Assembly Member
Micah Kellner will be distributing environmentally friendly tote bags at the Roosevelt Island Farmers Market this Saturday. Kellner reports:
In the following weeks, I will be distributing free tote bags to constituents at street fairs, greenmarkets, and outside grocery stores. The idea behind the campaign is to promote the use of durable reusable bags for grocery trips and other shopping needs instead of using plastic bags. The average family uses 60 plastic bags in only four trips to the grocery store. These American-made (the company is Fabriko) Eco-Spun Recycler Tote Bags I am distributing are made from 100% recycled plastic bottles, a material known as PET. PET is considered the greenest material on the planet today and regularly using just one of these bags for daily shopping can eliminate over 1,000 plastic bags from entering our waste system.
My great hope is that my campaign will begin to raise awareness about alternatives to plastic bags. Single-use plastic bags accumulate and persist on our planet for up to 1,000 years. In New York City, they comprise about 2.87% of our residential waste stream, and they are our largest source of plastic waste – and plastic bags are among the 12 items of debris most often found in coastal cleanups. To read more about this issue, I highly reccomend the website ReusableBags.Com.
My GO GREEN! CHALLENGE comes just after New York City's Local Law 1, the Plastic Carryout Bag Recycling Law, came into effect on July 23rd, 2008. This new city law requires stores across the City to establish in-store recycling programs for plastic bags and film plastic, such as plastic wrap, dry cleaning bags and newspaper bags. The law applies to stores that use plastic bags and occupy 5,000 or more square feet or have more than five branches operating in New York City. Stores are also required to sell reusable bags.
I will be distributing our environmentally friendly tote bags at the the Green Market starting at 10:30am on Saturday October 25th, at the Rosevelt Island Senior Center Monday October 27th starting at 11am, and on Tuesday October 28th at Gristedes starting at 1:30pm.
Introduced just over 25 years ago, the world consumes an estimated 500 billion plastic bags annually (almost 1 million per minute). According to the EPA, over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps are consumed in the U.S. each year. Four out of five grocery bags in the US are now plastic. Plastic bags don't biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food chain when animals accidentally ingest them.
I will also be exploring policy avenues to have an even larger impact. Using reusable bags needs to rise to the level of a social imperative, and I think it will, once people realize how simple it is to make such a big difference. A good example is Ireland. That country introduced a new tax in 2002, requiring customers to pay at the register if they wanted to use a plastic bag. Within weeks, use of plastic bags dropped by 94% as the Irish began to adjust to carrying tote bags to the store. Now using a plastic bag is socially unacceptable in Ireland. People are just more aware.
