New Jersey’s food retail industry is perplexed and stunned at the barrage of attacks by some environmentalists on our request to temporarily pause bans on single-use bags during the COVID-19 public health emergency. The suggestion that this is somehow a nefarious master plan to undermine bag bans is a farfetched conspiracy theory peddled by extremists who ignore the truth when it is most convenient for them.
The New Jersey Food Council has been the only business trade association to support a statewide ban on single-use plastic and paper bags and had been working in partnership with these same environmental groups just a few weeks ago to achieve this goal. With the COVID-19 outbreak, our efforts were diverted to developing recommended best practices to assist grocers and their workforce function as an essential business during this unprecedented time.
One of the many proposed policies is for the handful of New Jersey towns to temporarily suspend their single-use bag bans. States like Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Illinois, as well as cities like San Francisco, have paused their bans on single-use bags, and for good reason.
We know that only about 3% of shoppers actually clean their reusable bags, and a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that COVID-19 can survive on plastic surfaces up to 3 days. Store employees staffing the checkout lines and interacting with customers simply do not want to touch a customer’s reusable bags in fear that these bags are harboring the invisible COVID-19 virus.
Stores have been taking extraordinary steps to ease their employee concerns, and some have banned their employees from handling reusable bags, requiring customers to bag their own groceries. But for those customers who refuse to self-bag or are unable to do so because of physical limitations, employees have no choice but to handle the reusable bags since single-use paper and plastic bags are not readily available in areas where bans exist.
This simple request to help our stores function during a global public health emergency is blasphemy to New Jersey’s environmental lobbyists. Activist organizations like the Sierra Club, Environment New Jersey and Clean Water Action could care less about the health and safety of workers; they were outraged by the idea of pausing a few local ordinances.
These same tone-deaf lobbyists also have no sympathy for those facing financial hardship as a result of the pandemic. Many of these local ordinances that the New Jersey Food Council is asking a temporary reprieve from place fees on single-use bags, meaning customers without reusable bags pay for every single-use paper or plastic bag. Asking someone who just lost their job, is depending on food assistance programs, or might be facing reduced hours to pay a quarter for a bag is just kicking people while they are down.
The policy purists fail to recognize that protecting the public health and providing economic relief in a time of crisis doesn’t have to be at odds with efforts to stem the flood of plastics. We will have time to pursue a statewide program once this crisis is over. For now, the paramount concern must be the health, safety, and economic security of customers and our workforce.
And, for those environmentalists who like to throw grenades from the safety of their living rooms, I invite them to make a true difference: Work in a grocery store. We need every set of able hands we can get.