Brockton area supermarkets pushing reusable bags

Brockton area grocers plan a more aggressive campaign to get customers to use reusable shopping bags as part of a new statewide effort to reduce the environmental impact from plastic bags.

“We’d like to bring up the visibility of the reusable bags in our stores,” said Rick Caron, operations director at Raynham-based Trucchi’s Supermarkets. “The more visible we can make this, the better.”

On Thursday, the Massachusetts Food Association and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection signed an agreement to cut shopping bag distribution in Massachusetts by one-third within five years — from 1.5 billion to 1 billion per year.

The Massachusetts Food Association is an industry group representing more than 500 grocery stores.

Plastic shopping bags are rarely recycled and often end up in the environment, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a research group in Washington, D.C. About 100 billion of the bags are thrown out each year in the U.S., the group says.

Molly Tarleton, a community relations specialist for Hannaford Supermarkets, said the agreement is great because it is a collaboration.

“It’s not about one chain but about the industry as a whole,” she said. “It’s a challenge but it’s attainable and, hopefully, we’ll be able to go beyond that.”

Most Brockton area grocers sell reusable bags for $1 a piece, and say they’ve already been able to cut back the number of plastic bags given out.

At Trucchi’s, whose locations include West Bridgewater and Abington, plastic bag distribution fell 13 percent as reusable bag sales took off, Caron said.

The grocer now plans to advertise the bags more heavily in its fliers and put up signs around the store reminding customers to bring the bags when they shop, he said.

At Hannaford Supermarket in Easton, 800 reusable vinyl bags have been given out in the past month in an attempt to spread their usage, said store manager Arthur DeChellis.

“We told customers to either keep it for themselves, or give it to a friend,” he said.

The store started giving the bags away to inquiring customers after halting a program that offered a discount to customer who brought their own bag.

The discount of 5 cents per bag ceased in February because it wasn’t leading more customers to bring their own bags, DeChellis said.

But financial incentives for using reusable bags have worked well at Save-A-Lot in Brockton, according to store owner Harold Slawsby.

Since opening in 1996, the store has never given away free shopping bags, he said. It charges 10 cents for a large reusable plastic bag and 3 cents for a normal plastic grocery bag, along with $1 for a cloth bag.

The result: “very, very few” people take the small plastic shopping bags out of the store, Slawsby said.

“If you encourage people to reuse, and give them the proper product that can be reused, they’ll go for it,” he said.

Charging by the bag may not work everywhere, however. In West Bridgewater, selectmen Chairman Jerry Lawrence dropped a plan to impose a 5-cent-per-bag tax in the town after getting calls from residents mostly opposed to the measure in February.

Some grocers, such as Shaw’s Supermarkets, say they don’t have the appetite for charging a bag fee, but are instead appealing to customers’ altruism. Customers have responded strongly when a portion of the reusable bag sales has gone to charity, said spokeswoman Judy Chong.

Shaw’s, with 10 stores in the Brockton and Taunton areas, plans to start a new charitable campaign in April, using money from the bag sales to benefit a yet-undisclosed environmental cause, Chong said.

Material from GateHouse News Service was used in this report. Kyle Alspach can be reached at kalspach@enterprisenews.com.