Plastic bottles remain down-Island despite broad ban

Plastic bottles still line shelves in a few Oak Bluffs storefronts, despite the fact that five years ago, a bylaw was adopted that banned single-use plastic bottles, 34 ounces or under, of water, soda, and other drinks in the down-Island town. Town officials said the enforcement of the ban is not critical in comparison with their other duties, and their office is too short-staffed to prioritize differently. 

A halt to the sale of plastic bottles was proposed by a group of young environmental activists known as Plastic Free MV in 2019. The group — made up of mostly fifth-grade students — set out to ban single-use bottles across the Vineyard, and were successful; all Island towns adopted the bylaw between 2019 and 2022.

But plastic bottles remain in a few holdouts, including one brand-new food market that opened in place of Linda Jean’s this spring, called Highlands General. Reliable Market has continued selling plastic bottles for years.

At the time, the students had hoped for efforts such as refill stations to make the ban easier to abide by for businesses and townspeople. But Oak Bluffs officials spent funds on other infrastructure projects, with only a few refill stations installed so far in the central area of downtown, such as in Post Office Square. 

The Oak Bluffs health department, made up of four board members with an additional two health agents, was tasked with enforcement of the ban after its adoption. Oak Bluffs health agents, Alexa Arieta and her assistant Lorna Welch, have since pointed to more critical to-dos for their department. Monitoring cyanobacteria in local ponds and bacteria in ocean waters, crowded housing, and restaurant inspections top their list. 

Arieta reiterated this perspective at a recent board of health meeting on March 10, when board of health member Tom Zinno brought up microplastics and forever chemicals found in plastic bottles, and recommended the health agents enforce the ban more effectively. 

Zinno recommended a regulatory act that would require Oak Bluffs stores to immediately stop selling plastic bottles. 

“If we all got our blood tested, we’d have a serious percentage of microplastics from all the plastics that we have in our bodies, or we use in our lives these days. And, you know, whatever we can do to help along that way, I think we should just get on board with it,” Zinno said in the meeting in March. 

But Arieta, the Oak Bluffs health agent, said the department is spread too thin to regulate single-use plastic bottles. She also pointed out that there’s no recycling receptacles in the down-Island town, so even if all beverage bottles were aluminum, they would still end up in the trash, another problem. 

“There’s nowhere else to put it. So no matter what you’re drinking out of, if you’re disposing of it in the town of Oak Bluffs, it’s going into the landfill,” Arieta said. “In my opinion, I think that the regulation — that was brought up by some very well-intentioned children — was shortsighted.”

It’s not the first time the health agents in Oak Bluffs have said implementing the ban is not doable for them. They’ve said as much at a few public meetings, citing short-staffed operations each time. But no other department or town official has been tasked with the initiative as a result, and no recycling bins have been installed.

Oak Bluffs Select Board member Emma Green-Beach is among those who are supportive of the bottle ban, and want more action. She told The Times that from a consumer standpoint, she understands the difficult nature of enforcement. But she also said she believes the ban is “a necessary and obtainable step toward reducing plastic use.” 

Green-Beach added that this is just one possible solution to a long unwinding of the corporate plastic use that has been normalized over the decades. “It will be inconvenient for us, but we are a smart and resilient species,” Green-Beach said of the ban. “We can figure it out.”

The bottle ban is still a priority to many on the Island, including the Vineyard Conservation Society (VCS), a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization, who published a letter in The Times a year ago asking for more efforts to be made. 

“VCS is disappointed that there is no system for enforcement of this bylaw, or even education available for businesses about it,” Samantha Look, executive director of VCS, and Zada Clarke, director of advocacy for VCS, wrote in the letter last March. 

Look and Clarke said they spoke to other Massachusetts municipalities who enforce a bottle ban. They found that the board of health is the responsible party in those towns, sometimes in partnership with the select board or a sustainability coordinator, and that they go to great lengths to ensure stores don’t sell plastic. 

“They were transparent that the bylaw isn’t enforced perfectly: No one checks every day, but it is being enforced consistently, and in response to complaints. That is all that we are asking for here,” Clarke and Look wrote. 

Many Massachusetts municipalities, however, such as towns in Barnstable County, have more staff members in health departments. Some have housing-specific officials, or members tasked specifically with restaurant inspections, in addition to the health agents themselves. 

Look and Clarke wrote in their letter that they completed an audit of plastic-bottle usage in the towns and found that up-Island stores had almost no violations, and Oak Bluffs stores were mostly compliant. The solution for the issue, they wrote, wouldn’t take as much manpower as implied. They urged health agents to start a fining protocol for the shops that kept plastic on their shelves. 

Look and Clarke also wrote that VCS donated nearly 40 water bottle refill stations across the Island for the towns to install themselves. Four stations were donated to Oak Bluffs in 2019, but only one of those was installed by the time their letter was published in 2025. 

“More than five years later, the remaining three are likely sitting in a storage closet, collecting dust,” they stated in the letter at the time. 

In March’s meeting, Zinno recommended contacting other departments to get recycling bins in the town. He said that would be a good first step to an eventual ban enforcement. “It needs to be not just a board of health issue … it needs to be multiple groups in town,” Zinno said. 

Arieta agreed. She added, “No other board of health is responsible for complying with this regulation, and quite frankly, Vineyard Conservation Society has not approached any other board of health requesting them to create a regulation, so why they’re coming for Oak Bluffs, I don’t know.

“Everything costs money,” Arieta continued. She referenced the $1.9 million override on the town meeting warrant. 

“There’s no money,” she said. As the health agent, she said she had to request $15,000 at town meeting this year to cover the salary of Betsy VanLandingham, the Island’s only infectious disease caseworker, in order to comply with the state’s Department of Health requirements. 

Arieta urged the board of health to get more clear about their intentions. If the ultimate end to a plastic ban would be to stop people from consuming microplastics, she said people could already make that choice on their own. But if the goal is to push people toward purchasing recyclable bottles other than plastic, the infrastructure in the town would need to be updated to make that possible. 

“What is the goal here?” Arieta asked the Oak Bluffs health department in March. “If the goal is for limiting microplastics that you’re ingesting, we’re so far off base, it’s not even worth a drop in the bucket. But if the goal is that we want to keep the plastic out of the landfill, then we need to come up with a long-term goal on how to recycle these products. Otherwise, the regulation makes no sense at all.”