Brookline, Massachusetts is the eighty-fifth municipality in the United States and the forty-seventh in 2012 to enact a ban against single-use plastic bags.

Brookline is part of the metro-Boston area and home to sixty thousand residents. The community now has regulations against the use of polystyrene-based food and beverage containers and plastic bags. Both bans will go into effect on December 1, 2013 providing area merchants and restaurants a year to plan.

The new rulings will apply to grocery stores with sales over one million annually, drug stores with two or more locations in the city, and retail businesses with more than twenty five hundred square feet of space in either one of multiple locations throughout the city.

The ruling excluded compostable or marine degradable plastic bags or bags used in the packaging of produce.

Brookline joins a growing number of cities with plastic bag bans including: San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. More than half of these new regulations have been voted on and approved in the past year indicating a clear trend in community leadership that reduction in the use of plastic bags is necessary.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Even if your community hasn’t enacted a plastic bag ban, if your businesses uses these materials, it’s time to start thinking about alternatives! You may find that adopting greener solutions will help to reduce your overall waste trash disposal fees.