NYC proposes 10-cent grocery bag fee

MARCH 27, 2014
news.com.au
NEW York City grocery shoppers may soon face a 10 cent (A11 cent) fee on all plastic and paper bags, enlisting the nation’s largest city in a growing green movement.
The City Council introduced a bill on Wednesday that would impose the fee in an effort to spur customers to bring their own reusable bags.
Supporters of the bill say it would benefit the city’s economy as well as its environment.
“The bags get stuck in storms drains, they cause flooding and they litter our beaches,” Council member Margaret Chen of Manhattan, one of the co-sponsors of the legislation, said at a news conference on the City Hall steps.
“And they cost New York City a lot of money.”
City residents use one billion disposable plastic bags a year and it costs the city $US10 million ($A10.94 million) annually to ship used bags to landfills, according to the bills’ supporters.
The measure is expected to be voted upon within the next few weeks.
If it passes, New York will join such cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington to try to curb the use of plastic bags.
The 10-cent fee would not be a tax. Instead, the money raised from the bag sales would benefit the store owners who supplied the bags.
Some business owners have complained that the fee could keep shoppers away.
A similar measure was introduced last year but failed to gather the necessary support and therefore had to be re-introduced in front of the new council, which took office in January.
Nineteen council members are co-sponsoring the new bill, seven short of the votes needed to pass it.
Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said on Wednesday that she would need to review the bill before determining her position.
Her close ally, Mayor Bill de Blasio, stopped short of endorsing the bill a day earlier, but said that reducing the number of plastic bags was “a societal goal.”