By John Marshall
Have you ever gone to the supermarket and not left with something wrapped in plastic? Even if you have, the odds are good that your purchases were packed in plastic bags that ended up in your trash.
Reducing the use of plastic shopping bags has been a hot topic for folks in Mercer County and Princeton for the past few years. Last year, Mercer County voters were asked to decide on a proposal to charge a per-bag fee at stores. The goal was to get shoppers to ask themselves a very important question: Do I really need this bag?
While 60 percent of county voters overall voted no on the fee-per-bag proposal, 60 percent of voters within Princeton said yes—meaning that Princetonians want shoppers to ask themselves this question every time they shop.
The Princeton Merchants Association wants this question on everyone’s mind, too. Rather than penalizing plastic bag use with a government-imposed fee, we’d rather have our shoppers reduce their plastic bag use voluntarily.
To make a voluntary effort successful requires outreach to build awareness, which is why the Princeton Merchants Association is launching our collaborative “Learning Our ABCs” campaign:
Ask First
Bring Your Own Bag
Collect and Recycle
“Learning our ABCs” is a townwide collaborative effort to encourage PMA members, merchants, the municipality, patrons, and residents to voluntarily follow the three Rs—reduce, reuse, and recycle—when it comes to single-use bags. Reduce by asking whether a bag is needed, or whether multiple purchases can be combined into one bag; reuse by placing purchases into reusable bags; and recycle by collecting and properly repurposing plastic bags and films, such as the ones that wrap bundles of paper towels.
The Princeton Merchants Association will ask merchants to display the BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag) graphic and to train their staffs to “Ask First” before providing patrons a new bag. “Ask First” will include inquiring if the customer brought or will be purchasing a reusable bag, or would like to combine purchases into just one bag. Whole Earth Center and McCaffrey’s Princeton both offer a variety of reusable bags promoting BYOB and give discounts to shoppers who use them. And merchants will consider how to more effectively implement other alternatives to single-use bags.
Along with reducing the number of bags that are given out, we are also increasing recycling options for bags that have no more use. McCaffrey’s and the Princeton University Store currently offer bag recycling, and Whole Earth is soon to follow. Even though Whole Earth does not provide plastic bags, the store is embracing the effort to eliminate the number of bags thrown in the trash.
Sustainable Princeton will add drop locations at Princeton municipal buildings, while the Princeton Senior Resource Center will help coordinate with volunteers to collect bags to take to McCaffrey’s. Once collected, these plastics will be converted to Trex Lumber—a much more valuable building material than simply reincarnating plastic bags as new plastic bags.
Tremendous efforts have already been made in town to remove plastic from the waste stream. Every McCaffrey’s plastic produce and meat bag, for example, is compostable, and the supermarket takes in and recycles 50 percent more plastic than it gives out. Also, McCaffrey’s will soon be selling BagSavr receptacles, which shoppers can use to collect plastics to bring back to the market or the U-Store. Shoppers at McCaffrey’s can save $2 on a BagSavr when they bring in two full bags of bags for recycling.
The effort to rid the town of single-use plastic bags is creating some great partnerships. McCaffrey’s, for example, has offered to accept the plastic films that encase products arriving at Whole Earth. With help from its members, Sustainable Princeton, Whole Earth, and our local residents, PMA and McCaffrey’s hope to double their recycled material volume in year one and triple it in year two.
What we’re hoping to do is create a model that not only works here in Princeton, but one that other towns and merchant groups can replicate. Princeton is known worldwide as an innovator. So let’s lead by example. Let’s Learn our ABC’s, and by doing so we will not only improve our own Town, but guide our neighbors and beyond that a voluntary reduce/reuse/recycling program model can be successful without bans, taxes, fees, or penalties.
The Hometown Princeton Column is provided monthly by the PMA. On the web: princetonmerchants.org.
