It’s both easy and hard to miss plastic grocery bags—easy because they’re strong, light, free, and they can double as little trash bags once you’ve got them home and emptied out your groceries, and the bags’ single-use purpose has been served; hard because the blasted things get everywhere. Discarded on trash piles, they get caught in the wind and tangled up in powerlines, collect around curbs and in gutters, and ultimately make their way out to the coasts, where they litter shorelines and even blow out to sea, entangling and suffocating marine life and leaching toxic chemicals into the water. Plastic bags and other plastic waste also discourage tourism in littered areas and reduce waterfront property values. According to one 2022 study, plastic waste costs the world $100 billion per year in damage to marine real estate and ecosystems.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Lawmakers have responded. Since 2010, more than 100 countries have implemented partial or total bans or fees on plastic shopping bags at either the national or subnational level. In the U.S., 611 state or local policies were enacted from 2008 to 2023—the overwhelming majority, 91%, imposed at the city or township level.
Are plastic bag bans successful?
How effective are the measures, especially in the places the bags do the greatest harm—along the coasts? A new paper in Science asked that question, and the happy answer the researchers came up with?Very effective—in some cases slashing the number of plastic bags scattered on shorelines by close to 50%. With such environmental measures as recycling and biofuels often not living up to their hype, regulating plastic bags appears to count as a bright green win.
“I was surprised to see how effective plastic bag policies have been in reducing plastic bag shoreline litter,” says Kimberly Oremus, associate professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware, and co-author of the Science paper. “While they don’t eliminate the problem, they do help mitigate it. What makes me hopeful is the growing number and geographic spread of these policies in the U.S.”
The new study, which was led by environmental economist Anna Papp, an incoming postdoctoral scholar at MIT, reviewed the makeup of debris collected during 45,067 shoreline cleanups from January 2016 to December 2017, comparing the results of those locales that lay within jurisdictions that had implemented plastic bag restrictions to those that hadn’t. In the areas that did have bans or restrictions in place, there were between 25% to 47% fewer bags than in unregulated areas. What’s more, there were 30% to 37% fewer reports of entangled animals in those areas.
How do plastic bag bans work?
The regulations on bags that were implemented in the so-called treated areas were all one of three types: outright bans on plastic bags; partial bans permitting thicker, reusable bags that do not travel as easily on the wind; and fees—essentially taxes—on plastic bags, paid as part of the grocery bill at checkout lines. Of the three, the partial bans were least effective at removing plastic bags from the coastal waste stream. Fees, surprisingly, were more effective than outright bans; the authors don’t have a definitive explanation for that, but they do have some ideas.
“One hypothesis,” says Oremus, “is that in at least some cases, the revenue from fees is being used to further reduce litter. Another hypothesis is that plastic bag fees are applied to more retailers than plastic bag bans. [Also], many full bans include exemptions for certain retailers or bag types, such as allowing plastic takeout bags at restaurants for food safety. Our final hypothesis is that fees could have higher compliance rates than a full ban.”
Whatever happens in the various jurisdictions does not stay in those jurisdictions. The researchers reported what they termed both negative and positive spillover from place to place, with some areas with regulations in effect nonetheless accumulating bags that blew in from unregulated districts, and some unregulated places turning out to be at least a little bit cleaner if they shared a border with a regulated community. On the whole, greater consistency throughout a larger geographic footprint is achieved by statewide bans, rather than patchwork county or township bans.
“Statewide regulations cover the largest number of people and cleanups in our time period,” says Papp. ”The robustness of their effects may be due to their more comprehensive geographical coverage, minimizing concerns related to spillovers, such as consumers bringing plastic bags from unregulated to regulated areas.”
What more can be done to reduce plastic waste?
Papp and Oremus see a need for continued plastic restrictions not just in the U.S., but elsewhere. One 2022 survey from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that they cite in their paper, for example, found that parts of Africa have 12 times more uncollected or mismanaged plastic waste than the U.S., all of which needs to be controlled or eliminated. Toward that end, report Papp and Oremus, 175 countries are now in talks to create the first global plastics treaty. The need for such a pact is pressing. Over 460 million metric tons of plastics are produced worldwide every year, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and over 20 million metric tons of that winds up discarded in the environment. That waste figure is set to triple by 2060, projects the OECD.
“Plastic bags are just one of the many types of plastic waste in the environment,” says Papp, “so, bag regulations are far from a complete solution. More-comprehensive solutions that address the production or supply of plastics are likely needed.”
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