Let’s Start With Bags
Without all that much fanfare and amid only perfunctory industry push-back the town boards in East Hampton and Southampton have just set in motion the rapid phase-out of thin plastic shopping bags of the sort used at supermarkets and convenience stores. Though some of these bags are made of compounds that can be readily recycled locally, many end up in the trash almost as soon as they are emptied of their contents.
News accounts put the current value of waste plastic bags at less than $5 a ton, a price at which it is not worth it to deal with these notoriously hard-to-handle items. As such, they are a poster child for waste and rightly the target of bans, like the one that has been in place since 2011 in East Hampton Village, and followed voluntarily elsewhere, notably at Cirillo’s I.G.A. market in Amagansett.
Bag manufacturers, when confronting the bag-ban movement, have repeatedly asserted that it takes as much if not more energy and natural resources to make alternatives, such as paper bags. Independent reactions to this claim vary. But even if it were true, it would be beside the point. Single-use bags are a significant contributor to litter, can harm wildlife, are the second most prevalent form of floating debris in the world’s oceans after cigarette butts, and help swell landfills when disposed on shore. On the plus side, where they are banned it seems that the number of people who take their own reusable shopping bags with them to the markets increase notably — something that we have observed here and that is borne out in studies elsewhere. It is in this regard that bag bans may have the most value.
More than just plastic bags, it seems that we Americans need to look again at our willingness to tolerate the degree of solid waste we produce. Our cultural acceptance of disposable and excessive packaging is what is really at fault, not any single example of what we throw away. It is the reflexive reaction of store clerks who put a sandwich that is about to be eaten into yet another bag. It is the giant shippers such as Amazon that allow small items to leave its warehouses swimming in far-too-big cardboard boxes. It is our unwillingness to walk a short distance to do ordinary errands. It is our failure to build adequate bike lanes on our roads. It is our obsession with too-big houses and oversized cars and the unnecessary energy they consume. If banning plastic bags can get us to think about the rest of it, so much the better.