For Beantown, A Ban on Bags?

The new bane of the environmentalist movement is neither a steam-belching factory nor a gas-guzzling pickup truck, but an item whose overwhelming prevalence in the world makes its elimination a daunting task: the dreaded plastic bag.

As local governments across the globe undertake efforts to eradicate this menace, one Boston city councilman hopes that his hometown can stay at the forefront of the environmentally conscious movement.

“There is a glut of existing bags in the city of Boston,” said City Councilman Robert Consalvo, who filed a proposal that would curb plastic bag use in the city.

Consalvo said his plan—based on a similar bill recently enacted in San Francisco—takes a three-pronged approach to this environmental scourge.

He first wants to ban plastic bags in Boston's large retail stores, though the council has been debating the definition of “large retail store” since he submitted the proposal a month ago.

For stores that insist on the necessity of plastic bags, he wants to to make them use a more expensive, biodegradable type of bag.

The councilor said his bill would also establish a city-wide recycling program for plastic bags.

“The worst part is that the city doesn’t allow recycling of these bags,” Consalvo said. “My wife and I must have about a hundred at home.”

The bill already has nine co-sponsors on the council, and only seven would need to vote in favor of it for it to pass later this fall. But Consalvo said that he’s trying not to get too confident about the prospects of a bag-free Boston.

“Stranger things have happened in politics,” he said.

The city of Cambridge, meanwhile, has not taken such an active stand against this environmental danger.

Cambridge City Councilman Craig A. Kelley wrote in an e-mail that he remains unconvinced that campaigns against plastic bags will help solve the environmental issues.

“The real environmental damage done when we shop, whether we use paper, plastic or cloth bags, is generally in what we buy and how we get to the store,” he wrote. “All the canvas bags in the world won’t decrease the environmental cost, for example of driving to Shaws and buying a few steaks."

But some Cantabridgians are tackling the issue even without legislation from the city.

Whole Foods Market—the largest natural and organic food seller in the world, according to their Web site, which has a branch in Cambridge—encourages their customers to bring their own bags with them when they shop.

If customers bring their own bags, they receive a discount of $0.05 per bag, and the store also offers reusable bags for a dollar, said Lynay J. Smith, the marketing team leader at the Fresh Pond Whole Foods.

Whole Foods stores in New York City recently marketed 20,000 canvas bags created by British designer Anya Hindmarch, and though the store sold the bags for a mere $15, interested buyers can now find them on eBay for over ten times as much.

And last month in Taiwan, 30 people were sent to the hospital after a stampede of people tried to buy similar canvas bags. Riot police were required to ease the crowd, The New York Times reported. 

—Staff writer Nathan C. Strauss can be reached at strauss@fas.harvard.edu.