By Anthony Russo

When New Jersey enacted a wide-ranging single-use bag ban earlier this year, their action made the Garden State one of the most ambitious in the nation in addressing microplastic contamination and waste — a bold step, but one that left many questions in its wake for businesses and consumers.

The good news is some 3 billion plastic bags and about 68 million paper bags have been eliminated from 2,000 grocery stores in just the few months since the law was implemented, according to estimates from the New Jersey Food Council. It has helped keep our beaches and parks cleaner this summer, and one is sure to notice how few plastic bags are blowing around while driving on any highway in the state. That is a real accomplishment for New Jersey.

However, we’re now seeing there was a critical oversight when the bill was passed: the packaging for the thousands of New Jerseyans who have groceries and other essential goods delivered to their homes or ordered for pickup. While other states have taken a more cautious approach in order to ensure businesses have packaging options for basic services like curbside pickup, New Jersey also banned all paper bags along with single-use plastic bags from supermarkets and big box retailers that sell groceries.

Unfortunately, businesses have now replaced each single-use bag with reusable plastic ones for grocery orders — undermining the law’s well-intentioned environmental sustainability goals. The appeal of reusable bags is they are just that: reusable. But unlike an in-store shopping trip, consumers’ items are packed for them when they use curbside pickup or delivery – meaning they can’t reuse their bags for these orders. And while grocery stores do not like having to wastefully use these reusable bags, the bill’s far-reaching ban has left retailers with few other options.

As a result, New Jerseyans who get these deliveries — busy parents who cannot find time to make it to the store, seniors who depend on home delivery, or consumers who have simply come to enjoy the convenience of these services — are inadvertently accumulating dozens, if not hundreds, of reusable plastic bags as they place these orders. Worse, these thicker totes use far more plastic and would require being reused nearly a dozen times compared to a standard single-use plastic bag to offset the energy needed to produce them. Nor are the reusable bags recyclable at curbside as paper bags would be, if they were permitted for deliveries from supermarkets. This reality makes well-intentioned reusable bags actually less eco-friendly, when we put them in context of the number of them that people are accumulating.

To the legislature’s credit, lawmakers are moving rapidly to try to remedy the confusion by both consumers and businesses over what the law requires – and just as importantly what it doesn’t require. The bipartisan bill fix would allow customers to receive their groceries in paper bags either by delivery or curbside pickup — but only for a maximum of three years.

The problem is this legislation doesn’t really address the root of the issue. Paper bags would continue to be banned with purchases made inside supermarkets and big box stores, and the proposal still leans heavily on the continued use of reusable bags, creating a complicated new system of sterilization and reuse requirements for grocery stores and delivery platforms to implement. The proposed scheme, which is both vague and unproven, looks onerous for business owners, potentially and unintentionally unfriendly to the environment, and vexing to customers already confused by their ever-changing bag requirements.

Acknowledging that transitioning away from single-use materials would be difficult, the legislature has already tasked a panel of experts, the Plastics Advisory Council, with monitoring the bag ban’s implementation and evaluating its effectiveness. Rather than rushing into misguided band-aid solutions, the legislature should allow these experts to advise on how to navigate the difficult issue of eliminating single-use bags completely more thoughtfully, especially considering the need for delivery and curbside ordering. In the meantime, a temporary reprieve that allows paper bags for delivery and curbside orders would prevent the overuse of reusable bags that people are currently experiencing while still reducing plastic waste.

The legislature is taking the right step to fix some very real confusion and concerns with an otherwise landmark law. But in ending one problem, our Senators and Assemblymembers must take care to not create a whole new set of issues that will leave New Jersey residents and businesses equally baffled.

Anthony Russo is President of CIANJ.