Shopping cart outside of grocery store by Guanaco licensed under Creative Commons.

Montgomery County may join a growing list of jurisdictions that are temporarily rescinding fees on plastic shopping bags as part of coronavirus management efforts, but some environmentalists are pushing back against the move saying using reusable bags instead offer no greater risk than handling other items in a store.

“Suspending the carry-out bag tax during the COVID-19 pandemic allows store bags to be used at no charge to customers, which will hopefully minimize risk,” said Councilmember Will Jawando in a press release. “While the carryout bag tax does generate some revenue for the county, the health and safety of all Montgomery County residents must come first.”

The bill comes as some retailers, including grocery stores, are prohibiting shoppers from using their reusable bags, which the councilmember states in his release presents “a potential public health risk to those employees who must bag items for customers, as well as to the customers themselves.”

The county’s bag tax has been in effect since 2012 and requires all retail stores and restaurants with carry-out service to charge customers five cents per bag. Jawando introduced the bill to suspend the fee, along with five co-sponsors, on March 31. The full county council is scheduled to vote on Tuesday.

Watershed stewardship groups are unhappy about the proposed suspension

“There’s no point in rolling back environmental regulations unless there’s a risk,” says Anne Ambler, former president and current volunteer with the Neighbors of the Northwest Branch. She was one of the bag tax’s biggest supporters 10 years ago and advocated hard for its implementation.

“It just seems like the risk here is no greater than any other that you are taking. The checkers have to touch cans of food and packages that others have touched and the clerks I’m seeing are all wearing gloves,” Ambler continues. “Whether they put them in the plastic bag or cloth bag really is insignificant.”

Ambler has also helped monitor the policy’s effectiveness both at stores and around the creeks in the county. She and her fellow volunteers host trash clean-ups along the streams, and they’ve noticed a dramatic reduction in trash on the banks of the creeks.

Kit Gage from the Friends of Sligo Creek, says there are far fewer bags in her group’s watershed since the bag tax went into effect in 2012. “Of the things that they should be focusing on, it’s a waste of time,” Gage says of the county council. “They should be focusing on the pandemic…. working to set up hospital beds and helping people who are not able to find the next meal.”

The fee is small for shoppers, Gage adds. But it makes a big difference when pulled together in the county’s environmental budget. With huge budget shortfalls expected due to coronavirus-related closures, Gage thinks the loss will be particularly painful for the county’s Department of Environmental Protection. Bag fees are used to provide restoration and outreach grants and fund litter clean-ups, environmental education programs aimed at reducing litter. The money is also used to buy reusable cloth shopping bags that are distributed at events throughout the county.

Sarah Morse, Executive Director of the Little Falls Watershed Alliance, says she’s not surprised by the measure, although she’s dubious about the science behind it. The Safeway store near her own house put up a sign saying that employees won’t touch reusable bags or put people’s groceries into them. It remains unclear to her, however, that there’s any difference between the number and potency of germs spread from paper, plastic or cloth. Some of the research seems to indicate that cloth might even be less likely to hold germs from COVID-19.

“This whole time is so uncertain, and people are so frightened,” Morse says. She hopes that disposable bags will not go back to being the norm in places where people stopped using them in favor of reusable ones.

While DC has suspended its bag tax, it is due to lack of staff available for enforcement, not germ-related concerns, the city’s director of the Department of Energy & Environment, Tommy Wells, told DCist earlier this week. Wells said that inspectors are following Mayor Muriel Bowser’s orders to work from home and can’t enforce compliance. He also noted that he thought people were better off using reusable bags if they wanted to avoid being exposed to the virus and its possible vectors.

The new Montgomery County bill calls for the suspension of the bag tax to end once the pandemic is over, plus fifteen days. But as each week goes by and new information is learned about the virus’ spread, a definitive end date seems more elusive than ever.