The Soldotna City Council is further restricting the use of plastic bags by businesses by passing an ordinance at their most recent meeting. The ordinance mandates a fully plastic-free shopping bag model beginning on Jan. 1, 2025.
The move is already receiving pushback from the community, as protesters gathered outside grocery stores in Soldotna, demanding the change be repealed.
The ordinance, sponsored by Vice Mayor Lisa Parker and Councilman Jordan Chilson, references a study reported by the Homer News in February of this year that found microplastics present in each of the 39 water sources in Southcentral Alaska the study tested.
The language of the policy change combines the study’s results with the claim that disposable shopping bags cause environmental harm by escaping trash bins and landfills, creating a burden on those who must then clean up the escaped waste.
In 2018, the city passed an initial ordinance seeking to reduce the waste of plastic bag usage by defining disposable bags as having a minimum thickness of 2.25mm. In response, some of the grocers in Soldotna switched to paper bags only, while others replaced their thinner plastic bags with thicker ones. Councilman Jordan Chilson said the new ordinance intends to define a disposable bag more clearly to eliminate the usage completely.
“I think that is one aspect of the original code that we’ve kind of fallen short with and I think I had good intentions. But the reality is that unfortunately, when those thicker plastic bags were distributed in the community with the intent of being reusable, the unfortunate outcome was that people were still continuing to use them in disposable manner,” said Chilson. “The end result being that rather than less plastic ending up out in the landfill, we actually ended up with more.”
With the passage of the new ordinance, the references to bag thickness have been removed, and a “reusable bag” is now defined as one “produced to withstand repeated use over time” and “made of a material that can be cleaned regularly.”