Sustainable Bag Use

TopPriorities

Promoting Sustainable Bag Use

It is important to use any product sustainably. To help stores and consumers be mindful of bag use, we regularly work with our retail partners to reduce the number of bags leaving the store through unnecessary practices like double bagging.

However, oft-adopted policies that ban plastic bags or charge fees for each bag dramatically increase the costs for consumers, while forcing stores and consumers to use alternative products that have greater environmental impacts. In other words, bag-related policy often ends up producing unsustainable results.

As alternative to these counterproductive policies, we have suggested policymakers consider establishing a transaction fee model. This would be much less regressive in most scenarios, while still discouraging unnecessary bag consumption, particularly for retail purchases of one or two items.