Shaw’s plans to eliminate plastic bags in Barrington

BAG IT: Lucas Flavin bags groceries at Shaw’s supermarket in Barrington. The store is phasing out the use of plastic bags. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE
BAG IT: Lucas Flavin bags groceries at Shaw’s supermarket in Barrington. The store is phasing out the use of plastic bags. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE

If one of the largest supermarket chains in New England won’t defend the plastic shopping bag from environmental attack, who will?
With Barrington poised to become the first town in Rhode Island and third in New England to ban plastic shopping bags at store checkouts, the plastics industry and its bag manufacturers were dealt a blow when Shaw’s supermarket vowed to eliminate plastic at its Barrington store whether the bags are outlawed or not.
Carrying lunch or stuck in a tree, plastic bags are a familiar part of the American consumer consciousness, but their failure to break down when thrown away has made them a top target of the environmental movement.
“I teach this class and one of the things that comes up is the big fields of plastic [floating] in the North Atlantic and Pacific and what their sources are, which led me to plastic bags and bottles,” said Joseph Roberts, an assistant political science professor at Roger Williams University and the Barrington Conservation Commission member who first proposed a plastic-bag ban. “The thinking was there should be something Barrington could do to control the problem on the local level.”
For Shaw’s the move away from plastic will not be company-wide. Instead the Barrington store will act as a pilot for the chain, which has 10 stores in Rhode Island and 169 stores in New England.
“Our general preference is for these things to be done at the state level and not town-by-town, to avoid customer confusion,” said Shaw’s spokesman Steve Sylven about ditching plastic. “But the Barrington store was one of the first to be used as a zero-waste store – with the goal to eliminate 90 percent of landfill waste from our operations – and we are also thinking about being part of our community and the discussion was made by the leadership here and the manager of the Barrington store.” Sylven could not say how likely it is that Shaw’s, the largest retailer in Barrington, bans the bags statewide or regionally.
Shaw’s is owned by SUPERVALU, a Minnesota corporation with 2,400 supermarkets across the country.
When the Barrington Shaw’s does get rid of plastic bags – a process Sylven said will take up to 100 days – it will join the three Whole Foods Market stores in Rhode Island as the only large chain groceries in the state to voluntarily get rid of plastic.
In general, supermarkets have been reluctant to lose their plastic bags because of the cost of offering paper bags and the fear of alienating customers.
There are two Stop & Shop stores in New England that do not use plastic, but neither made the move willingly.
One is in Nantucket, Mass., the first community in the region to ban plastic in the 1990s, and the other is in Westport, Conn., which became the second in 2009.
Stop & Shop New England spokeswoman Suzi Robinson said the company has thought about getting rid of plastic at the checkout, but customers don’t seem up for it.
“Customers primarily request plastic bags when they are offered the choice,” Robinson said by email. “We’ve explored considering no plastic bags, but we have not made decisions to do this yet in any stores. There are many factors to consider.”
Robinson pointed out that Stop & Shop, like all major grocery chains, encourages customers to bring their own reusable bags and sells reusable bags.
Whole Foods got rid of plastic bags at its checkouts in 2008, but still has plastic bags within the store, in areas such as the produce section, where customers pull them from rolls as they collect fruits and vegetables.
“We are always looking for a better solution than the role bags,” said Whole Foods Eco Czar and Regional Forager Lee Kane. “We have not found compostable technology that works to our satisfaction, and then there is the expense side.” The move away from plastic bags has raised the possibility that some stores will start charging shoppers for disposable paper bags, but so far none in Rhode Island have done so.
Under the Barrington ban being discussed – final language is still being written by town attorneys – stores could charge customers up to 5 cents for a disposable bag. Plastic bags in other areas of a store outside the checkout would still be allowed.
If approved as discussed, stores that break the bag ban could be in for stiff penalties: $150 for the first offense, $300 for the second offense and $750 for the third offense.
Those fines bother Paul DeRoche, director of the Rhode Island Retail Federation, who spoke out against the ban at two Barrington meetings, urging the town to pursue the matter, if it must, at the state level.
“I oppose the measure because it is a mandate on businesses. Why would one town in a state with 39 cities and towns proceed alone on this?” De-Roche said.
The Rhode Island General Assembly has taken up the issue of plastic shopping bags in recent years.
In 2008 and 2009, bills that would have established a statewide tax on plastic bags died in the legislature and last year a bill sponsored by Sen. Rhoda E. Perry, D-Providence, and Sen. Joshua Miller, D-Cranston, that would have banned plastic bags at checkout did not pass.
The American Progressive Bag Alliance, a Washington plastics-industry lobbying group, sent Executive Director David Asselin to Barrington to argue against the ban.
The Bag Alliance argues that plastic bags are actually better for the environment than paper bags, claiming they take more energy per bag to make, transport and recycle.
The Barrington Town Council is expected to have a draft plastic-bag ordinance drafted this month with more debate and a vote in either October or November. •

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