Who’s Behind the ‘Save the Plastic Bag’ Campaign?

The plastic bag industry is nervous, and they have good reason to be. More and more cities are banning plastic bags, or imposing taxes on people who want to use them. It’s all part of an effort to reduce the number of plastic bags that end up littering our streets, floating on the surface of oceans and lakes, clogging storm drains, killing birds and marine life and sitting in landfills all over the world.

Plastic bags are so ubiquitous – you get one nearly any time make a purchase, from your groceries and clothing to medicine and school supplies.  In fact, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation estimates that shoppers worldwide use 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags per year.  That’s a lot of resources – and trash.  Trash that could easily be avoided by choosing reusable bags instead, which many people are now doing.

But the plastic bag industry doesn’t think we need to cut back on plastic. It’s their livelihood, and they’ve enlisted the help of lobbyist Stephen Jones to protect their interests.  One of the ways the industry (including plastic giants Elkay Plastics Co. and Grand Packaging) is ‘fighting back’ is through their website, SavethePlasticBag.com.  Save the Plastic Bag is an attempt to debunk ‘misinformation’ about plastic bags, and Stephen Jones is head of the campaign to bring their protests to the public.

Some of the points disputed on the Save the Plastic Bag website include the idea that plastic bags are made from oil, that paper bags are better for the environment, that landfills are full of plastic bags and that plastic bags aren’t recyclable.  The site alleges that a ‘global campaign of misinformation’ is targeting their industry. You can read the site’s claims and the data they use to back them up for the details.

Believe it or not, it’s true that there’s a lot of misinformation about plastic bags out there.  For example, paper bags aren’t necessarily a better choice.  Trees are cut down to create them in many cases, and they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as they decompose.  It’s also true that there are recycling facilities for plastic bags, though Salon notes that plastic bags are usually downcycled into other products that can’t be recycled – plus, less than 1% of all plastic bags end up being recycled.

Do any of the campaign’s points make plastic bags good for the environment? The answer is a resounding NO.  First of all, since plastic bags don’t decompose and very few of them end up recycled, they all have to end up somewhere.  That means they either take up space in landfills (which, despite the plastic campaign’s insistence that 0.4% of the total trash in landfills is a small amount, is actually millions and millions of bags) or litter the earth.  Why should we just continue adding to trash dumps when there are alternatives out there? And, regardless of the pro-plastic campaign’s insistence that the numbers are wrong when it comes to the animals killed by plastic bags, animals are still being killed needlessly.

The simple truth is, plastic bags aren’t good for the earth.  Reusable is always better.  Taxing people who choose to use plastic bags may not be the answer, and the fight against plastic bags is only a small facet of the efforts we need to make to clean up the only planet we have to live on.  But it’s still important, and reducing the number of plastic bags we use is absolutely worth doing.

To their credit, the ‘Save the Plastic Bag’ campaign advocates reusing plastic bags as many times as possible, recycling them when you’re done and even using reusable bags.  Consumers definitely need to take responsibility for their own actions and return plastic shopping bags to the store (most stores have recycling bins out front). Plastic bags aren’t likely to completely go away any time soon, so if you’ve got to use them, use them again, and again, and again – and then recycle them.  But you should also carry reusable bags with you on every single shopping excursion, because less trash on the earth is always a good thing.

Link [Save the Plastic Bag] + [Algalita]

Photo credit: PlasticBagFree.com + GreenerImpact

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