>> Hello, and welcome to the county, where we examine issues important to Baltimore County, Maryland. I'm your host, Lowell Melser for this episode. Today, we are exploring the new bring your own bag law that will go into effect in Baltimore County next month. Starting November 1st, the county will prohibit the distribution of single use plastic bags at checkout for most retail establishments, or else charge at least a $0.5 fee per paper or reusable bag distributed.

This includes convenience stores, department stores, grocery stores, restaurants, and more. Of course, there are exemptions for small businesses that operate solely in the region with three or fewer locations. But the goal is to encourage people to get in the habit of bringing their own bags to reduce the negative impact of plastic bag litter in our communities, waterways, and at the county's recycling processing plant.


>> Speaker 3: I think it's a good thing to limit the litter definitely.
>> Speaker 2: To help with the transition, the county is handing out 100,000 free reusable bags at farmers markets, libraries, and senior centers, as well as getting them directly to SNAP and WIC households. We spoke to a few bag recipients at the Towson Farmers Market.


>> Speaker 3: It's very helpful. Yeah, and these are really nice bags.
>> Speaker 3: I love the convenience of it, I didn't actually have a bag, and I didn't expect to buy much here. I just came for green beans, and I actually ended up getting flowers, and peaches, and something else I got cold.

But anyway, I could use the bag, and it came right in handy.
>> Speaker 4: And I love the bags. I prefer to use them at the grocery store rather than use the plastic ones, I just have to remember to bring them. And this is a good piece for my collection.


>> Speaker 2: And joining us now to take a deeper dive, and one of my favorite people at DPWT is Bureau Chief of Solid Waste Management for the county, Nick Rodericks. Nick, thanks for joining us. This is kind of an interesting dynamic here, I'm used to working with you every day, and I get to ask you some of the questions I really wanna know.

So first off, Nick, can you give us an overview just of what you do, what your day to day is?
>> Speaker 1: So, like you said, I'm the Bureau Chief of Solid Waste for the county, which means basically, anything related to recycling your trash, any composting, really any initiative where you got to throw something away, that falls under my purview.

So got a large staff, we got three facilities, we do all of the county's collection. So if you put something on your curb, we're the ones responsible for picking it up. So all of those wonderful staff I get to work with every day. And yeah, a lot of fun working for solid waste.


>> Speaker 2: What was your reaction when you heard about this new law? Now certainly, and we'll talk about the recycling plan in just a minute. But I've been out there several times, and I know one of the big issues they have out there are these bags getting caught up in the equipment out there.

But when you heard about this, were you like, thank goodness, this is gonna really help us, or what was your reaction?
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's kind of two, I view it from two different perspectives. One is kind of a citizen and from an environmental perspective, and then also from my solid waste hat.

So I think overall, it's a great thing. Growing up here, I have a distinct memory of plastic bags caught in leafless trees during winter, right, just rattling around. And I just kind of remember that I spent a lot of time fishing and hiking, and surprising where you find plastic bags.

So on a personal level, I'm excited about it, I think it's a really good initiative. And plastic pollution in general is a pretty horrific problem, and plastic bags are a small portion of that. But through my work in solid waste, I've had a lot of exposure to just kind of what plastic can do to the environment.

So I think overall, this is a really good step. And then when you throw in the fact that, yeah, they get caught in all of our machinery, they're everywhere at our murph, because I think some people think they're recyclable and they don't. They don't get through our machines, they get caught up, it a whole mess.


>> I'm seeing, they actually have to sometimes stop to clean out a lot of the gears and everything because so many plastic bags get caught up there. How do plastic bags currently impact the operations around the site? We talked about them getting caught up in the equipment, but is there a deeper story to be told there?

Because I guess ultimately, if they do get caught up, that's stopping the facility from doing what it needs to do.
>> Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah. I think that's kind of the gist of it, right, is that our machinery is set up basically to separate the key materials in your recycling, right?

Your bottles, cardboard, paper, and we have machinery and sorters that do a lot of that. Plastic bags are not one of the things that we're set up to sort, so the more plastic bags you have in there, the harder it is to get the right materials out. On top of that, they rip apart.

We have something called a star screen, which basically sorts out the paper and your cardboard. Plastic bags get wrapped around that all the time. And we do, frequently, like you'd mentioned, we have to stop production. Somebody has to climb in there and actually cut those out. I think people think that it just kind of will go through the system, it's not a big deal, and it's legitimately a huge headache.

And you mentioned, the environment, I'll say we did a waste sort last year, which is exactly what it sounds like. We actually pulled bags out at one of our facilities and sorted through it by hand. And after we did that, we estimated that between 5 and 6,000 tons worth of plastic bags, just plastic bags end up in our landfill alone.

If you extrapolate that to all plastics, it'll probably put in our landfill in the county about 11,000 tons of plastics. Most of those are recyclable, some of those are just plastic bags. So generally, they're not a great thing, I'd love to see less of them all around. When it comes to these plastic bags too, they take a long time to break down, right?


>> Speaker 1: Yeah. They're not going anywhere. Yeah, you put those in a landfill, I mean, your grandchildren's grandchildren, if they really ever wanted to, they could dig them up and still find them, right? They're not going anywhere. Exactly.
>> Speaker 2: And then I have one other question you just reminded me.

We see this at grocery stores and things, they have those bins where you can take your plastic bags and put them in. Are these bags actually recyclable, or they're a special process, or are they just basically taking these bags and using them to reuse them? Do you know how that works?


>> Speaker 1: I'll say the plastic in your recycling bag is like the lowest rung of plastic, so pretty much everything north of there, your bottles, we can do something with. There are ways to recycle plastic bags if you really wanted to, you could put in the effort, it's very expensive, it's not very cost-effective.

And for the most part, it's very difficult because that plastic is so thin, if you try to repurpose it, it doesn't really turn into anything, maybe you can recycle it back in the plastic bags. A lot of times actually, those recycling programs, they may end up in an incinerator and using a recycling credit.

It's really something we wanna stay away from. So in general, on top of the environmental waste and what it does to our system, they're just really isn't a great way to recycle those. I will say there are some newer technologies that have looked at repurposing it, packaging it, compressing it, it's not something we have the infrastructure to do.

And I think really it's kind of more of a novelty now than really kind of a large share of the market.
>> Speaker 2: Everyone always has these questions, recycling is a very popular -.
>> I'll say one more thing a little about recycling, recycling is really just a matter of can you get it out of the waste stream, and can you sell it?

And plastic bags, pretty hard to get out of the waste stream, pretty hard to sell. Yep, so that takes care of that.
>> How do you hope this new law will impact this litter? I know we've seen it already done in the city and a couple of other counties around Maryland, I don't know if you keep track at all of what they're doing.

But what are you expecting will be the outcome of this?
>> Speaker 1: I guess on a personal solid waste level, I think the thing that I hope it will do most is really give people kind of an opportunity to start talking about the waste that they generate. I think there's always pushback with these things, change involves pushback, but I would like people to be aware of their waste, right?

And if every day you go to the supermarket, you put your groceries in a plastic bag, and then you throw it out, you're not really thinking about the waste you generate. So from a sort of personal level as somebody working in this industry, I think what I'd like to see is people go to the supermarket and be like, well, why are we being asked to do this?

What is the environmental impact, and how does this change things?
>> Speaker 2: What do you say to people who believe that this really won't have an impact? There's a lot of people that don't believe in recycling. There's a lot of people that think that it doesn't make a difference that municipalities aren't really actually doing anything with this waste, it ends up in the landfill anyway.


>> Speaker 1: I can ask that that doesn't happen.
>> Speaker 2: But what do you say to the skeptics, and what do you say to the people that think this really won't have any sort of impact on the environment?
>> Speaker 1: I guess I'd ask like, well, then what is the solution?

And I'll say to those people, I'd love it if they come and spend a day with solid waste. Every single day I go to our transfer stations, and there are piles of trash, stories over my head, and we'll do that tomorrow, and we'll do that the day after.

And to me in many ways, that means that people are a little bit detached from the waste that they generate. So I guess I'd ask what would you like the first step to be? Is changing plastic bag use the silver bullet? Probably not. But unless you get people starting to think about it and get people engaged in the issue, it's just too abstract for us to make significant changes with.

So I think that's what I would say to people is yes, will plastic bags go away tomorrow? Probably not. But unless I challenge people, unless we challenge people as a county to think where is this going? What do we do with it? We're not gonna get anywhere.
>> Speaker 2: I think you are seeing though, a lot of people starting to change their habits too just by going to the grocery store.

Speaking for myself as well, I can't leave the house unless I know I have my bags, because I don't wanna. It's not even like a pay thing, it's like I don't want to use the plastic bags anymore because it's gotten through to me. But do you notice in the day to day, say compared to a couple of years ago that when you're out and about whether it's in a store and things like that, are you noticing the same thing, more and more people are bringing their own bags?

Because that's kind of what the county is trying to accomplish here too.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, I think absolutely. And whenever something starts, like I said, I think there's pushback. We saw the same thing, we switched over to brown paper bags for our yard waste last year from plastic bags.

People were concerned about it at first, then they started adopting it. And now I have a pretty good time explaining to people why that's a good thing. I can't compost a plastic bag, but I can compost your paper bag. So I think now, yeah, I mean, I leave if I go to the grocery store, my dad's always like, did you bring a bag?

We can't stop if you don't have a bag. And really, it becomes habitual. And I think that's kind of my larger point here is that these things are challenging, they don't always change everything overnight, but over time, you definitely see changes. And actually, we do have data from our waste facilities, we do these audits.

That will show that waste changes over time, that behavior, human behavior does change and it impacts what we throw away. So we can do it.
>> Speaker 2: If only we could do something about plastic water bottles -. Yes, for sure, we're getting there.
>> Speaker 2: So as we kind of wrap up here and people are wondering what other small changes they could make as far as their waste is concerned to make a big impact on the environment, what comes to mind?


>> Speaker 1: Yeah, the first thing I ask people to do is kind of just take inventory, all right? Start with the waste that you generate and just actually think about it for a day, for two days. If you wanna do it for a whole week, I'll be ecstatic. But every time you use a trash can, think, is this something that has to be thrown away?

And there are some inevitabilities, especially with our lifestyle, that there are some things that that's the end of the line for that material. But I do ask people, just think consciously, is that the end of the line for that material? Or could I have done something further up earlier in my day to prevent this piece of waste being thrown out?

And again, it's all baby steps, that doesn't change behavior overnight. But if you do start thinking about it and that's why I like this piece of legislation, it makes people kind of start to think about it. The other thing I'll suggest any Baltimore County resident does is go on our website.

You can look at the solid waste website and see basically any piece of material that you can think of, you can search. And it'll tell you whether it's recyclable, where you can put it. And if you can bring it to one of our Rdocs resident disposal drop off center where you can bring a whole array of materials.

So what do I do with this old TV monitor? Bring it to us. You'll drive it up to one of our Rdocs, bring it there. What do I do with this bag of old clothing I have? Bring it to us, we have a program for that now. I have an old wheelchair in my basement, nobody's used it, should I throw it out?

Bring it to us, we can recycle that now. So we have these programs, and I'd love if people started to use them. So go to our website, and you can definitely see just about anything we can try to figure out a solution for.
>> Speaker 2: Well, this has been a pleasure.

I learned a lot. Thank you. First of all, I appreciate it.
>> Speaker 1: Yep.
>> Speaker 2: Joining us once again, Nick Rodericks, Bureau Chief of Solid Waste Management for the Department of Public Works and Transportation here in Baltimore County. Thanks so much for joining us, Nick.
>> Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to this episode of The County.

This episode was produced with help from the Baltimore County Public Library Media Services. We'll see you next time.