"The Bag Bill"

Activist Jennie Romer, a lawyer who got bills banning plastic bags from stores passed in California, moved to New York to do the same thing in New York City.

"Jennie Romer moved from California to New York about four years ago to save the city from plastic bags. A practicing attorney, she is the country’s leading expert in plastic-bag law. Romer is thirty-eight years old, stands six feet tall, wears dark skirts with dark tights, and has copper-red hair, a pale complexion, and light-blue eyes. The bangs across her forehead sit as straight and level as the scales of blindfolded Justice. She served her apprenticeship in San Francisco, which in 2007 became the first city in America to place a ban on plastic grocery and retail-store bags. San Jose, where a similar law led to an eighty-nine-per-cent reduction of plastic-bag litter in the city’s storm drains, relied on her counsel. When Oakland moved to pass an anti-bag ordinance, it was defeated by the legal action of the plastics industry; from that setback, she learned how better to advise Los Angeles, which passed its own anti-bag ordinance, in 2012.

No. 1 among Romer’s goals today is the passage of a bill called Intro 209A, which has been awaiting a vote by the New York City Council since 2014. The bill, in its current version, would put a five-cent fee on the most common plastic and paper bags. Romer believes that because of plastic bags’ wastefulness and the damage they do to the environment humans will eventually use a lot fewer of them, and that New York’s acceptance of this change is only a matter of time. For the city to have come so far and so quickly toward rejection of the single-use disposable plastic bag, when ten years ago nobody in government was even talking about it, is partly because of her."

Ian Frazier reports for the New Yorker in the May 2, 2016, issue.