[B]URLINGTON — The city of Burlington will ask voters on Town Meeting Day whether to ban or reduce the use of single-use plastic bags, stirrers, straws and styrofoam as an environmental protection measure.
The City Council voted Monday to unanimously put a non-binding advisory question on the March Town Meeting Day ballot on the issue.
Brattleboro has instituted a ban on plastics that city officials say is working well, and other municipalities, as well as some state legislators, are considering similar efforts.
The resolution the council passed raises concerns about how plastic isn’t biodegradable and pollutes rivers, Lake Champlain and the oceans. It lays out efforts around the world to limit the use of plastic, including a $40,000 fine implemented in Kenya for anyone using or selling plastic bags.
Councilor Joan Shannon said that she thinks the issue of plastic pollution is often overlooked, and that there are efforts that can be taken at the local level to address it.
She said the advisory question on the March ballot would allow the community to weigh in before the council moves forward with a policy.
“I think it’s important as we go forward with initiatives as a council that we have the buy-in of the community and we’re able to gauge how important and how much of a priority this is in the community,” Shannon said at Monday’s meeting.
Shannon said she was part of an informal group of councilors who had been researching a plastic bag ban several years ago. While large grocery stores didn’t have a problem with plastic bag bans because they have dealt with them in other municipalities, smaller retailers did raise concerns, she said.
“The people who were very resistant to this are the small mom and pop shops, who feel that their customers want these bags,” she said.
Shannon said she thought it would be valuable for those constituents to tell both the council and those store owners how they feel about plastic bags.
Shannon said any efforts to reduce plastic use would be an ordinance change, and not require a charter change vote and state legislative approval. She said the council could consider action two or three months after the vote, if it is supported.
Councilor Adam Roof said if supported by the voters, the ban would go to a working group or the ordinance committee to examine the issue at more depth.
The plastic issue isn’t new to Burlington — young Burlingtonian Milo Cress gained national attention for founding a “Be Straw Free” project in 2011, when he was 9. Cress received national attention and is considered one of the faces of the international movement to ban plastic straws.
Kelly Devine, the executive director of the Burlington Business Association, said she thought the city’s businesses would be supportive of a move to reduce plastic use.
A group of downtown businesses are currently discussing how to decrease their use of film plastic, a very thin plastic material commonly used in packaging retail materials, she said.
“Compared to several years ago, there’s definitely a lot more awareness about the impact of plastics in the environment,” she said.
A ban on thin-film single-use plastic bags was introduced in Brattleboro effective July 1, 2018.
Patrick Moreland, Brattleboro’s assistant town manager, said that the ban has been working well. He said Brattleboro’s major retail supermarkets were able to promptly stop using plastic bags, and the city’s smaller businesses are also all in compliance.
“I’d say it’s been a pretty remarkable transition,” he said.
In Montpelier, just under 80 percent of voters supported a charter change banning single-use plastics on Election Day in November. Charter changes need to be approved by the Legislature.
Paul Burns, the executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said that a number of other towns are also considering moving forward with measures to address single-use plastics.
“We believe that because the world is being inundated by single-use plastics, it is time for places like Vermont to take action and simply stop selling and using this material as much as we can,” he said.
There is also a push by some state legislators to push for statewide single-use plastic bans, Burns said. He said municipal action makes it more likely for statewide action, which could eventually lead to national action.
