Senate Votes to Stop Local Bans on Plastic Bags

The Michigan Senate on Tuesday approved legislation prohibiting local communities from banning retailers from using plastic bags, ordinances two counties have moved to enact.

The bill, which still has to pass the House and gain Gov. Rick Snyder’s signature, would supercede local laws under consideraton in both Washtenaw and Muskegon counties.

A committee of the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners committee last week backed a resolution imposing a 10-cent fee on most plastic and paper bags used by retailers, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Exceptions would be provided for low-income residents and for plastic bags used to wrap frozen foods, meat or fish, newspapers, laundry or dry cleaning, pet waste bags, or bags used to prevent spills from prepared foods such as soups or salads.

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The county pays about $200,000 a year to deal with plastic bags and the damage they do to machinery at the county’s reycling facilities.

“We all know the impacts of plastics bags,” Washtenaw County Commissioner Yousef Rabih told lawmakers last week. “They’re a nuisance and they’re littering our country, our state and our waterways.”

The proposed Muskegon County plastic bag ban would also impose a fee on retailers, who are fighting back against the plastic bag bans, already in place statewide in California and in Hawaii’s largest counties, according to the National Conference of State Legislators.

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Plastic bags have also been banned in the District of Columbia and the Outer Banks region of North Carolina, but the Outer Banks ban was temporarily suspended after a natural disaster in 2011 and has yet to be restored.

Charlie Owens, state director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, told the Free Press that while his organization doesn’t disagree with the “honorable intentions” of the proposed Washtenaw prohbiitiion, but said it is anti-business and would encourage employers to seek other locations.

A petition on MoveOn.org seeks to ban plastic bags across Michigan. The petition, launched by Michael Schlaack, says only 5 percent of plastic bags nationally are recycled. The average person uses 360 plastic bags a year, according to the petition.

The remainder end up in landfills or as litter that clogs storm sewer drain systems and eventually make their way to the Great Lakes, where they entangle or are invested by lake wildlife and shore birds, or break down into small bits that persist in the ecosystem and could move through the food chain if ingested by fish.

» The Detroit Free Press has more about the proposed Washtenaw County plastic bag ban.

Image credit: Photo of Great Blue Heron swallowing fish trapped in plastic bag by Andrea Westmoreland via Flickr / Wiki Commons