Campaign aims to reduce plastic bag usage

While shopping at the local Giant Eagle supermarket, Liza Boulet usually becomes more concerned with other customers’ plastic bag usage than the contents of her own grocery list. 

“I see people putting lunch that they’re about to eat into a plastic bag, then just walking around a corner and eating it,” Boulet said. “It’s very disconcerting.”

Boulet’s concern over this wastefulness spurred her “Bring Your Own Bag” initiative, which aims to reduce plastic bag usage on campus through a bag quota policy starting Feb. 3. Boulet, the student sustainability coordinator for Pitt’s Department of Housing and Dining Services, and Jess McDonald, the student sustainability coordinator for Sodexo, partnered to develop the project. 

To notify students about the new policy, Boulet and McDonald, both senior environmental studies majors, have tabled in Litchfield Towers Lobby and near the Quick Zone under Towers since Jan. 15, put up signs near the cash registers in University dining facilities and created a Facebook event. They plan to table in Sutherland Hall and the Cathedral of Learning, and they have an interview with WPTS Round Table to spread the word about their project this week.

The policy limits students to 15 free plastic bags per semester at University dining facilities, including Quick Zone stores in Towers and Sutherland Hall, Oakland Bakery and Market and the food courts in the William Pitt Union, Petersen Events Center and Cathedral of Learning.

Cashiers will monitor students’ bag usage by scanning students’ university IDs if they use a plastic bag at a dining facility. If students exceed their 15-bag quota, the cashier will charge them 25 cents per bag. Students can pay the fee with cash, credit, Dining Dollars or Panther Funds.

Boulet said the cashier will automatically charge students the 25-cent fee if they do not have their University ID and opt to use a plastic bag.

According to Boulet, the initiative should make students more conscious of daily habits that may be harmful to the environment.

In its first semester, the fee for exceeding the bag quota will only apply to students.

McDonald said the fee will not apply to faculty members because they generally do not carry their University IDs everywhere, as most students do.

But cashiers will still ask faculty members to show their University IDs with their purchases to monitor the total number of bags used per shopper throughout the semester.

If faculty members do not have their Pitt IDs with them, it will be impossible to track any bags that they use, McDonald said.

According to Boulet, depending on the policy’s success, faculty may be subject to the bag fee next semester.

Alternative bags will also be available to reduce the use of plastic bags.

When the policy begins, Sodexo will offer reusable bags for purchase at Quick Zone stores, which are located in Sutherland Hall and Litchfield Towers, so students can still carry their items without using plastic bags.

According to Boulet, the price of the reusable bags is still undecided but will fall between $2 and $3.

Jim Earle, the assistant vice chancellor for business at Pitt, approved the campaign.

Earle, head of the Department of Housing and Food Services at Panther Central, said he hopes the policy changes the mindset of the student community.

“It helps to make students aware of practices that may be harmful to the environment and hopefully encourages them to reduce behavior that could have a negative environmental impact,” Earle said.

The Student Government Board Environmental Committee and student organizations including Free the Planet, Students for Sustainability, Take Back the Tap and the Pitt Green Fund, support the campaign.

McDonald said an undetermined portion of the bag fee will go to the Pitt Green Fund, a student-run organization that helps support and finance student-led environmental sustainability projects, and the rest will go to Sodexo, since the company will front the cost of the reusable bags.

Susan Fukushima, Sodexo’s resident district manager, confirmed that Sodexo would cover the up-front purchase of the reusable bags.

“Since they are purchasing the reusable bags up front, which was not in their anticipated budget, they have to ensure that they are breaking even,” McDonald said. “In future semesters, Liza and I are hopeful that the entire fee will go to the Green Fund.”

The total amount of money collected from the campaign is highly dependent on how much students exceed their bag limit.

McDonald said she realized the magnitude of plastic bag usage last year when she was working on an ongoing project for her geology class, called Sustainability. For the project, she created a plastic bag collection system by placing drop boxes in each campus dorm and gathering the deposited bags each week.

To give students a sense of how vast the consumption of bags was, McDonald built a large sculpture resembling a monster out of all the bags and displayed it on the William Pitt Union Lawn for an Earth Day celebration. McDonald said she worked with 10 classmates to organize the project during the beginning of the semester, and she collected plastic bags between March 1 and April 15.

McDonald said the team collected more than 7,000 bags in less than two months.

“So after seeing the sheer volume of bags that students had in their rooms, it made me think about the fact that we need to minimize the waste there, because they were just going to throw those bags out,” she said.

McDonald said they ended up recycling all of the collected bags used in the sculpture.

Boulet and McDonald organized a Bring Your Own Bag pledge, through which they informed students about plastic bag usage on campus during their two weeks of tabling in Towers. Roughly 450 students who signed the pledge believed they could use fewer than 15 bags this semester.

Every student who has not exceeded his or her quota by the end of the semester will be eligible to participate in a raffle, McDonald said, and two students will win prizes from the drawing. They have not yet determined the raffle prizes.

McDonald said she and Boulet decided to have students sign the pledge to raise awareness about plastic bag usage and gain support for their campaign.

Dan Deutsch, a Pitt junior majoring in finance, is excited for the student body to develop the environmentally friendly habits he has been practicing for years.

“I try to never use bags, if possible,” Deutsch said. “At Quick Zone, I’m always throwing my stuff into my backpack, and if I don’t have my backpack, it’s usually just an item or two, so I don’t use a bag. I definitely look forward to seeing this take action.”