Extra Extra, read all about it! Effective January 1st, 2013, Toronto became the first major Canadian city to create a bylaw that bans retailers from offering plastic shopping bags. Grocery and retail stores in Toronto previously charged a “plastic bag fee” of 6¢ per bag. To my surprise, all of this fee money was going to stores pockets, rather than going back towards a green initiative. Even more shocking, this fee earned stores over $5 million dollars in one year alone!
I’m personally a strong supporter of this ban, however, I’m skeptical on whether it will actually be effective, or endure stores and customers criticism. Due to the vast amount of stores selling these plastic bags, the ban will be extremely hard to enforce. However, if Toronto were able to effectively ban these bags, I could see a domino effect occurring, leading one city after another to make the switch.
If the ban were to fail in Toronto, hopefully things would at least be different moving forward. Previously, stores had no incentive to convince customers to bring their own bags, or to switch themselves and offer the more expensive paper bags. There are several solutions to this incentive issue, but I’ll only list a few. An easy fix would be to split the fee 50/50 between the stores and their customers. Or, if the manufacturing cost of each bag were 6¢, a store could give the customer a 6¢ per bag discount on their purchase for brining their own re-usable bag(s).
The question I’m wondering is, when will the majority of stores unanimously decide to take sustainability matters both seriously, and separately from government regulation? I feel that if companies decided to scarify a few dollars here and there for the sake of the environment, their personal satisfaction and consumers perceptions of their actions (whether it’s greenwashing or not) will far exceed the dollars lost.
