New York City grocery shoppers may soon face a 10-cent fee on all plastic and paper bags, enlisting the nation's largest city in a growing green movement, according to CBS News.
The City Council introduced a bill Wednesday that would impose the fee in an effort to spur customers to bring their own reusable bags, CBS News reported. Supporters of the bill say it would benefit the city's economy as well as its environment.
"The bags get stuck in storms drains, they cause flooding and they litter our beaches," Councilwoman Margaret Chin of Manhattan, one of the co-sponsors of the legislation, said at a news conference, according to CBS News. "And they cost New York City a lot of money."
City residents use 5.2 billion disposable plastic bags a year and it costs the city $10 million annually to ship used bags to landfills, according to the bills' supporters, CBS News reported.
The measure is expected to be voted upon within the next few weeks, according to CBS News. If it passes, New York will join such cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington to try to curb the use of plastic bags.
The 10-cent fee would not be a tax, according to CBS News. Instead, the money raised from the bag sales would benefit the store owners who supplied the bags.
Though grocery stores supply the vast majority of the disposable bags used across the city, the fee would also apply to bags sold at other retail stores, CBS News reported. It would not apply to restaurant deliveries or most street food carts.
Councilman Brad Lander said the fee also applied to paper bags not because the bill was intended as a method to raising revenue, but as an incentive for customers to opt for reusable bags, according to CBS News.
