THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO PLASTIC BAGS

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KATHARINE MIESZKOWSKI, SALON - The plastic bag is an icon of convenience
culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on
Earth, numbering in the trillions. They're made from petroleum or
natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting
fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on
some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some
100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a
prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery
store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide -- about 2 percent
in the U.S. -- and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries.
. .

Once aloft, stray bags cartwheel down city streets, alight in trees,
billow from fences like flags, clog storm drains, wash into rivers and
bays and even end up in the ocean, washed out to sea. Bits of plastic
bags have been found in the nests of albatrosses in the remote Midway
Islands. Floating bags can look all too much like tasty jellyfish to
hungry marine critters. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine
Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and
sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic.
The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is
some form of plastic.

There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile
of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Program. 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. There's six times as much plastic
as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre. . .

Following the lead of countries like Ireland, Bangladesh, South Africa,
Thailand and Taiwan, some U.S. cities are striking back against what
they see as an expensive, wasteful and unnecessary mess. This year, San
Francisco and Oakland outlawed the use of plastic bags in large grocery
stores and pharmacies, permitting only paper bags with at least 40
percent recycled content or otherwise compostable bags. The bans have
not taken effect yet, but already the city of Oakland is being sued by
an association of plastic bag manufacturers calling itself the Coalition
to Support Plastic Bag Recycling. Meanwhile, other communities across
the country, including Santa Monica, Calif., New Haven, Conn.,
Annapolis, Md., and Portland, Ore., are considering taking drastic
legislative action against the bags. In Ireland, a now 22-cent tax on
plastic bags has slashed their use by more than 90 percent since 2002.
In flood-prone Bangladesh, where plastic bags choked drainage systems,
the bags have been banned since 2002.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/10/plastic_bags/

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