Utah House Bill 320 would have banned any plastic bag or “auxiliary container” regulation for the state of Utah. The bill was not passed, but it did spark a conversation around the idea of reducing the rights of cities and counties within the state after Moab and Park City enacted plastic bag bans. In 2014, California became the first U.S. state to ban plastic bags, and across the globe plastic bag bans or fees have been implemented since 1990. Plastic producers have lobbied hard to save the plastic bag, and in the past decade many bag bans have been repealed due to the convenience they provide and a ban’s perceived detriment to small retailers. Overall, plastic bags make up a relatively small amount of our plastic waste stream by weight, so does any of this plastic bag legislation actually have an environmental impact?
Plastic bags only make up about 12% of America’s plastic but they take up to 1000 years to decompose and present many environmental problems. Unlike many other plastics now, plastic bags are rarely recycled since they cause problems with the machinery, and even where they are recycled, people are often unaware and don’t recycle them. Once they are disposed of, plastic bags can be carried by wind across long distances, and are easily caught in plants and trees where they can become dangerous to wildlife. Recently, dead whales have been washing ashore with stomachs full of plastics, including dozens of plastic bags. Plastic bags are not only highly visible signs of our waste stream, they also are detrimental to ecosystems.
So can we change the amount of plastic bags that are floating and flying around? A 25 year study that was published in July of 2018 in Science of the Total Environment has presented some of the first evidence to show that bag bans can positively impact the environment. The study was conducted using trawls in specific areas from
1992 to 2017 along the coast of the United Kingdom and it looked at all plastic and fishing waste. Of the categories of plastic that were specified in the study, all showed an increase in abundance throughout the 25 years except plastic bags in the Greater North Sea (GNS) which had a “statistically significant downward trend in both the inshore (p = 0.05) and offshore (p = 0.01) regions”.
The authors of this study attributed the negative trend in the GNS to plastic bag legislation in Ireland and Denmark in 2002 and 2003. It was reported that plastic bag use was reduced by 90% in Ireland due to a fee placed on them with a similar trend in Denmark the following year. Nearly a decade later, there appeared to be a dramatic reduction in the amount of plastic bags found in the point-samples of the trawlers with averages before 2010 in separate parts of the GNS at 43% and 53%, and post-2010 averages at 16% and 21%. The authors suggested these results show that “behavioural and legislative changes could reduce the problem of marine litter within decades.” Assuming that the results of this study are accurate, we might begin to see a significant reduction of plastic bags off California’s coast around 2024. San Jose, CA who implemented a bag ban in 2011 conducted a much smaller inland study and found a reduction of “approximately 89 percent in the storm drain system, 60 percent in the creeks and rivers, and 59 percent in City streets and neighborhoods.”
As more plastic bag legislation nears its 10 year mark, we may begin to see studies showing the long term effects that legislation can have on the environment. Using these two studies as proxies for other areas that have enacted bans, we so far can see that bag legislation can reduce the amount of plastic in our oceans, streets, and waterways, leading to cleaner communities. Although plastic bags only make up 1/12 of our waste stream, they are a visible reminder of how much plastic we use everyday and where it can end up. Hopefully the U.K. study will serve as an incentive to coastal states and cities to implement their own plastic bag legislation so that we can see cleaner oceans in another 10 years.
References:
https://le.utah.gov/~2019/bills/static/HB0320.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718306442?via%3Dihub
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/climate/plastic-paper-shopping-bags.html
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/dead-sperm-whale-filled-with-plastic-trash-indonesia/
Data/Society/Decision-making Spring 2019 