Chicago’s 7-cent tax leads to drastic cut in disposable bag use

SPOKANE (Scrap Monster): The consumption of paper and plastic disposable bags has reported significant decline following imposition of seven-cent tax on bags effective February this year. A preliminary study carried out by the behavior design lab ‘ideas42’ in association with researchers belonging to the New York University and the University of Chicago Energy and Environment Lab suggests 42% decline in usage of bags at large grocery stores in Chicago post implementation of the bag tax.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel noted that Chicago has started making significant progress in reducing carbon footage and street littering, by way of reducing usage of plastic and paper bag. It is quite encouraging that many Chicagoans are willingly choosing to forgo paper and plastic bags at checkout, Emanuel added. Meantime, Jordan Parker, founder of advocacy group ‘Bring Your Bag Chicago’ congratulated the city’s efforts to evaluate the early impact of the mission intended to benefit Chicago’s environment.

According to the study, the imposition of bag tax has resulted in significant reduction in number of disposable bags used and the number of customers using disposable bags. Before implementation of the tax, shoppers used an average of 2.3 disposable bags per trip. Further to implementation of tax, the average bag usage reduced by over 40% to one bag per trip. The average number of disposable bags used per trip by customers in stores outside of Chicago reduced from 3.6 to 3.3.

The study indicates that majority of customers in Chicago used disposable bags prior to implementation of the tax. Nearly 82 percent of customers were found to use at least one disposable bag prior to implementation of tax. However, after the first month of tax, the number of customers using at least one disposable bag reduced sharply by 30% to 49 percent. On the other hand, there was no notable change in usage of disposable bags in stores outside of Chicago. In fact, the percentage of customers using disposable bags has edged higher from 91.5 to 91.6 after the implementation of 7-cent tax.

Further, the study notes that many Chicagoans have switched from disposable bags to reusable bags after the tax was implemented. Consequently, reusable bag use in Chicago jumped higher from 13.2% to 33.2%, increasing by 20 percentage points since imposition of bag tax. Interestingly, there has been a considerable rise in the number of customers who opted to not use any bag at all from 7.8% during pre-tax period to 21.5% during the post-tax period.

The study compared shopping bag usage of 14,168 customers at large grocery store chains in Chicago and surrounding suburbs in the months just before and after the implementation of the bag tax. The City administration noted that additional data collection and analysis will be held during the current year in order to analyze the longer-term impacts of the tax scheme.

In a bid to curb use of disposable bags, the City of Chicago had banned retail store chains from providing disposable plastic bags at checkout. However, the ban proved ineffective as it excluded plastic bags of certain specifications. In November last year, the City Council had repealed the ban and replaced it with a seven-cent tax on all paper and plastic checkout bags with effect from February 1^st, 2017.