Oregon bill to ban plastic bags at checkout now awaits Gov. Kotek’s signature

If you’re having a bit of deja vu over a plastic bag ban, you’re not alone. When Oregon lawmakers passed the first ban in 2019, which prohibited using so-called single-use plastic bags, more than a dozen Oregon cities had already passed such bans. But the ban’s environmental aim of reducing the use of plastic — and its impacts on the environment and human health — did not end up achieving that goal. Grocers replaced the thinner, single-use bags with a thicker, sturdier version that in theory could be reused but only rarely were.

The new plastic bag ban lawmakers have now sent to the governor for signature would eliminate all plastic bags from grocers and restaurants in favor of paper bags. Celeste Meiffren-Swango is the state director of Environment Oregon. She joins us to share more about how this new bill is expected to actually reduce plastic waste and what she hopes people do between now and January 2027, when the law goes into effect.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. “Nothing we use for just a few minutes should pollute the environment for hundreds of years” – that’s a quote from my next guest, Celeste Meiffren-Swango. She is a state director of Environment Oregon and she said that in support of a bill that is now headed to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s desk. It strengthens the ban on plastic bags at checkout that lawmakers first passed back in 2019, but it does not go as far as proponents had initially hoped.

Celeste Meiffren-Swango joins us now to talk about all of this and more. It’s good to have you back on the show.

Celeste Meiffren-Swango: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Miller: Can you remind us what the legislature passed back in 2019 in terms of plastic bags?

Meiffren-Swango: Sure, yeah. So in 2019, the Oregon Legislature, with the leadership of then Representative, now Senator Janeen Sollman, passed the Sustainable Shopping Initiative. And what that law does is, starting January 1, 2020, grocery stores, retail and restaurants could no longer provide single-use plastic grocery bags or checkout bags, and would have to provide recycled paper bags or quote, unquote “reusable plastic bags” for a 5 cent fee.

Miller: And the disposable ones, those are thin film plastic.

Meiffren-Swango: Right, exactly those thin … we all know the thin film plastic bags, yeah.

Miller: What had localities been doing before that in the lead up to that statewide legislation?

Meiffren-Swango: Yeah, so I think, like 10, 15 years ago, we really started to hear more and more about the impact that plastics were having on the environment and in particular, the impacts that it was having on the ocean and marine life. I’m sure you remember reports of whales washing ashore with bellies full of plastic, reports that sea turtles were eating plastic bags thinking they were jellyfish and that there’s a swirling gyre of plastic waste in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that’s twice the size of Texas.

That really started reaching the public consciousness about 15 years ago. People started looking around to see, where are the places where we can be eliminating some of the most wasteful plastics? And I think plastic checkout bags were kind of at the top of the list. So people across the country, not just in Oregon, were working to pass local bans on plastic bags. Here in Oregon, kind of leading up to that 2019 legislative session, 15 cities and towns across the state of Oregon had passed restrictions on single-use plastic grocery bags. So that’s why lawmakers were really looking for the opportunity to do something statewide.

Miller: Instead of a piecemeal approach, let’s have a statewide way to deal with this.

OK, so that 2019 bill got rid of plastic film checkout bags, but allowed reusable, much thicker plastic bags. How much data is there about whether or not these thick plastic bags that you might get at a restaurant takeout, say, or at a grocery store are reused? And if they are reused, how many times they might be reused?

Meiffren-Swango: Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of data about this. So Environment America, which is our national affiliate, released a report at the beginning of last year called “Plastic Bag Bans Work,” and found that by and large, for the places where we’re actually tracking how well these plastic bag bans have been implemented, they have resulted in significant reductions in plastic film waste. We could extrapolate the data out to find that plastic bag bans can eliminate up to 300 plastic bags per person per year. So for a state like Oregon, we’re talking 1.2 billion single-use plastic bags that are no longer being used.

The one caveat to that is that in a set of these states, including here in Oregon and in places like California and Washington, the law does allow and has been allowing those thicker plastic bags at checkout, under the guise of them being reusable. But I think we’ve seen, based on data in California, that actually people are mostly treating them as single-use. So a lot of folks will reuse them, maybe once, and put them as liners for trash cans or use them for cleaning up their dog waste.

But people aren’t really bringing them back time and time again to the grocery store and reusing them at the levels we really think is needed to cut a lot of the plastic waste. So that’s why the proposal, this year with the legislature, was to get rid of those like plastic bags at checkout, to get rid of all of that unnecessary plastic waste.

Miller: Because it seems like there’s different ways to think about this. Your point is, if the main idea is to get rid of plastic film waste, then the ban has done a great deal towards accomplishing that. But if what you want to do is reduce the overall use of plastic in any kind that humans are using and then just tossing, letting people get them for 5 cents or maybe for free at a restaurant to-go counter, it’s counterproductive.

Meiffren-Swango: Yeah, we’re not seeing the full environmental benefits of the law if we continue to allow plastic film bags to be handed out at checkout, even if there is that 5 cent fee.

Miller: And am I right … I mean, it seems like the difference between a thin plastic film bag and these theoretically, although maybe often not reused ones, there may be, what, 10 times more plastic in those quote unquote “reusable ones.” They’re often quite thick.

Meiffren-Swango: Right. The intention is for them to be more durable, so they are made with significantly more plastic. But if people aren’t actually reusing them, then it actually just results in more plastic waste. So that’s why we really wanted to get rid of all of those plastic film bags at checkout and encourage people to use bags that are truly reusable. And for times when maybe you forgot your reusable bag, that there would be a recycled paper bag available for 5 cents.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for what earlier versions of this bill would also have addressed?

Meiffren-Swango: Yeah, so initially this was, we called it the “Beyond the Bag Ban.” So there was the elimination of those thick plastic bags at checkout, but then it also included two policies that are referred to as kind of “customer upon request” policies. So the first would have phased out those single-use plastic toiletries that you sometimes get at hotels, just the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and instead of just automatically putting those in your hotel room, they would simply be available upon request of the customer.

Miller: So if you’re checking into a hotel, when they give you the key cards, say, they would also, instead of being allowed to have it be by default that there’s shampoo and conditioner bottles in the bathroom, they would say, hey, do you want these?

Meiffren-Swango: Right. It would just be if you need it, if you didn’t bring your own or if they didn’t have one of those refillable pumps that a lot of hotels have actually started moving to. You could call down, similar to if you forgot your toothbrush, your toothpaste or something like that, and get the bottles of shampoo and conditioner as a way to just cut down on, again, that unnecessary waste that is sort of thrust upon us as consumers.

Miller: So that’s one version of the ask first policy. What was the other one?

Meiffren-Swango: Well, in 2019, the same year that the legislature passed the bag ban, they also passed a “straws upon request” policy, which basically does the same thing – instead of the default being that everybody gets a plastic straw, restaurants would have to either ask or the customer would have to ask in order to get the straw. So the version of the bill that we were working on this session would have added plastic utensils and condiments to that existing “straws upon request” law that already exists in Oregon.

Miller: So it seems like those bits of single-use plastic, they would still be available, as you’re saying. You would change the default, add a little bit of friction to the human interaction to make it, ideally, you’re thinking, less likely. Why was this struck? What was the pushback that I guess in the end was successful?

Meiffren-Swango: It’s sort of hard to pin down. I think that we didn’t get a totally straight answer, but the bill passed, full comprehensively through the Senate with bipartisan support, got to the House side and there was just some concerns among some members on the House side around putting too many restrictions on businesses. And I think some misunderstanding of how the law would actually be implemented.

But unfortunately, there just wasn’t the support that we needed in order to pass the bill. And since [we think] actually restricting those thicker plastic bags is the most substantive part of the law, we’re very excited that that bill ended up passing through both chambers, even though it didn’t have those upon request policies. And we can revisit those upon request policies in the future.

Miller: When it comes to the overall goal here of reducing the use of plastic waste, which is just one of the priorities of your organization, how much more do you think can be done at the governmental level, the state level in this case, in terms of prohibitions or mandates? As opposed to, I don’t know, more of a bottom up social movement?

Meiffren-Swango: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really good question. I think people are clamoring for less plastic in our lives, right? It is on us as individuals to reduce plastic where we can. But I don’t know the last time you were in the grocery store. Everything seems to be packaged in plastic. Even things that didn’t used to be packaged in plastic, now are packaged in plastic.

Miller: Or plastic inside of plastic inside of plastic.

Meiffren-Swango: Exactly, you order something online and you get all this plastic. It’s never ending and so the consumer can only do so much. So that’s why we do need businesses to lead the way and also for governments, like the state of Oregon, to do what we can to reduce plastic pollution, plastic waste here in our state, and show other states what’s possible.

Miller: I want to turn to some other bills in the legislature. A few weeks ago, the governor signed a bill that will ban firefighting foam that contains PFOS, something that your organization has been focused on. What is this bill going to mean in practice?

Meiffren-Swango: Well, right now, firefighters use firefighting foam. And oftentimes, it contains PFOS, which is a toxic forever chemical that builds up in the environment but is also a huge public health concern. And because firefighters are constantly exposed to this firefighting foam containing PFOS, they’re at extreme increased risk for cancer.

So this was a bill by Senator Sollman, who I think wanted to protect both firefighters and the environment, and it’ll phase out firefighting foam that contains PFOS. It came from the firefighting community, who said that they have viable alternatives and can start using firefighting foam that doesn’t create such a health risk for our first responders.

Miller: Back in April, we talked about a bill that would have required thousands of Oregon businesses, from hospitals to restaurants to food producers, to compost their food waste instead of throwing it away. Where does that bill stand right now?

Meiffren-Swango: So the Food Waste Bill, House Bill 3018, passed out of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment and is now in the Budget Committee. So right now is really the time of session where the legislators are really deciding what the budget priorities are. We’re working to try to get food waste to be among the priorities that are moving forward, because we think it’s kind of a no brainer. We need to be using the best use of all of this food. Instead of sending it to a landfill to turn into climate pollution, we should actually just be putting it back into the food … Well, first, feeding people who are hungry or sending it back into the food system as compost.

Miller: What were some of your other priorities for this session that have either fared well or have fallen by the wayside?

Meiffren-Swango: Yeah, one of the bills that has passed, the governor has already signed, is a bill around wildlife crossings. So we have fragmented tons of wildlife habitat across the state. There’s been an effort over multiple years to invest in what are called wildlife crossings, which are underpasses or overpasses that make it easier for wildlife to cross and it also makes our roads safer.

So there was a bill that passed, that basically creates more synchronicity between ODOT and ODFW and to better plan and implement wildlife crossings across the state. We’re still hoping to get more funding for wildlife crossings through the budget process, but this was a really exciting step in the right direction.

Miller: Celeste, thanks very much.

Meiffren-Swango: Thanks.

Miller: Celeste Meiffren-Swango is a state director of the nonprofit Environment Oregon. They advocated for the bill expanding Oregon’s plastic bag ban. That bill did pass a legislature and is now on Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s desk.

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