Plastic bag caught in fence. credit: Foresight MultimediaNPR just did a report on plastic bag bans that are spreading across the country and even the world. The story tells of one city, San Francisco, that started it all off. The article lists the cities, including London and Paris, that are now joining in. On average each of us uses 500 plastic bags per year. David Gorn reports, “The city [San Francisco] banned hard-to-recycle plastic bags in grocery stores, and so far, that translates into 5 million fewer plastic bags every month.”

According to an article on salon.com:

There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In the Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there’s now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that’s twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags.

A recent article in The London Times has a different take. They say that there is not enough science to back up claims that plastic bags negatively effect marine life. London is facing the potential of a similar plastic bag ban to the one in San Francisco. Author Alexi Mostrous writes,”The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.”

Still, a different perspective is offered in this opinion piece from USA Today. It states, “Public education campaigns about littering and recycling can help more than ineffective bans on products that are used every day by billions of people worldwide. It needn’t take 1,000 years to alter anti-social behavior.”

Unfortunately, as this interactive presentation on MSNBC points out, plastic bags are very difficult to recycle and don’t produce much usable material. Also included in this presentation is an interesting side by side comparison of plastic versus paper.

How do plastic bags affect us here in Buena Vista and Chaffee County? A group of citizens have already begun a conversation about the pros and cons of having a plastax - a tax on plastic bags. Check out that discussion on the Channel BV Forums. Please comment on this article about your opinion of plastic bags, how they effect you positively or negatively, and whether or not a bag ban or tax would ever be appropriate to pursue here in our community.

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