If you’ve been following the news, you have noticed that the term “single-use plastics” has been arising more frequently in the press and media. Fortunately, the term has been paired with the word: “ban.” 40 years after single-use plastic bags were widely adopted commercially in the United States, the movement of eradicating these persistent and threatening pollutants is finally rolling through — not only locally and corporately, but more recently through state-wide legislation.
Before we get into the newest advances in banning single-use plastics, here’s a very brief rundown on why these items should be banned. The plastic we use today does not biodegrade. This means that the utensils, cups, straws, grocery bags, and containers that billions of people use once and throw away in the name of convenience, every minute of every day, have stuck around. Mindblowingly, the U.N. Environment reports that only 9% of the world’s nine billion tonnes of plastic have been recycled. Most of our plastic ends up in our landfills, bodies of water, and the environment, slowly contaminating soil and water and greatly threatening wildlife.
Single-use plastics may be helpful for the individual for the half-hour that he or she uses them, but they are harmful to the global ecosystem for as long as they exist afterward. And as we’ve been realizing, that’s too long of a time for us to sit around.
So what’s been going on? As of now, there are 127 countries with some form of taxation or restriction on at least one type of single-use plastic. However, “Zero Waste” social movements thankfully have not allowed the global community to stop there. In the US, there are 5 states in the running planning to ban the spread of plastic bags by 2020: Hawaii, California, New York, Maine, and Vermont (the last two signed the bill into action just in this past week!) Although these bans may not be perfect when it comes to fully stopping the commonality of plastic, cutting out the ability for establishments like stores, bars, and restaurants to allow access to single-use utensils is a monumental step in the right direction.
As always, though, it’s not all in overhead government change. There has been movement in the corporate world too — with Starbucks’ resolution to ban all straws (1 billion annually) in its use by 2020 — and also, in individual city legislation like Seattle, Boston, and Portland. These running bans, having been enacted by cities years ago, give us statistics on how successful legislation can impact the way a society acts. Good news — it works!
Most notably, the entire country of Canada has adopted legislation to ban all single-use plastic by the year 2021, and New Zealand is on its way.
But as we bring it back to what we stand for here at SAS: think globally, act locally.
The biggest concern about banning plastic is that it will only encourage demand for trash-bags and plastic liners that would usually be substituted with used grocery bags. It’s true that if people aren’t fully aware of the good that comes out of a change, the change won’t be as effective. So how do we combat this? By spreading awareness of why things have to change — through our words, and most importantly: through our everyday actions.
