Baltimore City’s Bag Ban Delayed Again to Appease Retailers

Today Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott announced a second delay to the implementation of the plastic bag ban — this time to October 1st. You can read the press release here, but ultimately the delay serves to give retailers more time to prepare for the ban. If you remember, Mayor Scott already delayed the ban back in January, when it was originally supposed to go into effect, to July 9th of this year — just in time for Plastic Free July. Unfortunately Baltimore City won’t be free of plastic bags this July, or even August or September.

What’s another three months of plastic bags? It’s hard to tell, but according to Baltimore City’s own Office of Sustainability “the three trash interceptors in the Baltimore harbor, aka the Mr. Trash Wheel family, have collected over 700,000 plastic bags.” That’s a lot of bags! Also, the Baltimore Office of Sustainability gives great information on why all of this matters to the city:

“Plastic bags are a large portion of plastic pollution that ends up in our trees, streets, parks, drains, harbor, waterways, and oceans. Banning the use and spread of plastic bags will decrease litter, prevent storm drain blockages and reduce our city’s carbon footprint to combat climate change. Fewer plastic bags in circulation is an important step towards a cleaner and greener Baltimore. In the U.S. we throw away enough plastic to fill a football stadium 1.5 times every day on average and that amount is increasing.”

Trash Free Maryland couldn’t agree more with that assessment! So why the delay? The Baltimore Sun ran a piece earlier today on the delay, and they quoted the city’s director of sustainability, Lisa McNeilly, as saying “we had hoped that by summer, everything would have been more amenable to the rollout, but what we’ve seen is that there continued to be some concerns from retailers about using reusable bags and having the capacity for it.”

We understand that there are challenges when implementing any new law, but when it comes to plastic pollution we don’t have time to wait. We hope that this delay will be the last delay, and on October 1st we can finally say goodbye to plastic bags at checkout counters across the city.