Bad news for the Amercian Beauty film kid.
Banning free plastic bags is working. China, the leader in plastic bag use, has banned free plastic bags and has since seen a 49% decrease in new bags being used, according to the University of Gothenburg’s research distilled on the ScienceDaily. While there is further room for improvement — like actually enforcing compliance with businesses that don’t want to due to competition — at least it’s a step in the right direction.
Another country that has successfully implemented a customer fee on plastic bags is Ireland. Residents now use about 20 bags versus 330 bags per year, when they were given away for free. That’s a 90% reduction, which has been brought on by successful campaigns to educated people on the harmful environmental impact of plastic bags.
One factoid from this well-designed infographic is that a plastic bag thrown into a landfill today will need until 3010 to break down. Americans throw away about 1000 billion bags a year.
Local efforts in Portland include Fred Meyer banning plastic bags in all 10 stores since August 2010. Other stores, like New Seasons, never even offered them. However, there’s some question as to the real benefits, especially when it comes to human behavior. It’s not as if by not buying plastic bags people are bring their own reusable bags to shop. This local blog post brings up a few of these issues, including that a customer may just be asking for a double or triple paper bag. This then gets into paper versus plastic debate in which neither really “win,” and is viewed as a wrong question. So far the best option at this point is to bring reusable bags, while questioning what we’re buying and why.
Which then brings up the mixed messaging on reusable bags potentially contradicting a stores’ policies/offerings.
But that’s another blog post for some other time. Time to go film a floating plastic bag while I can. Except it’s raining. Oh, Portland.