City of Toronto’s New Plastic Bag Surcharge
As of June 1, 2009, the City of Toronto has imposed a five cent charge for plastic bags at any retail location. In theory, this is great. I already use reusable bags for my grocery shopping, and often decline bags when shopping at clothing stores, drug stores, electronics stores etc, depending on what the item is (i.e. I might feel weird putting a brand new light-coloured t-shirt in my purse with all the pens and god knows what else is in there).
I think discouraging people from using plastic bags is a great way to help them from ending up in the landfills. And I even felt that way before I saw this:
So, if I think this is such a good idea, then why do I say I support it “in theory”? My beef is that that five cents that’s being charged isn’t required to be paid to anything.
Retailers are entitled to keep the money received from the plastic bag charge, the money is not remitted to the City of Toronto. While the City does not stipulate what retailers should do with this money, it does support reinvesting the funds in local environmental or community-based initiatives.
Source
Meaning that not only are retailers saving money because people will inevitably start bringing reusable bags with them everywhere, so that will be less bags that the retailers have to pay for (plus the money they make off selling their own branded reusable bags), but they get to keep the money that we’re paying for the bags. And I’d assume that 5 cents per bag is a considerable profit, considering places like grocery stores use very thin bags and buy very large quantities. (And the five cents is a minimum – I’ve heard of people having fast food delivered only to be charged 10 cents per bag when they weren’t given the option to not have the food delivered in plastic.)
I cannot believe that the City of Toronto let that happen. Why not have the money go back to the city to fund more green initiatives? Or be donated directly to some kind of “green” group that researches greener technologies or helps to clean the environment in some way? Or even to fund a cleanup of the plastic bags that are out there right now? Why do the retailers get to profit from every aspect of this initiative – having to dispense less bags alone will reduce costs for them, which should be enough of an incentive to get them on board to participate. I’d prefer the five cents be a environmental tax. Otherwise, it’s really just a cash grab for the retailers.
Just goes to show how much influence big business has on our mayor – seems he’s looking out for the retailers and not the tax payers or the environment.
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June 4th, 2009 at 9:39 am
I agree. K and I were talking about this last night shortly after I saw you. The only explanation I could come up with is that it could be looked at as some kind of reward to the retailer for complying with the new bi-law? But since when do we get a reward for following the law? I think the money should go to some kind of environmental charity or towards improving our environment too!
I can also see that it could be quite a task for some smaller business owners who might not be as organized as larger businesses to keep track of just how many bags they sold. But that’s not really our concern.