North Cook News

Evanston City Council is considering implementing a tax on businesses located within city limits that provide customers either a single-use bag upon purchase of goods.

According to Evanston Now, council members and the development commission have been working on a proposed 15-cent fee per bag. There's also a plan to permanently ban single-use bags as of April 2024.

"Removing plastic bags from our community will have significant both the environmental impact, but also just community standard of living impacts because we know plastic bags end up, you know, in the in either the wrong waste cream or they're not in the waste stream at all and they're just literally in a stream," Council Member David Reid said during a January 9 meeting. "What the research has shown and I went into far more detail during the committee meeting but is that a tax is extremely effective at reducing plastic bag usage and bag usage."

There would be a few exemptions to the tax including small paper bags, newspaper bags, and some small businesses that only use paper bags, Evanston Now reported. A portion of the money collected from the tax would go to the city's solid waste fund.

Several residents attended the meeting on January 9th to voice their opposition to the proposed tax. Small business owners told council members that it was unfair especially since some are still struggling to operate following the pandemic and with record inflation. 

Council member Eleanor Revelle suggested the tax only be applied to businesses that were 10,000 square feet or larger, targeting bigger chain businesses and not small ones. Council ultimately decided to unofficially change some of the proposals and look to decrease the tax to ten cents while pushing back the effective date on the permanent ban.