The worldwide battle against the single-use plastic bag has heated up considerably in the last year. Legislation declaring partial or total bans passed in Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Rwanda and India’s state of Kerala.
Showing environmental leadership among large cities worldwide, Paris, France, declared a ban on plastic bags, starting this year. Australia voted to implement a plastax (a tax on plastic bags), starting in 2009; many there are pushing for a total ban.
The two-year-old plastax in Malta showed a 25 million bag reduction. But sadly, the much-touted success of the Irish plastax seems to have slipped. Ireland put the plastax concept on the map in 2002, clocking a drop of 85 million in bags used the following year. But bag use was back up to 115 million in 2005. Ireland plans to up the ante by increasing the levy from 12 to 15 cents (Euro) next month.
Taiwan reversed its 3-year bag ban, and Scotland scrapped its plastax proposal, but its environment committee said the campaign for a levy on plastic bags had “created a useful debate.”
People are not waiting for governments to take the lead on this. From supermarkets in Kunming City, China, to farmers markets in Vancouver to the students at Hanover High School in New Hampshire, world citizens are taking steps to reduce the “white pollution.”
Some large corporations joined the reusable bag bandwagon in 2006. Furniture giant IKEA hiked up prices on its disposable bags in the UK, while slashing the cost of its reusable bags. Whole Foods, Costco, Stop & Shop and Giant and other retailers are now selling logo-covered reuseable shopping bags, but there’s a lot more they could be doing.
Which brings us back to Los Angeles. AB 2449, signed into law by Schwarzenegger, requires California grocery stores to make it easier for their customers to recycle plastic bags and use reusables, starting this July. But it also had a bummer of a pre-emption clause: local agencies cannot adopt any fees or any additional recycling requirements for the next 5 years. Californians Against Waste and the League of California Cities lobbied hard for the bill, but under pressure from the grocery store lobby they were forced to compromise on the local preemption language in order to gain adoption of the recycling provisions.
Citizens like Anna Cummins, founder of Bring Your Own and a Worldchanging LA writer, are not going to sit on her hands until 2012. Anna is working with coffee shops and companies in the Los Angeles area to implement a reusable bag and cup education program.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually, which costs retailers $4 billion. Worldwide, the estimate is 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags per year -- that comes out to over one million per minute. But the good news is that switching to reusables is one of the easiest ways to move toward sustainable living, and many countries, communities, retailers and individuals are catching on.
