Plastic bags are in grocery, convenience and clothing stores. They’re used as lunch bags, gym bags, doggie cleanup bags and trash bags. They blow down the street; they get stuck to roadside fences. People ball them up and store mounds of them beneath kitchen sinks and in pantries.

Plastic bags also shred into tiny pieces and float among marine life, filling the bellies of sea turtles and littering beaches worldwide. They abound in landfills. And for the one-cent apiece they cost to make, they are quite affordable.

Or are they?

In March 2007, San Francisco banned plastic bags at large supermarkets, effective in November 2007. The ban affects pharmacy chains in May 2008. The ban was prompted when a Chinatown community group called plastic bag litter one of the single most oppressive quality of life issues in the neighborhood. Once investigated by the San Francisco Department of the Environment, the complaint led to a citywide concern for the issue.

According to Mark Westlund, public outreach program manager of the department, “We looked at the reasonable option of charging a per-bag fee to cover the real costs of managing the waste stream. But this approach was cut off in the California state legislature, where the grocery and bag lobby helped pass legislation prohibiting local agencies from imposing fees to reduce bag use. Since a fee could not be imposed, a ban became the next logical option.”

Once the ban is in operation, stores will be allowed to offer compostable corn or potato starch bags, paper bags made from recycled materials or reusable fabric bags. These steps will help combat the 180 million plastic bags handed out to shoppers every year in the city, and the 774,000 gallons of oil necessary to produce all of those bags, according to Jared Blumenfeld, the city’s environmental director.

Still, there is opposition. Dave Heylen, vice president of communications for the California Grocer’s Association, said his organization opposed the measure because compostable bags and plastic bags can’t be mixed during recycing operations. This is a concern, but a limited one, as the Department of the Environment reports that only one percent of plastic bags are currently recycled.

And clearly the concern is not widespread. The New York Times reports that other cities throughout the U.S. and Canada are considering similar measures. In fact, the San Francisco move is among several worldwide efforts to control the enormous amounts of plastic bag waste that fill landfills and litter streets every year.

In April 2007, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to look into an across-the-board ban on plastic checkout bags, according to Westlund. Around the same time, New York State Assemblyman William Colton, D-Brooklyn, citing San Francisco’s ordinance, announced he would introduce similar legislation to ban plastic bags. Alaska also recently introduced a bill to put a 15-cent fee on disposable plastic bags given out by retailers. These plans and San Francisco’s initiative are bold responses to a global crisis, for the seemingly innocuous plastic bags pose a bigger problem than one might initially realize.

A Worldwide Dilemma

Though no exact numbers are available, the plastic bag industry estimates that the world consumes 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags a year. That’s about one million plastic bags consumed every minute. A 2005 Environmental Protection Agency report on municipal solid waste shows that nearly 5 million tons of plastic bags, sacks and wraps were generated in waste that year. Each bag takes 500 years to break down in a landfill, where most bags end up.

But plastic isn’t the only problem.

Paper bags—which require a large number of trees—are chopped into chips, then heated under pressure in a chemical solution. They also require four times the amount of energy used to make a plastic bag. Plastic bag production also creates 70 percent fewer atmospheric emissions and up to 94 percent fewer waterborne wastes than paper bags, according to National Geographic News. In addition, paper bags cost four times as much as plastic bags and take up more room in landfills than plastic bags. That said, paper bags are easier to recycle, so a greater percentage of them end up in recycling centers.

Recycling Woes

The challenge with plastic bag recycling lies in the economics, for it is cheaper to make new bags than to recycle used bags. Westlund explained that the plastic bags only sell for about $30 a ton, which means that the entire waste stream from San Francisco would sell for under $500 annually.

Few outlets will even take back plastic bags for recycling because it is unprofitable. Wal-marts and large grocery stores accept them occasionally, and then sell the bags to a plastic broker, who in turn sells them to a recycler. The final process is referred to as downcycling rather than recycling, however, because the end product is not a new plastic bag but instead a different un-recyclable product, such as composite decking.

Despite the challenges and the energy required to recycle both plastic and paper bags, environmental groups maintain that recycling is a worthwhile venture. One ton of recycled plastic bags saves 11 barrels of oil, while one ton of recycled paper bags saves 13 to 17 trees and three cubic meters of landfill space, the Sierra Club reports. But options besides traditional paper and plastic bag use exist.

Paper, Plastic or Neither?

The U.S. trails in efforts to curb the plastic bag problem. Taiwan banned all plastic bags in 2001, but then lifted the ban in 2006 because of concerns that plastic bags used for food or soup could pose a health risk if they were reused, according to a 2006 article in the Taipei Times. Still, the current reduced plastic bag usage in Taiwan demonstrates that the exercise has educated citizens about the problem and has shown that life is possible without plastic bags. Bangladesh—after recognizing the role plastic bags played in the catastrophic monsoon floods of 1988 and 1998 by clogging the nation’s drain system has also banned plastic bags altogether since 2002.

Many other countries are starting with smaller initiatives. In 2002, Ireland set the new standard for plastic bag management by introducing the PlasTax, a 15-cent tax (now raised to 22 cents) per bag that is charged to the merchant and passed to the customer. The results are impressive. Since 2002, Ireland has seen a 90 percent reduction in plastic bag consumption, and the money raised from the tax—$9.6 million—has been diverted into a “Green Fund” used to benefit the environment.

Other nations are following suit. Through voluntary efforts by retailers, Australia achieved a 45 percent reduction in plastic bag use between 2003 and 2005, and in 2006 the state of Victoria introduced a charge for every bag in large stores. The hope is that the state’s success will influence the rest of the country to follow its lead. Scotland is also experimenting with a program of “Green Tills,” which allows shoppers who do not use plastic bags to proceed more quickly through the checkout lines at stores.

Of course, if shoppers simply abstained from taking bags at stores, governments wouldn’t need to introduce such bans in the first place. According to the Sierra Club, “A sturdy, reusable bag needs only be used 11 times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable bags.”

Many stores now offer a small incentive to customers who use their own bags. For example, Kroger offers a five-cent refund for each personal bag a customer uses, even if it is an old plastic bag from another store, and so does Foods for Living, a local health food store in East Lansing, Mich. Whole Foods and Trader Joes stores also offer a five-cent refund per bag.

These days, reusable bags don’t have to mean silly tote bags or high-tech ripstop shoulder bags, either. According to the Christian Science Monitor, a limited release of 20,000 reusable cotton bags made by designer Anya Hindmarch and printed with “I am not a plastic bag” on the side sold out in one hour from the English retailer Sainsbury. The designer writes on her Web site: “We are trying to use our influence in a positive way to make it fashionable not to use plastic bags, to raise awareness of this issue and to encourage people to make small changes in their behaviour.”

In the end, consumers can choose their own cloth bags or reuse the bags they have lying around. They can choose to recycle the bags they take home. They can choose to throw their bags away, to let them blow away or ignore the issue altogether. Consumers can choose plastic or paper, or they can choose neither.

want More Information?

• Reusablebags.com
- information and resources about the issue and alternatives

• Film and Bag Federation (plasticbag.com)
- industry group for plastics

• Progressive Bag Alliance (progressivebagalliance.com)
- industry group making it
easier to recycle and return
plastic bags

• International Biodegradable Products Initiative
(bpiworld.org)
- promotes biodegradable products

• Grassroots Recycling Network (grrn.org)
- works to eliminate all waste