Chicago Following New York In Plastic Bag Recycling

If you’re a loyal reader of SCREAM or various other green blogs, you may know that New York City recently passed a restriction that requires certain stores to take back their plastic bags.  Chicago is looking to jump on that wagon, too.  An ordinance was introduced yesterday that would require stores to take back and recycle the plastic bags they dispense.

The measure is almost exactly the same as New York.  Stores greater than 5,000 sq ft or with five or more locations would be required to have recycling bins for the bags.  They will be required to take back not only their bags, but newspaper sleeves, dry cleaning bags, bags from other stores, and even shrink wrap.  I was surprised about the shrink wrap ’cause I thought that was a #3 plastic which is PVC.    Anyway…  On top of all this, the merchants will need to offer for sale reusable bags to their customers.

I’m glad that this is happening here, locally.  I still wish they’d go the route of San Francisco and do a full-on ban of petrol-based plastic bags, though.

From the Trib:
Some 100 billion bags a year are consumed in the United States, representing 12 million barrels of oil used to manufacture them, said Brian Granahan, an attorney for Environment Illinois. And only about 2 percent of the plastic bags are recycled in the U.S., he added.

Source: Chicago Tribune