By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Local businesses in Princeton will voluntarily collect plastic bags from their customers to be recycled, now that they have fended off an effort by environmentalists to charge their customers a fee for paper and plastic shopping bags.
The nonprofit Princeton Merchants Association announced Friday a partnership with the town government to encourage shoppers to reduce, reuse and recycle their bags. The Merchants Association said there would be drop-off bins around town where residents could bring plastic shopping, newspaper, bread and food storage bags and plastic wrap and film.
“One of the great things about the recycling component is that it goes beyond just plastic shopping bags and includes all types of plastic wrappings and bags,” Mayor Liz Lempert said by email Friday.
She said the town would put collection containers at the River Road municipal dump, the Princeton Senior Resource Center, and at the Public Works facility on John Street. In all, there will be 10 containers placed around town with more to follow.
“By increasing the number of plastic bag recycle containers around town we will reduce what would otherwise end up in our landfill,” said Diane M. Landis, executive director of Sustainable Princeton, in a news release issued by the Merchants Association.
Participating merchants so far include the Princeton University Store, McCaffrey’s supermarket, the Whole Earth Center and Craft Cleaners. McCaffrey’s will serve as a clearing-house for the bags by turning them over to a company, Trex Recycling, to be recycled.
As part of the campaign, merchants will ask their customers if they want a bag and encourage them to bring their own bags.
The push by the Merchants Association comes after local environmentalists urged the Princeton Council to create a 10-cent mandatory fee on every plastic or paper shopping bag their customers took. Advocates point to the harmful effects of plastic bags, which wind up in waterways and do not degrade in landfills.
They saw a charge as a way to discourage shoppers from taking paper and plastic bags. Merchants would keep the bag fee money, but there were questions of how any such requirement would be enforced.
Resident Bainy Suri, a leading advocate for the bag charge, said Friday that she thinks that a charge is still the right way to go. She said that based on her experience, the Merchants Association’s campaign is a kind of tactical move by opponents of bag charges or bag bans.
For its part, the council has shown little interest in creating a new layer of regulation. Councilwoman Jo S. Butler said Friday that she had not seen either a proposed ordinance or resolution calling for a bag fee.
