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C- N/A
R- Disagree
A- lovetoknow
A- No
P- Persuade

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Let us help you live a life you love. Find tools to help you have fun and make the most out of each and every day.

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Would Banning Plastic Bottles Hurt or Help the Planet?

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Would Banning Plastic Bottles Hurt or Help the Planet?

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C- September 2019
R-
A- Above The Noise
A- No
P- Inform

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Would Banning Plastic Bottles Help or Hurt the Planet?

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C- August 2018
R- Disagree
A- World Resources Institute
A- No
P- Persuade

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It seems to be the summer of plastic bans. Starbucks, Hyatt, the city of Seattle and others have all committed to phase out plastic straws. Stafford Township in New Jersey passed a plastic bag ban just last month, joining dozens of other American cities and states imposing taxes or bans on single-use plastics.

But is this a good thing?

Not if that's all we do.

The Case for Banning Plastic

Use of single-use plastics (think wrappers, straws and bags) has skyrocketed over the last few decades. But as I explained recently, our ability to recycle these plastics at scale remains poor. Globally, 8 million metric tons of plastic trash leak into our natural spaces each year, harming wildlife, mucking up the ocean and jeopardizing people's livelihoods.

So it's understandable why bans are becoming popular. The beaches of New Jersey, for example, bring in billions of tourism dollars each year, creating jobs and funding local municipal needs. These sprawling, sandy spaces and the busy boardwalks that line them are an important part of local life. There are clear personal and economic incentives to keep these beaches clean, which make plastic bans politically palatable despite the inconvenience.

Monmouth County, New Jersey, which earned nearly $2.5 billion in tourism revenue in 2016, adopted what Clean Ocean Action called the most comprehensive plastic ban in the United States. The law was passed in May 2018, just before the start of beach season, and prohibits local businesses from distributing plastic bags, straws and Styrofoam containers. Local coverage of the ban indicates that it was well-received by residents and business owners. Monmouth Beach Mayor Sue Howard explained that, "If you live on the Shore, and you walk on the beach, and you see plastic straws and Styrofoam containers, you know what the damage is."

Where Plastic Bans Fall Short

It's encouraging that local governments are focusing on passing laws to fight plastic litter. Unfortunately, while these laws may reduce the most visible form of plastic pollution, it could be at the expense of other environmental impacts. That's because, somewhat ironically, disposable plastic bags require fewer resources (land, water, CO ₂ emissions, etc.) to produce than paper, cotton or reusable plastic bags-by a wide margin.

For example, Denmark's Ministry of Environment and Food found that you would need to reuse a paper bag at least 43 times for its per-use environmental impacts to be equal to or less than that of a typical disposable plastic bag used one time. An organic cotton bag must be reused 20,000 times to produce less of an environmental impact than a single-use plastic bag. That would be like using a cotton bag every day for nearly 55 years. (Note that these figures aggregate the bags' impact on water use, CO ₂ emissions, land use and more, but they do not include their impact on plastic pollution.)

Banning plastic straws is also increasingly popular. Starbucks recently announced that it would phase out use of plastic straws by the year 2020. Straws don't provide as much utility as bags, so for many this is an easy adjustment.

But these bans leave the impression that they solve the plastics pollution problem without much discussion of  systematic  solutions. As a society, we should think holistically about the products we use and their impacts. We can't just ban bad products-we must invest in alternatives.

How Consumers, Governments and Businesses Can Beat Plastic Pollution

That same Danish study suggests that the most eco-friendly bag option for consumers is polyester, reused at least 35 times. This keeps plastic pollution out of our natural spaces and reduces the per-use environmental impacts of the bag to the lowest-possible levels. However, it will take a lot more than reusable bags to solve the plastics pollution problem. Right now, only about 9 percent of plastics are recycled globally.

As of January 1, China refused to import most recyclable materials from the United States and other developed countries, claiming the materials exceeded acceptable contamination levels. This has backed up the flow of disposed paper and plastic, causing serious problems for local waste management companies. However, there may be an ironic upside to China's decision. For too long, the easy option of shipping excess recyclables to China has resulted in underinvestment in in optimizing plastics, maximizing their recovery and reducing waste.

Governments at the state and federal levels need to team up with private industry to address more systemic issues. We need to invest in redesigning plastics so that they can be readily broken down into their molecular units and remanufactured into new plastics of the same quality, the essence of a closed loop system. We need better recycling technology that can address the major obstacle of recycling plastics: about 25 percent of plastics collected are contaminated and therefore unusable. We need to reinvest government budgets in the infrastructure and associated policies needed for these systemic solutions. Once these technologies are deployed at a large scale, we can start recapturing the economic value of plastics, incentivizing their recovery and recycling, while minimizing plastic pollution and overconsumption of natural resources.

We need a wider array of smart public policies, a recycling infrastructure that's right-sized for the problem, better recycling technology and new business models. Banning single-use plastic bags and straws without significant further action is putting a finger on a spigot at a time when we need to suppress the tidal wave.

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Banning Straws and Bags Won't Solve our Plastic Problem

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It seems to be the summer of plastic bans. Starbucks, Hyatt, the city of Seattle and others have all committed to phase out plastic straws. Stafford Township in New Jersey passed a plastic bag ban just last month, joining dozens of other American cities and states imposing taxes or bans on single-use plastics.

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C- March 2019
R- Agree
A- Earth Island Journal
A- No
P- Inform

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Experts say Congress could look to local policies to shape national legislation on throwaway plastics

Every minute an estimated 2 million single-use plastic bags are handed out at checkout counters across the world. They contribute to the 300 million tons of plastic waste generated each year, much of which ends up in the environment where it threatens wildlife, endangers public health and costs billions to clean up.

Legal analysts have advised Congress that the US could reduce its contribution to the global plastic pollution crisis by implementing sweeping federal policies to restrict plastic use. Photo by velkr0 / Flickr.

How do you solve a problem this big?

According to legal analysts who advised Congress at a briefing in January, the United States could reduce its contribution to the global plastic pollution crisis by implementing sweeping federal policies that restrict plastic use and hold manufacturers accountable for responsibly handling waste.

The expert group, composed of members from Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic at UCLA and ocean conservation organization Surfrider Foundation, specifically recommended that Congress craft federal legislation banning single-use plastic products such as bags, straws, and expanded polystyrene foam food containers. They also called for establishing "extended producer responsibility" schemes, which hold plastic manufacturers responsible for the waste they create.

Their recommendations, along with a new report, drew on research into existing legislation targeting plastic pollution in the United States and across the world. The experts found that the key to reducing plastic pollution is curbing consumption. The report and its presentation resulted from a semester-long project by UCLA students Charoula Melliou and Divya Rao, in collaboration UCLA attorney Julia E. Stein, Surfrider's legal expert Angela Howe, and plastic bag legal expert Jennie Romer.

"We have to stem the tide of plastic entering our waterways and landfills by reducing our consumption in the first instance," says Stein.
What Works
There are currently no federal laws restricting single-use plastics, but that doesn't mean there aren't good examples that could serve as useful templates.

According to Stein, Congress could shape federal policy by following existing local and state laws that have already been crafted to tackle plastic problems with bans on all types of single-use plastic items, from bags to expanded polystyrene foam food containers to straws. California made headlines in February after lawmakers proposed a phaseout of all plastic products that aren't completely recyclable.

Such laws are grounded in scientific evidence that plastics are problematic because they don't break down in the natural environment and pose a danger to wildlife and probably people.

There's a precedent for using state and local laws to help craft national legislation: microbeads. After several states and municipalities banned the sale and manufacture of health and beauty products containing these ecologically damaging exfoliating plastic beads, the United States passed a federal actdoing the same.

Most experts agree banning single-use plastic products is a more useful strategy for reducing plastic use and pollution than recycling, which is much less effective. A ban also tackles the issue at the source, helping to curb greenhouse gases coming from the rapidly expanding petrochemical industry that uses fossil fuels to produce plastic.
Commonly Used Plastics
With plastic so ubiquitous, where to start? Experts say that banning just the most commonly used and littered items could cut pollution significantly.

That puts single-use plastic bags front and center.

Plastic bags are among the top five most commonly found items on shorelines, according to global beach cleanup data. So it comes as little surprise that the most legally targeted plastic item worldwide has become the plastic bag. On the whole, research suggests focused legislation is highly effective at reducing plastic bag use and the presence of bags in the natural environment.

"Single-use plastic bags are particularly problematic as a source of marine debris because of both the quantity generated as well the mobility of bags," says Anastasia Telesetsky, a professor of law at the University of Idaho who has argued for the need for a global treaty banning most single-use plastics. "Some products are definitely more problematic than others though regrettably most single-use plastic packaging products can be found as part of 'mismanaged waste' somewhere in the world."

Suffolk County on Long Island, New York, adopted a five-cent plastic bag fee at the beginning of 2018. According to county legislator William "Doc" Spencer, in just a few weeks, several grocery stores reported drops in plastic-bag use of as much as 80 percent.

And Suffolk County isn't an isolated case. Many success stories about plastic bag legislation are documented in the briefing report. Washington, DC saw an 85-percent reduction in plastic bag use after a five-cent tax was implemented in 2009. In San Francisco, plastic bag pollution dropped 70 percent following a complete ban on plastic bags with a 10-cent fee on compostable and paper bags that went into place in 2007.

While plastic bag legislation may help reduce use and pollution on a local level, the expert group's briefing report highlights a lack of consistency in US plastic bag legislation. And some states have implemented or attempted to implement rules that prohibit legislation regulating plastic bags and other problematic plastic consumer products, which is why proponents of plastic bans are pushing federal action.

According to the experts, the ideal federal legislation on plastic bags would mirror what's been found to be the most effective on both local and national levels elsewhere: A ban on all thin plastic bags, and a fee on all other kinds of bags such as those made from paper, thick plastic, and compostable materials. And it would be sweeping, so no part of the country could obstruct such a ban.

To further curb use and pollution of throwaway plastics, states and municipalities have also begun to ban plastic straws, plastic foodware like cups and utensils, expanded polystyrene foam food containers, and cigarette smoking on beaches. Several companies have stopped using plastic straws and other single-use plastic items to create less waste.

The briefing's authors suggest that Congress should, at minimum, create a rule ending automatic distribution of plastic straws at all restaurants and bars and ban expanded polystyrene foam products outright.

"In the United States, where local efforts to enforce source control laws are under threat of preemption in several states, having comprehensive federal legislation that requires source control is a way to protect and augment the work of local governments that are trying to combat plastic pollution," Stein says.
Broader Focus
Besides banning common problematic single-use plastic products, the expert group also recommends Congress pass legislation that would hold corporations accountable for handling plastic waste at the end of its life.

Extended producer responsibility regulations require manufacturers of plastic products to take their items back for reuse, recycling, or disposal to increase recycling rates and prevent plastic waste from entering landfills and the natural environment. Container-deposit legislation is one example of such a program that's widespread - though not ubiquitous - around the United States.

Telesetsky says these schemes may be useful when designed to manage long-lasting plastic products, but they're trickier to implement and incentivize when plastic packaging is involved. "The problem with applying extended producer responsibility principles to existing single-use plastic is that there is simply no market for all of the reprocessed cheap packaging plastics that are being generated," says Telesetsky. "Cheap plastics have a finite usable life before they are inevitably landfilled or burned."

Telesetsky praises the new briefing because it raises awareness of a critical problem. But unlike the briefing group, she proposes banning single-use plastic products outright, on a global scale, in addition to incentivizing innovation in creating new biodegradable products and packaging, which she argues would stop plastic pollution more closely to its source. And it would address the issue on what she sees as a more radical and international - and thus more impactful - scale.

Yet Stein emphasizes that while her briefing has a national focus specifically tailored to US Congress, the wider view is international.

"We support international efforts to address plastic pollution, but the United States also needs to take responsibility at home for its own contribution to the problem."

Will Congress take up that challenge?

Stein says she and other members from the UCLA-Surfrider group who traveled to Washington, DC in January held several legislative briefings for Congressional members and staff, including those involved with last year's 2018 Save Our Seas Act.

The act provides some funding for federal marine cleanup and waste-prevention efforts through NOAA's Marine Debris Program. Already, two of the bill's cosponsors, Senators Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), have begun working on a revamped "2.0 version."

"Overall, we felt the reception was positive - plastic pollution is a topic that is on the minds of the American public and the congresspersons who represent them," Stein says. "We're hopeful that Save Our Seas 2.0 legislation in the Senate may provide a chance to think about comprehensive federal strategies to reduce plastic pollution."

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Crafting a Federal Ban on Single-Use Plastics

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Experts say Congress could look to local policies to shape national legislation on throwaway plastics Every minute an estimated 2 million single-use plastic bags are handed out at checkout counters across the world. They contribute to the 300 million tons of plastic waste generated each year, much of which ends up in the environment where it threatens wildlife, endangers public health and costs billions to clean up.

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C- August 2019
R- Agree
A- Vox
A- No
P- Inform

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The policy: Plastic bag bans and taxes

Where: In more than 400 states and cities in the US

In place since: 2007
The problem:
Plastic bags are forever. The thin sacks that hold our groceries, toothpaste, and takeout meals have little hope of being recycled, and instead just might be reused as liners for our trash cans or containers for our dogs' waste, after which they find themselves either blown into storm drains and rivers or hopelessly clogging landfills. According to one 2009 estimate, some 100 billion of these bags were used a year in the United States and somewhere between 500 billion and 1.5 trillion worldwide.
How it worked:
More than 400 laws and ordinances across the country ban or tax plastic bags, according to Jennie Romer, an attorney at the Surfrider Foundation and a leading advocate and expert on plastic bag policies. The bans actually started outside the United States, with Bangladesh banning them countrywide in 2002 and Pakistan announcing recently that it, too, will ban single-use plastic bags. "Our slight change in habits will do miracles for future generations," one politician wrote.

In the United States, bans were spurred by a wide range of environmental groups, especially those concerned with oceans and waterways like the Surfrider Foundation. Plastic bags and other plastic products can easily wind up in rivers, storm drains, and oceans, creating massive floating patches of garbage and threatening marine life. (Activists are already moving on from plastic bags to encouraging bans on plastic straws and foam food containers.) California passed the first statewide ban in 2014, after several local governments had already banned single-use plastic, including San Francisco, which did so in 2007.

While a straightforward ban may seem like the most effective way to stop people from using plastic, researchers and consultants suggest another strategy is working better: a tax on all non-reusable bags, which may or may not be combined with an outright ban on some plastic.

That's because straightforward bans can lead to skyrocketing use of paper bags or thicker plastic that's allowed because it's considered reusable. While paper bags do not have the unique environmental downsides of single-use plastic (they can be recycled more easily and they don't blow around as much), the processing of paper can be environmentally nasty. California's ban, which also places a 10-cent tax on paper or reusable bags, is one of the most extensive in the nation, while all of Hawaii's counties have passed laws that ban single-use bags, with some also tacking on a tax as high as 15 cents on other bags.

This has led to some backlash, including lawsuits from the plastics industries and efforts to roll back the laws. More than a dozen states, typically more conservative ones like Oklahoma or Mississippi, have passed laws that preempt local bag policies and put the question of taxes or bans solely in the hands of the state legislature.

Chicago banned thin plastic bags in 2015, but it allowed stores to use thicker plastic bags that could ostensibly be reused. "When that ban went into effect, the retailers' response was that 'Our customers want plastic, we can't offer thin, let's just start offering thick plastic bags," said Tatiana Homonoff, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at New York University who has studied the plastic bag laws. The resilience of stores giving their customers some kind of plastic bag, she says, was "an unintended consequence of leaving close substitutes unregulated." Chicago soon scrapped that policy and by February 2017 had implemented a new law: a 7-cent tax on all checkout bags.

"That's where we see big changes in disposable bag use," Homonoff said.

A study of the law by Homonoff and researchers at the University of Chicago and consulting firm ideas42 found that after the new policy went into effect, "Customers were much less likely to use a disposable bag, and switched to reusable bags or no bags at all." Before the tax, about 80 percent of Chicago consumers used disposable bags and fewer than 10 percent used no bags at all. In the year after it went into effect, "the tax led to a large decrease in the proportion of consumers using a disposable bag, with roughly half of consumers switching to reusable bags while the rest opted for no bags at all."

According to Homonoff's research in both Chicago and Montgomery County, Maryland, "very small financial incentives can lead to big behavioral change," she said. The fact that small fees, 5 or 7 cents, can lead to a big reduction in disposable bag use suggests that a sizable portion of the population is perfectly happy to use a reusable bag or not use a bag at all, and need just the smallest push to get there. Homonoff said that in her surveys, people would tell her, "I have a reusable bag in my car. Now I bring it into the store and actually use it."

"As long as there is a fee component in place, that really drives people to not want to get that bag," Romer said. "You see people walking out with something pressed under the arm."

In Montgomery County, which implemented a 5-cent bag fee, the portion of customers observed by researchers at eight stores in the county who used disposable bags went from 82 percent to 40 percent, while the number of bags per trip also fell, according to Homonoff's research. Beyond any environmental effects, these policies also seem to be changing the culture around single-use plastic, which many people know is environmentally damaging but still need a slight nudge to change their behavior. Alongside the bans, there's been a surge of public awareness of the persistence of plastic waste and the folly of recycling it.

And these policies have real effects downstream - literally. San Jose, California, implemented its Bring Your Own Bag Ordinance in 2012, which included a ban on single-use plastic and a 10-cent fee for paper, and found dramatic decreases in "bag litter" in the city's creeks and waterways. "The litter surveys demonstrated a reduction in bag litter of approximately 89 percent in the storm drain system," a city environment and transportation committee report read, "60 percent in the creeks and rivers, and 59 percent in city streets and neighborhoods, when compared to data collected from 2010 and/or 2011 (pre-ordinance) to data from 2012 (post-ordinance)."

What drove the decrease in litter wasn't just more people using more reusable bags - although that happened - but also a rise in using no bags. Reusable bag use jumped from about 4 percent of bags, the city said, to 62 percent, while the portion of people who used no bag doubled, and the average number of bags used per customer fell from three to fewer than one.

The Ferguson Foundation, a Washington, DC-area nonprofit group that organizes cleanup efforts in and around the Potomac River, found that after DC implemented a 5-cent fee in 2010 on single-use bags, the number of plastic bags removed by volunteers dropped by almost three-quarters.

But the preferred policy of the advocates and researchers isn't being implemented everywhere. After the New York City Council approved a 5-cent fee for all takeout bags, the state legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo killed it before later passing a statewide law that banned plastic and allowed individual counties to impose a tax on paper.

"From what we've seen in other cities, it's not going to be particularly effective," Homonoff said of the New York law, as opposed to a tax on all takeaway bags. Romer, who worked on previous attempts to implement plastic laws in New York City, described the new law as "disappointing." While New York City is following through by taxing paper, it is not required across the state, which means that outside the city, municipalities might allow for unlimited and untaxed paper bag usage, thus not encouraging overall bag usage to go down.

"We really want people to not get a bag at all if they're getting an item or two, or bring their own bag," Romer said. "I like visiting California to see that that works."
Correction: Matthew Zeitlin is a writer in New York. An earlier version of this story misstated that an estimated 500 million to 1.5 trillion plastic bags are used each year worldwide. It should be 500 billion.

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Do plastic bag taxes or bans curb waste? 400 cities and states tried it out.

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The policy: Plastic bag bans and taxes Where: In more than 400 states and cities in the US In place since: 2007 The problem: Plastic bags are forever.

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C- September 2019
R- Agree
A- The Guardian
A- No
P- Inform

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The most ambitious US legislation to tackle the scourge of plastic pollution choking up oceans and piling up in landfills could pass in California Friday - or end up in the dustbin of history. Lawmakers are likely to vote on proposals that aim to phase out most single-use plastic packaging within the next decade.

The two identical bills - one introduced in the state assembly and one in the senate - commit to a 75% reduction in plastic statewide within 10 years. If passed into law, they would require manufacturers to ensure that all single-use packaging produced, sold and distributed in California is fully recyclable or compostable by 2030. Companies that fail to comply could face up to $50,000 a day in fines.

Environmental groups say the legislation is significant because it compels the powerful companies that have allowed cheap, disposable products to proliferate to help solve the pollution crisis.
San Francisco airport announces ban on sales of plastic water bottles
"Single-use plastic packaging is somewhat of a reckless convenience," said Geoff Shester of the environmental advocacy group Oceana, which lobbied for the legislation. "But we can't just put the onus on consumers to solve the problem. We have to get industry involved."

But the legislation has faced varying levels of opposition from the plastics industry and consumer goods manufacturers, which have forced through several changes to the bill in an effort to make the immediate responsibility less onerous.

Some industry critics have said that the legislation is redundant, since many large producers - including Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi and Unilever - have already committed to reducing packaging waste. But the bill's supporters say the government needs to be able to hold corporations to their word.

Plastics groups have heavily invested in efforts to lobby against the legislation. Novolex Holdings, a South Carolina-based company that manufactures plastic bags, is funding an advocacy group called Californians for the Environment and Recycling to disseminate the message that the bills would make certain baby formula, packaged foods and personal hygiene products such as toothpaste inaccessible to Californians.

"That's nonsense," Shester said. "No one is saying we're going to be consuming less soda or less toothpaste. It's just that the government and industry are going to have to come up with systems that we can all live with."

It is still unclear how those new systems would work, said Julia Stein, a supervising attorney with UCLA's environmental law clinic who was not involved in the drafting of the legislation. "The bills do leave a lot of how this would all work undefined," she said. Built into the legislation is the creation of a panel that includes representatives from local government, recyclers, product manufacturers and packaging designers to advise on specific regulations.

"But passing the bills is certainly a big first step," she said.

Plastic wrapped in plastic: the wasteful reality of America's grocery stores

Currently, less than 10% of the plastic sold in the US each year is recycled. Much of it ends up in landfills, some of it is burned, and millions of tons of plastic ends up in the ocean. A recent Guardian investigation revealed that cities around the country are no longer recycling many types of plastic dropped into recycling bins, partly because of China's ban on importing plastic waste from the US.

Recycling centers across the US are also struggling. A drop in scrap values recently contributed to the shuttering of California's largest recycling center operator rePlanet, which laid off 750 employees in August.

A third bill under consideration in California aims to increase the demand for recycled plastic and boost the state's struggling recycling industry by requiring beverage manufacturers to increase the amount of recycled content in plastic bottles over the next decade.

The state's legislative year ends Friday - which means lawmakers have just a few more hours to either vote on plastics proposals or table themfor further consideration.
Topics

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Most ambitious US law to tackle single-use plastics faces make-or-break moment

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The most ambitious US legislation to tackle the scourge of plastic pollution choking up oceans and piling up in landfills could pass in California Friday - or end up in the dustbin of history. Lawmakers are likely to vote on proposals that aim to phase out most single-use plastic packaging within the next decade.

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C- January 2020
R-  Agree
A-  NCSL
A- No
P- Inform

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State legislatures have considered a number of measures to reduce the prevalence of plastic bags at grocery stores and other businesses.

Reducing bag use can mitigate harmful impacts to oceans, rivers, lakes, forests and the wildlife that inhabit them. It can also relieve pressure on landfills and waste management.

While some states are focusing on implementing effective recycling programs, others are imposing bans or fees to discourage the use of plastic bags altogether.

Bans and Fees

Eight states-California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon and Vermont-have banned single-use plastic bags.

In August 2014, California became the first state to enact legislation imposing a statewide ban on single-use plastic bags at large retail stores. The bill also required a 10-cent minimum charge for recycled paper bags, reusable plastic bags, and compostable bags at certain locations. The ban was set to take effect on July 1, 2015, but a referendum forced the issue onto the ballot in the November 2016 election. Proposition 67 passed with 52 percent of the vote, meaning the plastic bag ban approved by the Legislature remains the law. A detailed summary of the law can be found below. Voters also rejected a second measure, Proposition 65, which proposed to create an environmental fund with proceeds from a 10-cent charge for alternative bags.

Hawaii has a de facto statewide ban as all of its most populous counties prohibit non-biodegradable plastic bags at checkout, as well as paper bags containing less than 40 percent recycled material. Bans in Kauai, Maui and Hawaii counties took effect between 2011 and 2013, with Honolulu becoming the last major county to approve the ban in 2015.

New York became the third state to ban plastic bags in 2019 with passage of Senate Bill 1508. The law, which goes into effect March 2020, will apply to most single-use plastic bags provided by grocery stores and other retailers. Bags distributed at the meat/deli counter and bulk food area are exempt, as well as newspaper bags, trash bags, garment bags, bags provided by a pharmacy for prescription drugs, and restaurant takeout bags. The law allows individual counties the option of placing a 5-cent fee on paper bags, with 2 cents going to local governments and 3 cents to the state's Environmental Protection Fund.

Five other states enacted legislation in 2019-Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Oregon and Vermont. In addition to plastic bags, Vermont's SB 113 also placed restrictions on single-use straws and polystrene containers.

In 2009, the District of Columbia enacted legislation requiring all businesses that sell food or alcohol to charge 5 cents for each carryout paper or plastic bag.

Recycling Programs

States have a long history of pursuing legislation related to labeling, recycling, and reusing plastic bags. In 1991, Maine became the first state to enact legislation requiring recycling efforts at retail stores. The law prevents retailers from supplying plastic bags unless they provide a convenient storefront receptacle to ensure used bags are collected and recycled. Since then at least four other states-California, Delaware, New York and Rhode Island-and the District of Columbia have followed suit.

Legislation Summary

State lawmakers have introduced at least 95 bills in 2019 related to plastic bags. Most of these bills would ban or place a fee on plastic bags. Others would preempt local government action or improve bag recycling programs.

2011 CA S 567

Enacted

Prohibits the sale of plastic products labeled as compostable, home compostable, or marine-degradable unless it meets standard specifications. It provides for a civil penalty for a violation.

2019 HB 130

Enacted

Expands upon the existing at-store recycling program regarding the use of single-use plastic bags and limits stores subject to the program from providing single-use plastic bags for only specific uses.

2019 HB 1115

Enacted

Prohibits a retail establishment from providing single-use carryout bags at the point of sale or otherwise making the bags available to customers, with exemptions for certain types and uses of plastic and paper bags.

2017 HB 56

Enacted

Repeals the eight-year ban on the use of plastic bags by retailers on the Outer Banks.

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State legislatures have considered a number of measures to reduce the prevalence of plastic bags at grocery stores and other businesses.

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C- July 2018
R- Disagree
A- BBC
A- No
P- Inform

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Walking along a short section of stony beach, Claire Waluda stoops briefly to pick up something from between the rocks. It is a brightly coloured plastic bottle top - just one of hundreds of bits of plastic that she finds washed ashore on the remote, windswept island of South Georgia.

Located in the south Atlantic, on the fringes of the Antarctic, it is nearly 1,000 miles (1,500km) from the nearest major human settlement. Yet even here Waluda, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, is finding worrying signs of our throw-away attitude towards plastic. Regularly she finds seals entangled in this debris or albatross chicks coughing up bits of plastic film.

These are just a few examples of the damage our throw-away relationship with plastics is inflicting on the environment. More than 78 million tonnes of plastic packaging is produced worldwide every year by an industry worth nearly $198 billion. Just a fraction of that is recycled while the vast majority is thrown away. Plastic litter now clutters every part of our planet, from remote parts of the Antarctic to the deepest ocean trenches.
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High profile campaigns and TV programmes such as the finale of the BBC's Blue Planet II, where Sir David Attenborough highlighted the problems plastics are causing in the world's oceans, have led to growing public alarm over the issue. In response to mounting pressure, governments, manufacturers and retailers are beginning to take steps to tackle the tide of plastic waste. But how much will this fundemantal change to the way we buy our goods actually cost?

Many of the companies attempting to tackle the amount of plastic waste generated by their products admit it will eat into their profits. Coca-Cola, for example, produces 38,250 tonnes of plastic packaging in the UK each year and estimates indicate it sells more than 110 billion single-use plastic bottles globally. The company has pledged to double the amount of recycled material in its plastic bottles in the UK and is trialling refillable bottles. Although it refuses to give details, Coca-Cola says these efforts will increase costs.

And even companies that have been dragging their heels will soon have to address the amount of plastic packaging they use. More than 60 countries are introducing legislation aimed at reducing the use of plastic bags and other single use plastic materials. This month, tiny Pacific island nation Vanuatu became the first in the world to ban single use plastic bags, straws and polystyrene food containers.

The cost of change
Several major supermarkets, including multinationals Tesco and Walmart, have already promised to reduce the amount of plastic packaging they sell their products in. Alongside Coca-Cola, drinks manufacturers Pepsi, food and cleaning multinational Unilever, food producer Nestle and cosmetics company L'Oreal have also pledged to ensure all their packaging is either reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.

But despite these commitments, much of the food and drinks industry is still trying to work out how it will meet the targets it has helped to set for itself. Some experts fear that without the right approach, this rush to banish plastics from our shopping baskets will make the goods we buy more expensive.

"It is not as simple as 'plastic is bad' so let's use something else," warns Eliot Whittington, policy programme director at the University of Cambridge's Institute for Sustainability Leadership, where he advises drinks manufacturers on reducing waste. "It will require a complete change in the way we use product packaging at the moment. Most packaging is now used just once and thrown away. We need to move away from that. It needs some form of leadership from government."
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More than a third of the food sold in the EU now comes packaged in plastic and each of its 510 million residents produce about 31kg of plastic packaging waste a year. One reason plastic is so dominant is its ability to do more, for less: it takes less material to make a drinks bottle out of plastic, for example, than it does to make one out of glass.

"Plastics are cheap, lightweight and adaptable in ways many of the alternatives are not," says Susan Selke, director of the school of packaging at Michigan State University.

Fifty years ago, before the plastics revolution had gathered pace, most drinks were sold in glass bottles. Today almost all soft drink bottles are made from a tough plastic material called polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.

While the cost of producing bottles can vary depending on the raw material and energy prices at the time, it is generally not that much more expensive to produce a glass bottle versus one made from PET - about $0.01 more, according to some analysis.

However, when manufacturers start transporting produce in glass bottles, costs start to rise. A 330ml plastic soft drink bottle contains around 18 grams of material while a glass bottle can weigh between 190g and 250g. Transporting drinks in the heavier containers requires 40% more energy, producing more polluting carbon dioxide as they do and increasing transport costs by up to five times per bottle.

"In many cases plastics are actually better for the environment than the alternatives," explains Selke. "It is surprising until you look closely at it."

A report by the American Chemistry Council and environmental accounting firm Trucost estimates that the environmental costs - which places a value on dealing with the pollution generated by a product - would be five times higher if the soft drinks industry used alternative packaging like glass, tin or aluminium instead of plastic. As governments seek to penalise polluting companies with carbon taxes and levies, these costs may be passed onto consumers.

"Food costs are going to increase - there can be no doubt about that," says Dick Searle, chief executive of the British Packaging Federation, which represents the industry in the UK. Using glass milk bottles instead of plastic, for example, can lead to additional costs for producers.

But does this mean the costs will be passed back to shoppers?

Iceland, a British supermarket that pledged to remove plastics from its packaging by 2023, is already switching its ready meals from black plastic trays to ones made from paper and plans to use other packaging materials like glass and cellulose, which is made from wood.

"Making this change is going to cost money," warns Richard Walker, the chain's managing director. "But we are determined that our customers will not have to foot the bill."

There are some, however, who warn that abandoning plastic after nearly 70 years of using it to package our food could have other far more costly, unintended consequences.

What may at first appear to be a wasteful plastic bag wrapped around your cucumber, for example, is actually a sophisticated tool for increasing the shelf-life of your food. Years of research have allowed plastics to push the time food lasts for from days to weeks.

"I think people underestimate the benefits of plastics in reducing food waste," says Anthony Ryan, professor of chemistry and director of The Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield.

The shrink wrap used on cucumbers for instance, can more than double the length of time the vegetable can last, allowing it to be kept for up to 15 days in the fridge and cutting food waste in half. An unwrapped cucumber would last just two days at room temperature and 9 days if refrigerated.
A meaty problem
Beef bought in polystyrene foam trays covered with plastic film will generally last between three and seven days. However if it is vacuum-packed in multilayer plastic, it can be kept for up to 45 days without spoiling. Environmental accounting firm Trucost estimate that vacuum-packing sirloin steak can cut food waste almost in half compared to conventional plastic.

Much of the food we now buy in supermarkets comes tightly wrapped in sealed plastic films and protective trays. This keeps fresh meat in an oxygen-free atmosphere, helping to prevent it from spoiling. Delicate fruit and vegetables are also kept safe from bumps that can degrade them, meaning they're more likely to be sold. Putting grapes in their own individual plastic boxes has been found to cut food waste by 75%.

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Plastic wrapping can also keep fruit and vegetables in their own little microclimates - known in the industry as modified atmosphere packaging - which can help to prevent them from ripening too quicky. Putting sweet peppers into a bag with a modified atmosphere can extend their lifespan from four days to 20, according to the Flexible Packaging Association. Extending the shelf life of food can greatly reduce the cost of food waste to supermarkets. Extending the shelf life of produce by just one day would save shoppers in the UK up to £500 million ($661m), according to anti-waste charity Wrap.

The global cost of food waste is already estimated to be almost $1 trillion a year, which is largely borne by manufacturers and retailers. While some believe that single-use plastic packaging has actually led to an increase in the amount of food we throw away by encouraging a culture of disposability, many in the plastics industry argue that without plastic packaging, the cost of food waste could rise.

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In this light, it might not make sense to ban plastics altogether but instead make plastics better.

"Rather than going back, it is perhaps more useful to look at innovation," says Eliot Whittington. "There are more and more companies that are reinventing plastics with additives that help them break down or making plastics that are biodegradable."

Whittington points to the growing bioplastics industry, which uses starch or protein from plants like sugarcane to generate the basic hydrocarbon materials needed to create plastics. Some of these bioplastics are not biodegradable at all, but others - like polylactic acid (PLA) - can break down over time and some are compostable, meaning they disintegrate entirely rather than merely crumbling into smaller "microplastics".

One company that has already shifted to bioplastic is British skincare company Bulldog. It has swapped its traditional plastic tubes for polyethylene made from sugarcane.

The new tubes are more expensive but "we still think it is the right thing to do," says Simon Duffy, the company's founder.

Another bioplastics leader is Coca-Cola, which two years ago launched the PlantBottle, a PET partially made with Brazilian sugarcane. It too has found that producing bottles from plants comes at a premium, although it wouldn't share with BBC Capital what this cost was.

Looking at a few examples, however, it becomes apparent just how much more expensive bioplastics can be.

A burger box made from sugarcane for instance, is almost twice as expensive as one made from polystyrene. A biodegradable takeaway fork made from plant starch costs 3.5 times more than a basic white plastic one.

Neither Bulldog or Coca-Cola are using bioplastics that can be considered biodegradable or compostable, instead encouraging consumers to recycle their bioplastics. And, in fact, there is some resistance to the widespread use of biodegradable materials.

"Bioplastics like PLA are huge contaminate for traditional recycling," says Dick Searle.

Surprisingly, due to rising oil prices, recycled plastic is actually cheaper to use than fresh, virgin plastic made from oil. A tonne of virgin PET costs around £1,000 while clear recycled PET costs just £158 per tonne.

Contamination of PET plastic with PLA, however, can leave the resulting bottle weaker and unfit for use, meaning the whole batch will have to be discarded. As manufacturers try to reduce their plastic footprint by using greener, biodegradable plastics, the risk of mixing with conventional plastics will only increase, potentially driving up the cost of recycled materials.

"Introducing these innovative products in a system that is used to more traditional waste stream is difficult economically," says Whittington.

It is a problem that will require new ways of identifying, sorting and dealing with plastic materials when they are thrown away to ensure biodegradable materials are kept separate from those that can be recycled.

But Anthony Ryan sees other problems with the widespread use of biodegradable packaging.

"It treats the symptoms, not the disease," he says. "If the disease is our throw-away society, making packaging biodegradable only encourages people to throw more away."

Instead, he suggests another solution: use more plastic.

"In modern meat or soft fruit packaging you might have several thin layers to give it strength, to stop gas permeability and to act as an adhesive," he explains. "You could get all of these properties from a single thicker piece of polyethylene. Then you would have a reduced set of materials, which would make separating and recycling this stuff easier."

He believes that making plastics more durable could help solve the current waste problem that is blighting our planet. Rather than abolishing plastics altogether, he proposes reusing the packaging we currently throw away.

Already deposit and reuse schemes like this - where plastic bottles are returned in exchange for a cash deposit and then are refilled - are in use in Finland, Germany, Denmark and parts of Australia.

According to research by the European Commission, however, reuse and refill schemes like this can work out to be up to five times more expensive than using packaging once and then throwing it away. But the World Economic Forum found innovative reuse and refill measures could actually reduce packaging costs by at least $8 billion a year, savings that could potentially be passed onto consumers.

And as many countries seek to introduce new laws that will put new levies on plastic bags and ban certain types of single use packaging, refillable and reusable options may become more attractive.

For Claire Waluda, whose team is monitoring the levels of plastic waste in South Georgia, the price of making these changes is one worth paying.

"We are seeing wandering albatross parents feeding plastic to their chicks," she says. "Anything that can reduce the amount of plastic debris in the environment is a step in the right direction."

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What's the real price of getting rid of plastic packaging?

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Walking along a short section of stony beach, Claire Waluda stoops briefly to pick up something from between the rocks. It is a brightly coloured plastic bottle top - just one of hundreds of bits of plastic that she finds washed ashore on the remote, windswept island of South Georgia.