguably, it’s very reusable.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
Clarification
Among its offerings of reusable shopping bags, the Hannaford supermarket chain sells two varieties which trigger a $1 donation to local charities or hunger-relief programs. An earlier version of this story overstated how many bags sold by Hannaford lead to a charitable donation.
