City and state governments across the nation are banning and taxing single use plastics to reduce the impact of things like plastic bags, straws, etc. Last year, New York placed a ban on single use plastic bags at grocery stores, and is charging a 3 cent tax on every paper bag used. Other states and cities, like Oregon and Hawaii have bans on plastic bags as well. However, are these bans really working?
After researching previous plastic bans, and hearing a speech by Ganesh Nagarajan (an associate director of polymers at LyondellBasell) I’ve learned that banning types of plastics will increase the use of other types of plastic. For example, a California ban on plastic grocery bags increased the use of plastic trash bags, as many people reuse grocery bags as bags for trash cans. This shows that plastic pollution is like a balloon, you press one side, the other side gets bigger.
In my opinion, informing people about how they can reduce plastic use in combination with taxes and bans will really reduce plastic waste. However, I think that our federal government should ultimately place some sort of ban on single use plastics, otherwise the problem will never completely stop.
Community Awareness and Outreach programs, similar to our project’s action can be set up. Grocery stores like Kroger and HEB can set up events where they give out reusable bags for use by consumers. Other environmental organizations can do the same, and have informational products to distribute.
But why aren’t some states aren’t banning plastics? The Texas Supreme Court ruled that as municipalities are not allowed to place bans on the contents of waste picked up by the city, so the plastic bag ban is unconstitutional. Eventually, I think, the federal government will put some type of ban on plastics nationwide, and this will pressure more local and state governments to finalize full bans on plastics statewide. But this is probably going to be 15 or 20 years from now.
Plastic product bans are slowly progressing nationwide (with some hitches), and are eventually going to work, but for now we are going to have to use alternative methods to reduce plastic.