The Bergen County retail store owners have left it up to the customers to decide if they want the New Jersey County to ban the usage of plastic bags or put a fee on the bags being offered at grocery stores. New Jersey has been facing a lot of plastic waste issues in the past few years as the levels of single-use plastic bag usage has increased to alarming levels, causing pollution all over the state.
Lot of state legislature bills present
New Jersey’s state legislature has quite a few bills dedicated to the issues of limiting provision and usage of plastic bags. Even though these man-made creations have been utilized for years and have helped the people with daily activities, they have now created a toxic soup in the oceans, killing millions of marine animals and sea birds.
Apart from the number of state legislature bills in waiting to be passed, there is also a proposal that John McKeon suggested regarding the same issue. The Assemblyman has suggested the ban on plastic bags and their usage in the entire state at least by 2017. When these plastic covers and carryout bags are banned, the question on everybody’s mind is what is going to be the alternative.
Wholesale reusable bags are the perfect alternative
Whole Foods is a famous grocery chain in Bergen County and it has already started the journey towards ensuring that the city is going to be a no-plastic zone. It has banned the provision of plastic bags and the grocery chain claims to have imposed this ban since 2006 itself. Instead, the grocery chain encourages its customers and other shoppers to buy or bring their own wholesale reusable bags.
Whole Foods has put a 10 cent fee on each disposable paper and plastic bag offered to customers so that they will stop using these products and instead carry their own bags. A refund of 10 cents will be given to those shoppers and customers who bring in their own reusable totes while shopping at Whole Foods stores.
Bins to dump plastic bags in
Even though the supermarket chain, Market Basket, provided all its stores with big bins, they weren’t used at all. The bins were placed at the corner of the stores so that customers could bring back the plastic bags and help in recycling them, by dropping them in these bins. But these bins were seldom used and the entire initiative was dropped.
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