Buncombe residents use millions of recyclable plastic bags a year; nearly all end up in landfills, Watchdog finds

by MICHELLE FEUER and JOHN BOYLE

The first of two parts

Buncombe County residents use an astounding number of single-use plastic bags every year — 130 million, by one estimate — and, despite being recyclable, nearly all end up in landfills where they become a health hazard, an Asheville Watchdog investigation found.

Plastic bags taken to grocery store drop-off bins may or may not be recycled, The Watchdog found. Bags placed in the familiar blue residential recycling bins for biweekly collection won’t be recycled.

“We get approximately 4,500 pounds of bags a day that goes to the landfill,” said Abraham Lawson, the co-owner of Curbside Management, commonly known as Curbie and the primary recycling facility for multiple western North Carolina counties, including Buncombe. Removing the plastic bags out of the recycling stream requires hands-on picking by a crew of workers snatching the bags off fast-moving conveyor belts.

Lawson said the thousands of plastic bags that end up there daily include single-use shopping bags, kitchen garbage bags, larger leaf bags and even the blue “recycling” bags that people sometimes use as containers for recyclables.

As Lawson spoke recently in a room above the Curbie’s work floor an employee snatched a blue recycling bag off the line.

“He’s pulling out that blue bag right in front of you, and he’s gonna rip that open, dump the contents and then throw that bag into that bay below him,” Lawson said.

The contents of the bay go to the Buncombe County landfill northwest of Weaverville, close to the French Broad River.

Once in the landfill — or tossed on the side of a road, or carried into tree branches by the wind — the plastic bags become a health hazard for humans and animals, environmental health experts told The Watchdog.

“I think the paradigm shift is the understanding that it [plastic] doesn’t really biodegrade — it just keeps breaking down into smaller and smaller micro- and nano-plastics,” said Karim Olaechea, deputy director of strategy and communications at MountainTrue, an Asheville-based nonprofit dedicated to the environment and conservation.

“MountainTrue and others have been doing sampling of water on the French Broad and other rivers in western North Carolina and are finding microplastics in 100 percent of water samples,” said Ken Brame, conservation chair of the North Carolina Sierra Club. ”We’re ingesting it; we’re breathing it.”

Plastic bags slow processing, befoul equipment

The plastic bags themselves are recyclable, and several local grocery stores have bins to accept them. Bags that do get recycled eventually go to companies in South Carolina and Virginia that use them to make plastic-based decking boards.

But Curbie cannot recycle them at its cavernous, 68,000-square-foot facility in Woodfin, where about 75 people work.

“We are not able to keep that material clean enough when it comes in mixed in with everything else,” Lawson said, noting that Curbie has tried to pick out relatively clean bags and ship them to the lumber manufacturers, but “we’ve never been able to hit the quality standards for them to be able to process that.”

Some communities served by Curbie still accept blue bag material, although Lawson said they’ve tried to push everyone away from them. Communities like Asheville, Fletcher, Weaverville and Woodfin have all gone to carts now, he said.

Curbie spends thousands of dollars a month in landfill fees to dispose of plastic bags that are incorrectly put in recycling bins.

“There is a tremendous amount of recycling labor going to plastic bags,” Lawson said during a recent Watchdog tour of the recycling center. “They wrap around my equipment causing damage, and 70% of the team’s time and resources are spent pulling the plastic bags away from recyclable materials.”

About 5%-10% of everything that comes into Curbie ends up in the landfill, Lawson said, and “out of that 5 to 10 percent, at least half of that is bags.”

Recycling bins at stores: A crapshoot

“Based on national numbers, we think there are about 132 million plastic shopping bags [used] per year within Buncombe County,” said Anna Alsobrook, the French Broad watershed science and policy manager at MountainTrue. “That being said, Buncombe is a little bit more progressive than maybe the national average, so that would be give or take on either end.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based nonprofit that works to protect endangered species, states that Americans use, on average, about 365 plastic bags a year. In Buncombe, with a population of 277,000 people, that extrapolates to about 101.1 million bags used every year.

The higher estimate, 132 million bags, comes after factoring in 11 million tourists visiting Buncombe each year, Alsobrook said.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency estimates that only one in 10 plastic bags is recycled — repurposed into new bags, packaging, or composite lumber to make decks and benches.

To manage plastic bag waste, many big box chain stores have set up recycling bins for consumers to recycle bags. In 2023, MountainTrue put electronic trackers in discarded bags to see if bags consumers dropped off at the stores actually ended up in plastic recycling centers where they’re meant to go.

Many of the bags — particularly those from Ingles Markets, Food Lion and Harris Teeter — ended up at the Trex Company plastic bag recycling center in Virginia, which makes decking boards.

But bags from other stores, particularly Walmart, ended up in the landfill, or as far away as Asia, MountainTrue found.

How the local plastic bag ban got shot down

Most single-use plastic bags are used only for an average of 15 minutes by the consumer, and their negative environmental impact outweighs any convenience, environmentalists contend. But their attempts to enact local laws, ordinances, and bills that ban or limit the use of single-use plastic bags in Buncombe County have been frustrated.

As of July, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington had implemented bans on single-use plastic bags, and more than 400 communities have local laws and ordinances to ban or tax single-use plastic bags.

North Carolina does not allow localities to enact bans or other ordinances regarding plastic bags.

In 2009, several counties in the Outer Banks implemented a ban on single-use plastic bags for large retailers, but the N.C. General Assembly repealed the ban seven years later.

Locally, there appeared to be widespread support last year for a waste reduction ordinance banning single-use plastic bags. The city of Asheville’s Plastic Reduction Initial Survey showed 80% of 7,000 respondents surveyed were in favor of a ban.

Both the city and the county were looking at ordinances that would ban single-use plastic bags, after months of planning. As the city’s webpage on single-use plastics reduction notes:

“In 2022, Plastic Free WNC, a coalition of organizations and community advocates including MountainTrue, Sierra Club, and NC Public Interest Research Group, gathered data on the impact of plastic bags and disposable foodware products on the natural environment and conducted preliminary stakeholder engagement. The coalition found that single-use plastic products pose a serious threat to public health and the local environment.”

The group presented a proposed ordinance to the Sustainability Advisory Committee in July 2022, and the committee recommended City Council take action to reduce single-use plastic consumption.

In August 2023, the city enacted changes that prohibited the use of plastic bags in curbside brush and leaf collection. In December and into January 2023, city staff conducted internal focus groups and researched sanitation service related to single-use plastics.

From March to August 2023, staff engaged residents and businesses and conducted further research regarding additional single-use plastic bag reductions in stores and disposable Styrofoam foodware products.

In short, the city was ready to move forward with a plastic bag ban.

The city wanted to give enough time for public outreach and community input, because, as Mayor Esther Manheimer said, “Plastic bag bans don’t really work unless everybody understands what the drill is and what to expect, and you’ve got to have a lot of lead time to make it successful.”

Asheville’s Sustainability Director, Bridget Herring, said her department conducted a legal analysis and looked at the feasibility of a ban and the estimated impact to businesses and residents.

The thinking was that North Carolina’s solid waste regulations left the door open for a potential plastic bag ban, but as Herring said, “There was ambiguity in the solid waste management act on a state level,” so it wasn’t a slam dunk.

Manheimer said environmental lawyers debated whether cities are authorized to ban single-use plastic bags, and whether cities and counties must have such moves authorized by the General Assembly.

North Carolina is not a “home rule” state, meaning the state generally has the ultimate legislative power, and cities and counties must have the authority granted by the legislature to act in many cases.

Manheimer said proponents were expecting a possible lawsuit from the N.C. Retail Merchants Association or individual retailers if they enacted a ban.

Instead, the N.C. Retail Merchants Association (NCRMA) spearheaded the effort to have a provision inserted into the state budget last fall that prohibits localities from enacting plastic bag bans.

‘A sneaky budget provision’

State Sen. Julie Mayfield, D-Buncombe and a senior policy adviser and former co-director at MountainTrue for 10 years, said MountainTrue had worked on the issue for several years.

As a former City Council member and veteran politician, Mayfield said she was aware of potential legal challenges, but she was optimistic the ban could hold after so many years of work.

“Finally, last year, we got it teed up with both the city and the county,” Mayfield said. “With the county, we had to convince some commissioners that this was a good thing, that the juice was worth the squeeze. That literally took a year.”

Mayfield said she began discussions five years ago about a possible ban with the NCRMA and its executive director, Andy Ellen. NCRMA’s membership includes more than 25,000 stores, which it says equates to 75 percent of North Carolina’s retail sales volume.

Ellen said paper bags generally cost 12 to 13 cents apiece, compared with 2 or 3 cents per plastic bag. He added that while paper bags are easier to recycle, they also have environmental impacts, as they’re derived from trees, and they also are more prone to failing when wet.

“We knew that they didn’t want [a ban on plastic bags],” Mayfield said. “What I kept expecting all last year was a ban that would ban bans. Instead, we got a sneaky budget provision.”

Under the argument that the North Carolina state constitution does not allow counties and municipalities to regulate commerce, the NCRMA and its supporters in the General Assembly inserted into House Bill 259, a budget bill, a provision stating that “no county may adopt an ordinance, resolution, regulation, or rule to restrict, tax, charge a fee, prohibit, or otherwise regulate the use, disposition, or sale of an auxiliary container.”

Mayfield said proponents of the ban were blindsided.

“Nobody saw it until it was in there,” Mayfield said. “Then once it was in there, it was pretty hard to get it out.”

Ellen declined to say who, specifically, in the legislature worked with lobbyists to create the last-minute budget bill provision, which effectively nullified Asheville’s efforts.

“We put it in the hopper,” he said. “It was more we worked through [General Assembly] staff over there.”

Ellen said he corresponded via email with an independent grocer a couple of years ago in a different part of the state when that locality was looking at a plastic bag ban. The retailer was offering plastic and paper bags to customers, and spending $16,108 a year in bags.

“However, if they were no longer allowed to use plastic bags and have to go to either paper only or reusable they would be looking at a yearly bag cost of $54,000, which is roughly a $37,500 increase in bag costs or well over a 164% increase,” Ellen said, noting that grocery stores typically operate on a profit margin of 2%-4%.

“In order to make up the $37,500 in increased operational costs from a plastic bag ban this grocery store was going to need to increase their sales by nearly $2 million, which most likely have to come by increasing prices significantly to consumers,” Ellen said.

The merchants’ association “would much rather the consumer bring reusable bags to the store,” Ellen said, although he noted that those bags can pose problems with bacteria and other contaminants if not kept clean. Consumers already have the choice to bring their own bags but often don’t, he said.

“I don’t know if people are as passionate as they come across in stories about this,” Ellen said. “If it’s so important to them, why aren’t they doing it?”

“We’re more in the free market, where we think retailers ought to be able to decide how and when they’re going to phase out the bags,” Ellen said.

Any chance for a solution, or a new ban?

The budget provision seems pretty airtight to Mayfield and Manheimer.

“So, there’s no workaround,” Mayfield said, referring to completely undoing the ban. “Our lawyers have looked at that pretty closely, but we’re [MountainTrue] not giving up. We have retrenched and are working on several different strategies.”

One of those strategies, Mayfield said, would be to work with the merchants association to “see if we can craft a narrowly tailored exception to the ban that would address the bulk of the problem as well as their concerns about policy inconsistency across the state and the impacts on small retailers.”

“Most of the bags come from the larger stores, and many of these already operate in states or localities that have bans, so it’s easier for them to adapt,” Mayfield said.

Asked if any other avenues toward a ban or reduction in usage of plastic bags exist, Manheimer said, “Voluntary [elimination of plastic bags], or get the legislation repealed.”

The odds of a repeal, she said, are “worse than getting marijuana legalized.”

Buncombe County Board of Commissioners Chair Brownie Newman also agrees that the ban seems locked in.

“Anything that is done would have to be purely voluntary, such as a public education initiative,” Newman said. “I don’t think we have the regulatory capacity to restrict it at the retail level.”

Olaechea of MountainTrue said he thinks there is hope, given the public’s interest in environmental issues.

In a statewide poll, Olaechea said, 82% of North Carolinians favor reducing the use of  plastics, including 74% of Republicans and 91% of Democrats. Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, Inc. of Jacksonville, Florida conducted the poll in April 2024, contacting  625 registered North Carolina voters statewide by telephone.

“I think it’s really important to underscore that they did not do [the budget provision] in the light of day — they did it in smoke-filled back rooms outside of a public process where people had [input],” Olaechea said. “That is not the actions of an interest group that is incredibly confident that they have public support or that legislators would be willing to put their necks out for them.”

Olaechea said he believes consumers can exert pressure on retailers to change.

In the Asheville area, some grocery stores already have given plastic bags the boot, including Aldi, which offers paper bags for sale, and Trader Joe’s, which offers paper bags at no charge.

The area’s largest grocer, Black Mountain-based Ingles Markets, provides paper and plastic bags at no charge. Walmart, which has four stores in Buncombe, offers plastic bags.

The Watchdog reached out to Ingles, Publix, Walmart, Harris Teeter, Food Lion, Fresh Market and Whole Foods to ask if they have considered eliminating plastic bags, if they recycle bags and how many bags they use annually.

“While we appreciate your interest, we respectfully decline this opportunity” to comment, Food Lion spokesperson Tierra Howell responded via email. “We value your understanding and consideration.”

Harris Teeter spokesperson Paige Hamer said the company is “deeply committed to environmental stewardship and sustainable business practices, recognizing the importance of collaborative efforts to create healthy, thriving communities.” The company also has ongoing efforts to reduce waste.

“This effort includes actively encouraging customers to utilize reusable bags in our stores, facilitating clean plastic film recycling, and constantly evolving and evaluating new strategies to enhance our environmental footprint,” Hamer said via email.

None of the other stores responded by deadline.

[Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Sen. Julie Mayfield’s position, including comments she made that it might be possible to work with the state retailer’s association to craft a narrow exception that would allow bag bans.]

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Michelle Feuer is a former producer for CBS 48 Hours and Dateline NBC, a licensed private investigator, and is the recipient of national journalism awards including an Emmy and an Edward R. Murrow Award. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.