Sunday, February 20, 2011

Plastic Bag Gets Boot in Brownsville

A high-pitched scream emanating from a million single use plastic bags could be heard across the Valley on January 5th when Brownsville became the first Texas City to roll out a plastic bag ban. Or did that pain cry come from the executives of Texas’ plastics industry?

If the latter, it may be in large part because plastics turned out to be as lucrative as Mr. McGuire implied when he told Ben in The Graduate to think about the “great future in plastics.”

Soon after 1967, when The Graduate hit U.S. theaters, plastics streamed into American grocery stores. And since their introduction in the 1970s, they have come to dominate the grocery market. As the cost to produce plastic bags fell to a penny per bag, the industry grew, and bag use became ubiquitous at checkout counters. It is said that today between eighty and ninety percent of all grocery bags are plastic.

Your bananas merit a plastic bag and so do your eggs, milk and bread--all before slipping inside another bag. We bag just about everything as if encasing vegetables and fruits in translucent film could protect us and our families from life’s larger, unseen harms.

But the urge to enwrap has ushered in a new era of pollution and waste.

“Plastic - especially plastic bags and PET bottles - is the most pervasive type of marine litter around the world,” according to research by the United Nations Environmental Programme. The finding was followed by a call by the UNEP for a World-Wide Ban on Pointless Thin Film Plastic Bags.

“[Plastic bag] manufacture requires large quantities of petroleum,” reports Newsweek, “And, once discarded, they tend to take flight in a puff of wind, snagging in trees and fences or floating in bodies of water, where they can choke marine life and birds. As litter, a plastic bag's life expectancy is far greater than a human's — 1,000 years or more.”

Adding to this list of concerns, the City of Brownsville asserted that plastic shopping bags…

  • “have a significant impact on the environment such as contributing to unsightly litter on the streets, sidewalks, beaches, clogging sewers and drainage systems, and polluting the Resaca waterways”
  • “are difficult to recycle and currently contaminate material that is processed through Brownsville composting program”
  • “create a burden on the city’s solid waste disposal process"
  • “have significant environmental impacts each year, including felling of over 14 million trees, and use of over 12 million barrels of oil for bags in the U.S.; and
  • “cause the death of well over 100,000 marine animals."

Based on these problems, Brownsville found that it is “in the best interest of the health, safety, and welfare of the residents of Brownsville to reduce the cost to the city of solid waste disposal, and to protect the environment by banning the use of plastic checkout bags.”

No doubt there are things to iron out with plastic bag bans. Charging customers to buy bags at check out is generally regressive—impacting people the most who have the least. But at least Brownsville and other cities are on a path to sorting this out--and we can help by learning from their experience, passing single use plastic bag bans in our own cities and towns, and sharing what we learn in Texas and other states.

Actions you can take:

1. Use fewer plastic bags and reuse the bags you have. You can recycle used plastic bags by dropping them off at bins located outside HEB stores.

2. Get cloth bags out to everyone. For free. Consider an idea taken up by youth in the Ecoppell Club -- to provide free cloth bags to the residents of Coppell, Texas. Their goal? Eliminate the use of plastic bags not only in Coppell but “in United States and even the world”

3. Support schools, recycling at the same time. You can recycle plastic bags and help schools earn cash through HEB’s Enviro-Bag program.

4. Contact your City Council member to see what plans they have for putting a plastic bag ban on the table.

References:

The Graduate (1967) (video clip)

Marine Litter: A Global Challenge (2009) by the UNEP

Taking Aim at All Those Plastic Bags (NYT article)

Battle of the Bags (newsweek.com)

Copy of the Brownsville Ordinance posted by Plastic Ban Report


2 comments:

  1. hi. it was really nice to read about such a interesting blog,. thanks for sharing the details.

    Recycling Plastic Containers

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for a lovely blog, save the mother nature

    Reuseable Containers

    ReplyDelete

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