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This article was published on July 1st, 2019. It does agree with my claim, and was written by Dion Lim, and Ken Miguel. There were no spelling errors,and its purpose is to inform.

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SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Plastic waste is one of the leading causes of pollution and, increasingly, cities are around the Bay Area are stepping up to ban plastic waste. San Francisco's legislation went into effect July 1. But do bans work?
RELATED: Viral sea turtle video fuels campaign against plastic straws
Earlier this month in Pacifica, volunteers combed the beach looking for garbage for an hour. A lot of what they found were tiny pieces of plastic from items we take for granted every day.

"We see too many straws still, we see lots of bottle caps, lots of plastic bottles," said Lynn Adams, Director of the Pacific Beach Coalition.
RELATED: San Francisco restaurant fights plastic waste one margarita at a time
Adams oversees beach cleanups along the Bay Area coastline. In just one week this June, she picked up 353 pounds of trash on the San Mateo coast, much of it made of plastic.

"You know, there are more wrappers," she said. "Everything has to be wrapped and packaged and there is more single-use plastic then there ever was, so yes it is worse in that regard."

The California Coastal Commission says plastics are one of the biggest pollutants found during their annual beach cleanup day every September. Volunteers pick up about a million pounds of trash, 80 percent of that waste comes from land.

"And that's in three hours," said Eben Schwartz, manager of the Marine Debris Program for the California Coastal Commission.
RELATED: Proposed San Francisco straw ban may affect people with disabilities
Schwartz is with the commission.

He says plastic waste found along the state's 1,200 miles of coastline is impacting everything in the ocean.

"Those single-use plastics get out into the environment, they break into smaller and smaller pieces and they pollute our food chain," he said. "They are being ingested at every level of the food chain."

Plastic is killing sea life and poisoning the food we eat.
RELATED: More waste is going to landfills, less is recycled. What's going on?
"There are toxins in these plastics that migrate into the tissues of these animals, and many of these animals end up on our dinner plates," said Schwartz.

"We are about to embark on a journey with our residents and our businesses to tackle plastics and specifically single-use plastics," said Debbie Raphael, Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment.

The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

"We understand that our oceans are full of plastic right now, and we know that if we want a future, where there are more fish than plastic in the ocean, we're going to have to do something about it," said Raphael.
RELATED: East Bay 5th grader wants plastic utensils out of schools
Beginning July 1, San Francisco will join the cities of Alameda, Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond and Santa Cruz in banning the use of some commonly used single-use foodware plastics, requiring compostable alternatives to plastic beverage plugs, cocktail sticks, plastic stirrers and toothpicks.

Starting Jan. 1, all straws and food containers sold in San Francisco must be biodegradable.

"The problem with single-use plastics, like a straw, is not the volume and bulk of the plastics, but they become emblematic of a culture of convenience, a culture of throwaway, that we are going to need to tackle if we are going to protect our natural environment," said Raphael.

Plastic bans have proven to work at reducing waste. San Francisco was the first city in the nation to ban plastic bags in 2007. In 2016, voters approved Proposition 67, banning plastic bags statewide.
RELATED: Inside Tonle: San Francisco's only zero waste clothing boutique
Since then the number of bags that have turned up on Bay Area beaches has dropped dramatically.

"Bags were typically among the top 10, even among the top 5 items we were picking up every year," said Schwartz. "When local plastic bag bans went into effect, we started to see a steady drop in bags we were seeing on coastal cleanup day."

Plastic bags used to make up 9 percent of the total waste picked up on that day, that's dropped to just over 1 percent. Environmentalists are hoping these new plastic bans will do the same for other plastics.

Back in Pacifica, the beach is cleaner than it was this morning.
RELATED: Marin County woman helping build better Bay Area with plan to re-use Amazon boxes
"I didn't see any plastic bags today," said Adams. "Which is a really good thing, so the ban did make a big difference for that."

Adams is hopeful that will soon be the same case for other plastic garbage too.

We want to help make the Bay Area an even better place to live. So ABC7 is dedicating more time, resources, and reporting to the major stories that impact your quality of life, and help Build a Better Bay Area. That includes being good stewards of our environment.

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San Francisco bans some commonly used plastic items

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SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Plastic waste is one of the leading causes of pollution and, increasingly, cities are around the Bay Area are stepping up to ban plastic waste. San Francisco's legislation went into effect July 1. But do bans work?

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This political cartoon was published in March 19, 2019. It agrees with my claim by showing the effects of plastic in the ocean on wildlife. The artist is Rodrigo. This cartoon has no spelling or grammar errors in it. It's job is to teach.

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The video was posted on July 1st, 2018. It agrees with my claim by explaining what happens to plastics and what we can do to stop pollution. The Publisher of the video is Kurzgesagt. The URL reveals nothing, but sources were given. No spelling or grammar errors were found. Its job is to teach/inform.

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Plastic Pollution: How Humans are Turning the World into Plastic

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This video was posted on April 15th, 2015. It does agree with my claim. The author is Emma Bryce, The URL reveals nothing, and its purpose is to teach.

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What really happens to the plastic you throw away - Emma Bryce

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This article was posted on April 30th, 2015, and has not been revised. The article supports the claim. The author's name is michael Gonchar. Only spelling/grammar error was changing Councilman to councillor. Its purpose is to educate.

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How many plastic bags do we briefly use and then throw away every week? We get our takeout food, drugstore purchases and clothing bagged, and our groceries double-bagged. All those single-use plastic bags may be cheap for consumers, but their costs add up. Plastic bags end up stuffing landfills, clogging sewers, polluting animal habitats and even fluttering in trees for years. California became the first state to ban plastic bags in 2014, although that law has been temporarily put on hold, and dozens of cities or counties have either banned the use of plastic bags or imposed a fee for their use.

Should single-use plastic shopping bags be banned in your state or community?

New York City is one of those places that has been considering a citywide ban. In the November 2014 article "New York City Council Hearing on Fee for Bags Becomes Heated," Matt Flegenheimer writes:

For years, the plastic bag has doubled as a sort of urban tumbleweed, sweeping across New York City sidewalks and encroaching ominously on its waterways, clustering on subway tracks and drifting airborne to the tree limbs of residential blocks.

Now the bags have divided a City Council that has found little about which to disagree. On Wednesday, a hearing grew heated as lawmakers considered what seemed to be a simple question: Are plastic bags a problem to be solved, as environmental advocates have long argued, or a necessary, and relatively harmless, part of city life?

The debate centered on a proposal to charge 10 cents for each single-use checkout bag at retail and grocery stores, in an effort to encourage customers to bring their own. The charge would also apply to paper bags, the bill's sponsors said, because they are more expensive for businesses to purchase. (A ban on plastics alone could lead customers to switch exclusively to paper, harming the businesses, according to the bill's supporters.)

Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn, a Democrat, one of the proposal's co-sponsors, suggested that the specter of a fee - or, as opponents have called it, a tax - was in fact the legislation's strength.

"People don't want to pay for something that used to be free," he said before a hearing of the Council's committee on sanitation and solid waste management. "That's why this bill works."

The de Blasio administration expressed an openness to the bill on Wednesday, saying it was "supportive of efforts to reduce single-use carryout bags" and noting their "negative environmental impacts."

At the hearing, Kathryn Garcia, the city's sanitation commissioner, said the department collected an average of 1,700 tons of plastic bags per week. It costs $12.5 million annually to dispose of the materials outside the city. Ms. Garcia said the bags threatened marine animals that often mistook them for a food source, and could jam sorting machines at recycling facilities.

But opponents - including some activists, council members from both parties and plastic bag manufacturers - have framed the proposed fee as a regressive tax, most likely to affect low-income and minority communities. Critics noted that plastic bags were often reused, and many argued that they rarely encountered bags on the street. Some called on the city to focus instead on litter prevention and recycling campaigns.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us ...

- Should single-use plastic shopping bags be banned in your state or community? Why?

- Do you think lightweight shopping bags are wasteful and polluting? Or do you think they are worth their weight in the benefits they provide to daily life?

- Do you think imposing a fee, or tax, for using plastic bags, as Washington has done, is a regressive tax? In other words, does it hurt poor people more? Or is it just good governance, creating an incentive for everyone to bring his or her own bags instead of constantly getting new bags after each shopping trip?

- Do you think about your use of plastic bags? Do you ever take your own bags, tell a store clerk you don't need a bag or save your old bags for reuse?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

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Should Single-Use Plastic Shopping Bags Be Banned?

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How many plastic bags do we briefly use and then throw away every week? We get our takeout food, drugstore purchases and clothing bagged, and our groceries double-bagged. All those single-use plastic bags may be cheap for consumers, but their costs add up.

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The article was published on September 2019, and has not been revised. It relates to the claim. The author is Maavi Singh. The article is from "The Guardian" news website. No spelling or grammar mistakes were found, and the article is meant to inform the reader.

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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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The article was published on February 23rd, 2017. It agrees with my claim. The publisher is the United Nations, even though the URL is .org, the actual foundation is run by several countries. It has no spelling or grammar mistakes, and its job is to inform.

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"Plastic pollution is surfing onto Indonesian beaches, settling onto the ocean floor at the North Pole, and rising through the food chain onto our dinner tables," Erik Solheim, the Executive Director of UNEP, said in a news release announcing the campaign.

"We've stood by too long as the problem has gotten worse. It must stop," he added.

Through its Clean Seas campaign, the agency has urged countries and businesses to take ambitious measures to eliminate microplastics from personal-care products, ban or tax single-use plastic bags, and dramatically reduce other disposable plastic items by 2022.

Ten countries have already joined the initiative with far-reaching pledges: Indonesia has committed to slash its marine litter by 70 per cent by 2025; Uruguay will tax single-use plastic bags later this year; and Costa Rica will take measures to dramatically reduce single-use plastic through better waste management and education, according to UNEP.

51 trillion microplastics litter the seas

These initiatives could not come sooner as up to 80 per cent of all litter in the oceans are made of plastic.

According to estimates, by 2050, 99 per cent of earth's seabirds will have ingested plastic

An illustration of the sheer magnitude of the problem is that as much as 51 trillion microplastic particles - 500 times more than stars in our galaxy - litter the seas.

Each year, more than eight million metric tonnes of plastic end up in oceans, wreaking havoc on marine wildlife, fisheries and tourism, and cost at least $8 billion in damage to marine ecosystems. According to estimates, by 2050, oceans will have more plastic than fish if present trends are not arrested.

According to UNEP actions to stem the growing tide of maritime litter could include reducing the use of single-use plastics at the individual level such as by using reusable shopping bags and water bottles, choosing products without microbeads and plastic packaging, and not using straws to drink.
RELATED: UN environment agency urges ban of microplastics in cosmetics and personal care products
"Whether we choose to use plastic bags at the grocery store or sip through a plastic straw, our seemingly small daily decisions to use plastics are having a dramatic effect on our oceans," said film actor and founder of the Lonely Whale Foundation, Adrian Grenier.

Supply chain modifications

Similarly, on larger and commercial scale, supply chains can be modified.

One such example is the technology company DELL Computers: which has announced that it will use recovered ocean plastic in its product packaging.

"DELL is committed to putting technology and expertise to work for a plastic-free ocean," said its Vice President for Global Operations, Piyush Bhargava. "Our new supply chain brings us one step closer to UNEP's vision of Clean Seas by proving that recycled ocean plastic can be commercially reused."

According to UNEP, major announcements are also expected at the upcoming conference on The Ocean at the UN Headquarters in New York (5-9 June), and UN the Environment Assembly to be held in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in December.

"The ocean is the lifeblood of our planet, yet we are poisoning it with millions of tonnes of plastic every year," expressed Peter Thomson, the President of the UN General Assembly, highlighting the upcoming conference and urging for ambitious pledges to reduce single-use plastic.

"Be it a tax on plastic bags or a ban on microbeads in cosmetics, each country [can] do their bit to maintain the integrity of life in the Ocean."

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'Turn the tide on plastic' urges UN, as microplastics in the seas now outnumber stars in our galaxy

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Launching an unprecedented global campaign, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is urging everyone to eliminate the use of microplastics and stop the excessive, wasteful use of single-use plastic, to save the world's seas and oceans from irreversible damage before it's too late.

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It was last revised on July 5th, 2019. The article agrees with my claim. Source is National Geographic. The URL shows that is is an organization, but sources were shown. No spelling or grammar errors were found. Its job is to teach.

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Marine debris is litter that ends up in the ocean, seas, and other large bodies of water.