In the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii, there’s an area of convergence where clockwise currents trap flotsam from traveling elsewhere. An island of floating garbage has formed there, mostly plastic and twice the size of Texas, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s been growing, Blob-like, tenfold every decade since the 1950s. Any nation taking responsibility and cleaning it up seems about as likely as any nation phasing out the plastic grocery bag, a root of the problem. But some are giving it a try.
China, which has a long tradition of cracking down on various animate and inanimate objects, will have developed a collective, government-sanctioned frowny face toward plastic bags starting this June.
Ireland passed a 33-cent-per-plastic bag tax in 2002. “Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent,” writes Elisabeth Rosenthal in a New York Times article published in February. “Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable—on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.”
After considering a per-bag tax, everyone’s favorite city of hippies, San Francisco, is leading the states with a full ban on plastic grocery bags and demanded use of compostable counterparts.
Among retailers, Whole Foods Market will have stopped sacking its expensive groceries in plastic by the end of this month at its stores in the U.S., Canada and the UK. Ikea in the UK has stopped using single-use plastic bags, becoming the first major retailer there to do so. (In the U.S., the chain charges a nickel per disposable bag.)
I’m no big environmentalist and I’m aware the issue spans beyond the uncharted plastic-bag islands of the Pacific—What about garbage bags? Food packaging? The fact that paper bags may be worse for the environment in some ways than plastic? What about our landborne pollution problems?
But I try to do my bit and use a canvas bag now for groceries whenever I can. I see how difficult it will be to ever phase out plastic bags here: they’re a hardwire of most grocery store cashiers’ preprogrammed motions, to schlep food into a polyethylene sack. Even when I announce that I’ll be carrying home my purchases in my own bag, they often peel off a plastic bag without thinking about it.