Los Angeles, California recently became the largest U.S. city to ban single-use plastic grocery bags. Other cities that have embraced bag bans include Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon.
How did we get to bag bans? Worldwatch Institute estimates that U.S. consumers use 100 billion plastic grocery bags annually; 90% of stores rely on them at the checkout. It’s easy to see why they’ve become so ubiquitous. Introduced in 1977, plastic grocery bags proved lighter, tougher, and cheaper than their paper counterparts. But little thought was given to their environmental impact.
Plastic grocery bags are primarily made of high-density polyethylene. Microorganisms don’t recognize this artificial polymer as food, so it takes centuries for bags to breakdown. They are more than a blight on the landscape – where they clog storm drains and get tangled in trees – they pose a threat to wildlife.
Animals get ensnared in bags. They also mistake plastic pieces for food. In our oceans, some 80% of marine litter is plastic in origin. The UN Environment Program estimates that about 1 million sea birds die each year as a result of encounters with plastic bags.
Researchers at Scripps Institute of Oceanography recently reported that plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean’s ‘Garbage Patch’ has grown 100-fold over the past 40 years.
The Los Angeles ban will divert some 2.7 billion plastic bags from our waste stream. This is something to celebrate. Let’s continue to eliminate plastic waste from our lives – for ourselves and the environment.
Photo, taken on March 22, 2007 near Karachi, Pakistan, courtesy of Zainub Razvi via Flickr.