Plastic bag bans have already prevented billions of bags from being used, report finds

Over the previous a number of years, U.S. cities and states have handed a whole lot of insurance policies proscribing the sale and distribution of single-use plastic baggage. A new report says these legal guidelines have largely succeeded of their aim of decreasing plastic bag use. The report — copublished by three nonprofits, Atmosphere America, U.S. Public Curiosity Analysis Group Schooling Fund, and Frontier Group — attracts on trade and authorities information to recommend that plastic bag bans can eradicate almost 300 single-use plastic baggage per particular person per 12 months. 

“The underside line is that plastic bag bans work,” mentioned Faye Park, president of the U.S. PIRG Schooling Fund, in an announcement. “Individuals understand shortly it’s straightforward to reside with out plastic baggage and get used to bringing a bag from residence or skipping a bag after they can.”

The report checked out plastic bag bans nationwide however targeted on 5 consultant insurance policies in New Jersey; Vermont; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; and Santa Barbara, California. New Jersey’s, enacted in 2022, has had the best impression, eliminating greater than 5.5 billion plastic baggage yearly. Insurance policies within the different jurisdictions eradicated between about 45 million and 200 million plastic baggage per 12 months, relying on inhabitants measurement. The researchers arrived at their estimates utilizing information collected by municipal businesses, teachers, and plastics and grocery trade teams. 

In whole, there are greater than 500 citywide ordinances banning plastic baggage within the U.S., in addition to 12 statewide bans — in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. New payments may quickly add Georgia and Massachusetts to that checklist.

The case in opposition to plastic baggage is easy. They trigger air pollution at each stage of their lifespan, beginning with the extraction of the oil and fuel that’s used to make them. They can’t be recycled; after getting used simply as soon as — for a median of about 12 minutes, in response to one estimate — they’re both incinerated or despatched to a landfill, the place they will final for a whole lot of years. 

Notoriously, baggage can even change into litter that pollutes the pure setting and kills wildlife. Plastic baggage, alongside plastic movies, trigger more deaths of sea turtles, whales, dolphins, and porpoises than some other form of plastic. They’ll additionally shed tiny fragments known as microplastics, publicity to which can be linked to metabolic disorder, neurotoxicity, and reproductive damage in people, amongst different well being issues.

“It looks like there’s a research every week displaying that plastics should not simply littering and polluting the setting, however digging into our bloodstream,” mentioned Janet Domenitz, government director of the nonprofit MassPIRG, the Massachusetts department of the Public Curiosity Analysis Group. Plus, microplastics release greenhouse gases that contribute to local weather change.

Plastic bag bans have their skeptics, nevertheless, together with those that imagine it’s “narcissistic” to assist them whereas nonetheless participating in different environmentally damaging practices, like driving a gasoline-powered automobile. Others have argued that plastic bag bans are bad for businesses, or that they violate consumers’ freedom to decide on plastic. As of 2021, 18 states had handed so-called preemption legal guidelines, stopping native governments from adopting their very own bag bans.

Some researchers have counterintuitively concluded that plastic baggage are good for the setting, in comparison with paper or canvas alternate options. One viral study from 2018 claimed {that a} cotton bag must be reused 20,000 occasions to offset the environmental impression of manufacturing it, whereas different research have criticized plastic bag bans for resulting in a spike in the usage of paper baggage — which additionally deplete sources. Analysis exhibits that paper baggage take more energy and water to provide than plastic baggage.

Different specialists, nevertheless, say the cotton bag research makes a “false comparison” between reusable and plastic baggage, failing to account for the total life cycle impacts of plastic as soon as it’s disposed of or littered into the setting. As for the plastic or paper debate, environmental teams agree that the purpose of a “well-designed” plastic bag ban ought to be to cut back disposable bag use of any sort. 

“The intent of those legal guidelines isn’t to shift from a single-use bag to a different single-use bag,” Celeste Meiffren-Swango, Atmosphere America Analysis and Coverage Middle’s Past Plastic marketing campaign director and a coauthor of the brand new report, informed Grist. “Paper has its personal environmental impression.” She beneficial that each one plastic bag bans embrace a 10-cent cost for paper baggage to encourage prospects to deliver reusable alternate options.

The report additionally urged policymakers to ban plastic baggage of any sort — not simply skinny ones. In some jurisdictions, it recognized a “loophole” that has allowed grocery shops and different retailers to switch skinny single-use plastic baggage with thicker ones which might be nominally reusable — though analysis suggests that buyers don’t reuse the thicker baggage in observe. In California, this loophole led to a web enhance within the weight of plastic baggage used per particular person between 2004 and 2021.