With the advent of 2024 came the enactment of legislation, including a law signed by Gov. Dan McKee in 2022 banning single-use plastic bags throughout the state.

The legislation, enacted on the same day as similar legislation in Colorado, makes the two states the eleventh and twelfth in the country to ban single-use plastic bags.

According to Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) Environmental Sustainability Policy Programming Services Officer Dave McLaughlin, the legislation is “15 years in the making.”

“The General Assembly has been introducing legislation related to single-use plastic bags actually going back as far as 2008,” McLaughlin said.

While 18 municipalities in the state had already enacted bans, including Cranston in 2021, Warwick and Johnston were not among them, leading to an adjustment period as the New Year begins for many stores and businesses.

One of those places is Dave’s Marketplace, where Susan Budlong, marketing and communications director, said in a statement that the store’s 10 locations in Rhode Island have spent time preparing for the change.

“We have updated our bagging systems to accommodate both paper and reusable bags for easy bagging,” Budlong said. “We do expect it may slow our cashiers down a bit as we all adjust to the change.”

Some other businesses, such as Stop and Shop, have charged 10 cents for paper bags provided by the store. McLaughlin said that methods like that are meant to incentivize customers to bring their own reusable bags and promote greater awareness of more sustainable bag options.

Budlong agreed, saying that she highly encouraged customers to purchase reusable bags at their stores.

“The idea behind a single use plastic bag ban is not to push people to rely on paper — but to invest in reusable bags,” she said.

According to a cost-benefit analysis conducted by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), the bag ban is likely to decrease microplastic pollution in the state. Research from the University of Rhode Island shows that the seafloor of Narragansett Bay contains over 1,000 tons of microplastics, the majority of which was accumulated over the past 20 years.

The analysis also found that plastic bags are one of the biggest reasons for rejected recycling rates, calling them “one of the biggest contaminants in the state’s recycling stream.”

McLaughlin hopes the legislation will lead to a lower number of rejected recycling, though he noted that plastic bags should not have been in the recycling in the first place.

The DEM was one of the biggest proponents of the legislation.

As for the communities with plastic bag bans already in place, McLaughlin pointed to Barrington, which became the first town in the state to enforce a ban in January of 2013, as an example for other towns and cities in the state to follow.

“It took a leadership role with establishing an ordinance, making revisions so that it was robust and didn’t have any loopholes,” McLaughlin said. “And their language and their definitions related to bags, that was a point of conversation and interest. And that ended up being in the final legislation, and that’s what’s in the state law right now.”

McLaughlin also said the state wanted to keep in mind the lack of progress toward a statewide ban in neighboring Massachusetts. In the Bay State, 160 of the state’s cities and towns have passed a single-use plastic bag ban, but there is no statewide ban in place, leaving a wide range of regulations and punishments between municipalities.

McLaughlin said that it was particularly important to avoid a similar scenario for businesses operating in multiple cities and towns in Rhode Island.

“We wanted to make sure it was consistent and uniform for the business community, especially for the businesses that have retail establishments in multiple communities,” McLaughlin said. “You don’t want to have to play by different rules.”

McLaughlin expects to see the impacts becoming clearer later in the year, noting that they will likely not be immediately visible due to litter having already built up. He did note, though, that Middletown, which enacted a bag ban in 2017, has seen an approximately 30% reduction in the number of littered plastic bags following the ban’s enactment.

While the legislation’s impacts may not be immediately visible, McLaughlin hopes that it will lead to a cleaner and healthier state, bay and recycling system, and that the DEM will be able to get more environmental legislation through the General Assembly in the future.

“The momentum is there for people to start to make more informed choices about the single-use items that are used in their daily lives,” McLaughlin said.