Over the past several years, U.S. 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 — copublished by three nonprofits, Environment America, U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Frontier Group — draws on industry and government data to suggest that plastic bag bans can eliminate nearly 300 single-use plastic bags per person per year.
The case against plastic bags is simple. They cause pollution at every stage of their lifespan, starting with the extraction of the oil and gas that’s 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.
Notoriously, bags can also become litter that pollutes the natural environment and kills wildlife. Plastic bags, alongside plastic films, cause more deaths of sea turtles, whales, dolphins, and porpoises than any other kind of plastic. They can also shed tiny fragments called microplastics, exposure to which may be linked to metabolic disorder, neurotoxicity, and reproductive damage in humans, among other health problems.