Julie Steinberg |Bagging the plastic policy

The European sustainability bash has been the global hot ticket for the past several years, but only recently have American cities begun to accept the invitation. San Francisco arrived early, a veritable organic presence with the foresight to ban plastic bags from large grocery stores in 2005. New York showed up a little late but triumphantly bore Mayor Bloomberg's six-cent fee on plastic bags initiative. And Philadelphia? Well, we haven't even RSVP'ed.

For a city that prides itself on its cultural progressiveness, we have a lot of catching up to do in the environmental arena, as I've written about before. While Penn's green programs are demonstrating relative success, real change has to be facilitated by the city. One way to do that is to copy New York and slap a fee on every plastic bag used in Philadelphia.

An hour spent at Fresh Grocer clarifies the need for this measure. Over the course of 60 minutes, I watched cashiers use two or sometimes three bags for a few cans. I witnessed a customer receive a plastic bag for a sole Three Musketeers bar. In one of the more absurd moments, a cashier offered my friend a plastic bag for her smoothie.

Lillian Sidner-Lewis has worked as a cashier at the Fresh Grocer for the past three months. Because the store has no set policy on how to bag groceries, she has created her own. "Sometime I triple bag because I don't want the food to spill out," she said. "These bags aren't worth two nickels."

Except maybe they are. New York officials estimate the city will rake in an extra $16 million in revenue from this tax, and Philadelphia could expect similar results. With this financial injection, perhaps fewer libraries and fire stations would have to close.

Ireland paved the way in 2002 when it started charging 22 euro cents per plastic bag. After the initial grumblings abated, plastic bag use decreased 94 percent within weeks, according to the International Herald Tribune. After a year, reusable tote bags became ubiquitous and using plastic bags became a social faux pas. That's exactly what has to happen - double bagging needs to become the new double dipping.

According to Jeff Beaky, the store manager at Fro Gro, 40 plastic bags are used per hour. To combat this, Fro Gro has made tote bags available for sale (2 for $1) over the past eight months. But numbers hadn't significantly increased until Beaky brought in bags with the Fresh Grocer logo. He's sold 140 of them over the past three weeks and expects to sell more as consumers go green.

"You need to use a reusable grocery bag approximately 45 times for its environmental impact to be less than taking a [plastic] bag," said Penn Environmental Group president and Wharton junior Laura Boudreau. "Think about it over a consumer's lifetime, and using reusable grocery bags (the same ones) will have a much smaller impact than using plastic or paper."

But urging customers to bring reusable bags isn't enough. Winning a raffle at Trader Joe's, the incentive behind buying a tote bag, is appealing but hardly life-changing. An added tax and an added inconvenience, however, have the potential to change consumer behavior for good.

City officials didn't return my numerous calls, but the mayor's Web site makes no mention of such a fee. The most relevant piece of City Council legislation calls for recyclable checkout bags (yes, you can bring back your plastic bags to Fro Gro to be recycled), which is commendable but still falls short of the mark.

It's true that the tax will rankle customers. "I don't think Fro Gro would ever do something like this, because it would piss off a lot of people," Beaky said.

But that's precisely the point - we need these grievances in order to evince new habits. When gas prices reached $4 a gallon, American drivers stopped driving. They carpooled, or took the bus or rented bikes - and demand for gasoline fell drastically.

The sooner Philadelphia considers (and passes) a tax on plastic bags, the sooner we can accede to a societal norm that everyone else seems to understand.

Even though I can't stand techno, I'd rather be partying with the Europeans than watching Philly's landfills pile up - one plastic bag at a time.

Julie Steinberg is a College senior from Boca Raton, Fla. Her e-mail is steinberg@dailypennsylvanian.com. That's What She Said appears alternating Tuesdays.

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