It seems like things are afoot in the retail world.

I was in Duane Reade the other day, and noticed that there’s a big bin in the front of the store full of plastic bags.  I asked one of the employees about it, and they said it’s a new law that all stores had to recycle plastic bags.  I looked into this a bit more, and was intrigued about all the activity going on in the plastic bag world.

One of the main drivers behind these efforts appears to be that when these bags are not recycled, they tend to take up landfill space, litter roadways, and have a disastrous impact on fish and wildlife. And since they’re made of plastic, these bags take hundreds of years to decompose.  It is becoming a quality of life issue for people, and legislators are beginning to take a bead on this very visible reminder of our consumer culture.

Here in New York, the city council passed a bill in January that requires large stores and retail chains, such as CVS, Duane Reade, Rite-Aid, and Wal-Mart, to recycle plastic bags prominently in their establishments.  Mayor Bloomberg, in his effort to make New York the “greenest city in the U.S.,” also announced plans in November to implement a 5 cent tax on the 2.8 billion plastic bags distributed in the city annually.  He estimates this program has the potential to bring in $84 million in new revenue for the city.

This is all well and good from 30,000 feet, but if a city is considering a tax on plastic bags, it really comes down to how this money collected is going to be spent.  For example, money collected by states that have bottle deposit laws typically spent on anti-littering awareness campaigns, but rather directly into the state general fund for a number of unrelated projects.   Let’s make sure that if we are going to be adding yet another tax, the monies should go towards solving the problem.

Grant Draper, at FD Element in New York