Shopping Bags

The debate regarding shopping bags and their (mis)use, particularly regarding the relative merits of the two principal “contenders,” plastic and paper, is heated and likely to become more so. In addition, recently a further complexity has been introduced in the form of the reusable fabric bag.

To convey purchases home, plastic shopping bags in 2008 accounted for something like 95 percent of the grocery (supermarket) and convenience store market (up from only 80 percent in 2003, as then estimated by the American Plastics Council) in the United States, meaning an annual consumption of 99 to 100 billion bags. Despite this popularity being based on their convenience, strength, ease of availability, and comparative cheapness (approximately one cent for plastic compared with four cents for paper), plastic shopping bags have come in for a huge amount of negative commentary, even if the situation is far from straightforward. The statistics are impressive, if not totally agreed to.

• Worldwide, between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags (so not just of the shopping variety) are consumed each year (that is more than one million per minute), and up to 3 percent of these enter the litter stream. Of the total, something like 380 billion relate to the United States, and only 1 or 2 percent of these are recycled.
• In the United Kingdom, 17 billion plastic bags are provided by supermarkets each year, resulting in 60,000 tons of plastic going to landfill.
• Plastic bag litter kills thousands of marine creatures every year when they mistake it for food or get entangled in it. Estimates produced by the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation suggest in excess of one million birds and 100,000 marine mammals become casualties annually.
• An estimate from the United Nations Environment Programme suggests there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter in every square mile of the world's oceans.
• In a vortex of ocean currents called the Northern Pacific Gyre, 1,000 miles off the coast of California, is an area at least the size of Texas (some estimates suggest up to twice the size) containing a churning mess of plastic debris.
• Even in landfills, the bags can take up to 1,000 years to break down, and in the breaking-down process they release toxins that contaminate soil and water, meanwhile blocking natural flows through the soil of oxygen and water. The alternative of incineration leads to both toxins and carcinogens being released into the air.
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• Plastic bag manufacture uses a nonrenewable resource (usually cited as petroleum, although in reality more likely to be natural gas).
• Plastic bags have been cited as choking sewer systems (Philadelphia) and, beyond that, leading to floods in Bangladesh and Mumbai through blocked storm drains (400 dead resulting in the latter case in 2005).
• Conventional plastic bags do not biodegrade easily and merely fragment endlessly. It was estimated that the stomach of a cow that died in New Delhi contained fragments from no fewer than 35,000 plastic bags.

This is (part of) the background to the case against plastic shopping bags and has encouraged both states/counties and whole countries to totally ban, or at least attempt to restrict, their prevalence. Thus, San Francisco and Oakland, California, have outlawed plastic bags in large grocery stores and pharmacies should they not be compostable, and even the obvious alternative, paper bags, can only be used if they boast 40 percent or more recycled content. Los Angeles plans to follow suit in 2010, and Baltimore, Maryland; Santa Monica, California; New Haven, Connecticut; Boston, Massachusetts, and others have all considered bans, although the results have, at best, been mixed—the plastic bag lobby, comprising plastics manufacturers who point to their industry's nearly half a billion dollar contribution to the economy, has in many cases mounted a spirited, and effective, counterattack.

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