About that... (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – It’s been two years since New York banned single-use plastic bags in supermarkets, restaurants, delis and other shops.

And yet many stores still continue to freely use them, according to a story on the New York Focus website.

The Beyond Plastics advocacy group shared with the news site a list of more than 100 stores in the New York City area that continue to give out the bags with impunity. The group compiles the list by sending volunteers into stores.

New York Focus said that the list includes everything from ethnic corner markets to national chains. Beyond Plastics stopped keeping count of delis and bodegas that usurp the ban, the news site said, preferring to focus on the bigger players. So the numbers could actually be worse.

The joke's on New Jersey as plastic-bag ban boomerangs (opinion)

Consumers getting buried under a mountain of reusable bags.

It’s hardly surprising. You make a law, you have to enforce it. But how can you make sure that every market, takeout place and deli in the city is in compliance? It’s impossible.

Then again, New Yorkers these days are used to having laws on the books that go unenforced. Just look at the crime mess that bail reform has spawned.

But with the plastic bag ban, green politicians got to pat themselves on the back that they passed a law to save the environment. Nonsense. There’s still plastic packaging, including plastic bags, everywhere you look. If you still get a newspaper delivered to your home, and I receive two, maybe yours come in plastic bags, like mine do.

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Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze?

The state Department of Environmental Conservation is responsible for enforcing the bag ban. The DEC told New York Focus that as of late September, they had visited 425 stores and issued 151 warning notices.

The City news site had reported in May of 2021 that the DEC had yet to issue any fines to stores breaking the plastic-bag ban. Since then, the agency has levied $75,000 in fines, including $15,000 this past September, according to New York Focus.

You can hardly blame the DEC for a lack of enforcement. The agency is charged with preserving and improving the state’s natural resources and “to prevent, abate and control water, land and air pollution,” according to the DEC website. The agency has around 3,000 employees, the website said.

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A bigger green failure you won’t find.

Think of the amount of land that the DEC is responsible for across New York State, all the forests, lakes and mountains. How can the agency take care of all that real estate while at the same time making sure that every corner bodega in every city and town is following the plastic bag law?

You’d truly have to have a plastic-bag police state in order to enforce anything even remotely approaching total compliance with the bag ban. It’s not happening. We can’t even keep up with the far-more-obvious illegal dumping of construction debris, furniture, electronics, landscaper clippings and other garbage across Staten Island.

So the bag ban is basically unenforceable. And even if it was being ruthlessly enforced, plenty of other plastic pollutants, everything from fruit and vegetable bags to plastic drink bottles and plastic packaging, are still out there.

It’s just another way that banning plastic bags has gone off the rails. In New Jersey, residents are being buried under a mountain of reusable bags that come to their homes every time they order a grocery delivery from the supermarket.

Think about all that when you’re lugging your reusable bags into the store. Or when those reusable bags make a mess in your home. Or when you forget your bag and get dinged a nickel for one in the store. The bag bans aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

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