Over the past few years, US cities and states have passed hundreds of policies restricting the sale and distribution of single-use plastic bags. A new report says these laws have largely succeeded in their goal of reducing plastic bag use. The report — co-published by three nonprofits, Environment America, US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and Frontier Group — uses industry and government data to suggest that plastic bag bans could eliminate nearly 300 single-use plastic bags per person per year.
“The bottom line is that plastic bags are killing jobs,” Faye Park, president of the US PIRG Education Fund, said in a statement. “People quickly realize that it is easy to live without plastic bags and get used to bringing a bag from home or skipping a bag when they can.”
The report looked at plastic bag bans statewide, but focused on five representative policies in New Jersey; Vermont; Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; and Santa Barbara, California. New Jersey’s, which went into effect in 2022, had the biggest impact, eliminating more than 5.5 billion plastic bags annually. Policies in the other jurisdictions have eliminated between about 45 million and 200 million plastic bags per year, depending on population size. The researchers arrived at their estimates using data collected by municipal agencies, academics and plastics and grocery industry groups.
In total, there are more than 500 citywide ordinances banning plastic bags in the U.S., as well as 12 statewide bans — in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. New bills could soon add Georgia and Massachusetts to that list.
The case against plastic bags is simple. They cause pollution at every stage of their life, starting with the extraction of the oil and gas used to make them. They cannot be recycled; after being used just once – for an average of about 12 minutes, according to one estimate – they are either incinerated or sent to a landfill, where they can last for hundreds of years.
It is notorious that bags can also become litter that pollutes the natural environment and kills wildlife. Plastic bags, along with plastic films, cause more deaths of sea turtles, whales, dolphins and porpoises than any other type of plastic. They can also shed small fragments called microplastics, to which exposure can be linked metabolic disturbance, neurotoxicity and reproductive damage in humans, among other health problems.
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“It feels like there’s a study a week that shows plastic isn’t just littering and polluting the environment, it’s burrowing into our bloodstream,” said Janet Domenitz, executive director of the nonprofit MassPIRG, the Massachusetts branch of the Public Interests Research Group, said. Plus, microplastics emit greenhouse gases which contributes to climate change.
Plastic bag bans have their skepticshowever, including those who believe it is “narcissistic” to support them while still engaging in other environmentally destructive practices, such as driving a gasoline-powered car. Others argued that plastic bag bans bad for businessesor that they transgress consumers’ freedom to choose plastic. As of 2021, 18 states have passed so-called preemption laws, preventing local governments from passing their own bag bans.
Some researchers have counterintuitively concluded that plastic bags are good for the environment, compared to paper or canvas alternatives. One viral study of 2018 claims that a cotton bag would need to be reused 20,000 times to offset the environmental impact of its manufacture, while other studies have criticized plastic bag bans as leading to an increase in the use of paper bags – which also use resources. Research shows that paper bags take more energy and water to produce as plastic bags.
However, other experts say the cotton bag study makes a “false comparison” between reusable and plastic bags, which does not take into account the full life cycle impacts of plastic once it is disposed of or scattered in the environment. As for the plastic or paper debate, environmental groups agree that the point of a “well-designed” plastic bag ban should be to reduce the use of disposable bags of any kind.
“The intent of these laws is not to shift from one single-use bag to another single-use bag,” said Celeste Meiffren-Swango, Environment America Research and Policy Center’s Beyond Plastic campaign director and a co-author of the new report, told Grist. . “Paper has its own environmental impact.” She recommended that all plastic bag bans include a 10-cent charge for paper bags to encourage customers to bring reusable alternatives.
The report also called on policymakers to ban plastic bags of any kind — not just thin ones. In some jurisdictions, it identified a “loophole” that allowed grocers and other retailers to replace thin single-use plastic bags with thicker ones that are nominally reusable — even though research suggests consumers don’t reuse the thicker bags in practice. In California, this loophole led to a net Increase in the weight of plastic bags used per person between 2004 and 2021.
