Stefanie Riggs

English 102-H

Professor Stacey Murphy

31 April 2012

 A Brief Discussion of Plastic Bags

                They float nonchalantly by, dancing on the breeze, swimming in the ocean, waving at us from trees. Plastic grocery bags are slowly taking over the world, and destroying the beauty, and rich diversity of nature. The bags became my focus for the past four months of my life, and I expect to deal with them until they are eradicated from my community and eventually my home state. Conservation is the act and belief in the value of protecting and restoring the natural world for future and present generations to enjoy and appreciate. These simple, yet overwhelmingly popular items are the first step of many I am to take in pursuit of my conservation goal. Plastic grocery bags are harmful to the environment, a waste of limited resources, and quite simply an eyesore when disposed of improperly. These ultrathin, lightweight concoctions of oil and natural gas are not easily recycled and prone to floating out of recycling units into trees, rivers, and ultimately the ocean. The damage this product has caused to the earth, animals, and people is near irreparable, but this needless harm can- and must-stop if humanity as a whole hopes to salvage the remains of our scant supply of natural resources and to appreciate the same level of biodiversity in future generations. Though first, it may make sense to explain what these pesky plastic products are composed of, and why they are such a gargantuan problem.

What are plastic bags made of? Both Jeb Berrier from “Bag It” and Tim Casser from the video “Battle of the Bag: Deconstructing a Consumer Culture Icon” played “bag psychologist” outside of popular shopping outlets. They asked the common consumer the above question, and the results were disheartening, but not surprising. “Plastic!” replied a wily interviewee from “Bag It”, a young shopper in “Battle of the Bag” answered honestly: “I don’t know.” To clear up the confusion, plastic shopping bags are made of oil-to be a little more specific, high density polyethylene. HDPE is a byproduct of natural gas and oil, which can be processed and stretched into polyethylene film, this film is moldable, malleable, and able to be melted together. To make 100 billion bags a year it takes about 12 million barrels of oil to make all those plastic bags (“Bag It”). Fossil fuels are precious, non-renewable sources of energy, and it takes 70 million years to produce a single drop of oil! Currently we are facing innumerable problems concerning the price of oil in the average American life. Could you imagine how far down the price of gas drop if we stopped using it on these single-use items which we plan on simply throwing away when we’re finished with them? When a plastic bag is being thrown away, first of all, there is no such thing as “away” and secondly, millions of years of oil and natural gas are being thoughtlessly tossed too! Using oil as fuel for cars is not much better from an environmental standpoint, but most conservationists would agree, the bags are an easier fix than our fuel situation. Plastic bags became the popular products they are today over time, and were created over no less than 52 years ago.

The real name of the plastic grocery bag is actually the “T-shirt” bag. This is because when they were first invented, they looked like scoop-necked t-shirts. They were created in the 60’s by a Swedish inventor. Charles Moore and Cassandra Phillips from Plastic Ocean describe the bags: “Most are your basic T-shirt bag, distinguished by the tissue-thin gauge and convenient handle holes, invented in the early 1960s by a Swedish engineer named Sten Gustaf Thulin. This man looked at a long, flat tube made of plastic film and saw a way to cut and weld a bottom seam and die-cut handles at the top. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that this cheaper alternative to the paper bag took hold in the United States. Thirty years on, it’s racking up those amazing distribution numbers we see today-possibly a trillion a year” (Moore, Phillips 166). After Sten Gustaf Thulin invented the bags, Exxon Mobil bought the patent and brought them over to America. At first the bags were not so popular; they initially caused more observable harm than good. Shop owners would encourage their customers to wash and bring the bags back to reuse, because they were very expensive. As a result, when people left their bags lying around the house, small animals and babies were likely to find them, resulting in suffocation and entanglement. The outrage of death caused by bag suffocation prompted the plastic industry to make a more disposable product. This led to the single use items we are now familiar with today, as well as the choking hazard and suffocation warnings on the bags themselves. Not only are we as a society familiar with these bags, but we encounter them everywhere in everyday life!

The bags caught on like a wildfire, sweeping the nation in a single-use frenzy. Why are plastic bags so widely used? The answer is horribly simple, the bags just happen to have the perfect chemistry for success in the consumer world. They are convenient, light, strong and cheap to produce. From an interview of Susan Frienkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Lovestory interviewer Laura Friedman asks Frienkel a question concerning plastic bags to which she replies: “It’s quite an engineering feat. It can hold more than 1,000 times its own weight, and it’s waterproof, very, very durable, and really cheap.” The bags cost the industry about a penny to make, and it’s easy to ship large quantities of them because they are so thin. These marvels of engineering can hold a surprising amount of weight although the bags themselves are virtually weightless. Though it is these factors-cost, weight, strength, and availability- which cause the most devastating, and irreparable damage once they are disposed of.

                To the common consumer, plastic bags may not seem like much of a problem, but instead, rather helpful and convenient! A grocery shopper may spend about fifteen minutes total actually in physical contact with a plastic bag: from the store, to the vehicle, to the home, to the bin, or perhaps reused as a trash can liner, poop bag etc. So what is the problem with bags?! Mark Murray says: “But the plastic T-shirt bag often becomes litter after it is properly disposed of. The plastic bags blow out of garbage cans, they blow out of the back of garbage trucks, off transfer stations and off the face of landfills” (Frienkel 147). Bags are wasteful, take a long time to decompose, and are difficult recycle.  But strangely enough, the most critical problems associated with bags usually occur after the consumer has come into contact with it! Bags are notorious for floating out of recycling bins and garbage trucks where they become a source of pollution to vegetation, bodies of water, and may even harm animals they come into contact with. Susan Frienkel writes: “It is not hard to see why the bags have become a favorite target. They are virtually without substance-evanescent puffs of polyethylene, transient and yet ubiquitous. They are designed for a brief use but remain with us seemingly forever as a visible and costly source of litter-hanging from trees, plastered against fences, tumbling across beaches-as well as a potential threat to marine life” (141). It has become sort of a game for me, to see if I can walk into a forest preserve without spotting a single plastic bag. The only times I have “won” were when I traveled out of state to The Great Smoky Mountain National Park! Here in Illinois, our “preserves” are plagued with lost and lonely bags, goading me from the tops of trees, and peeking out from the long leaves of the bulrushes. However, I see the most bags alongside roadways, where they must have blown from garbage units and trucks. In the state of California: “Caltrans, the agency charged with maintaining California’s freeways, spends $16 million per year just to remove plastic bags from roadways” (Moore, Phillips. 137). Plastic bags, which honestly, are truly unnecessary, are degrading the land. Infesting roads and choking trees, the bags are truly a completely avoidable source of pollution. If we stopped the wide spread of runaway bags, we could prevent the irreparable damage they cause to life both on land and in the ocean.

On land, plastic shopping bags float nonchalantly along and are deposited wherever the wind falters. Animals all over the planet have suffered greatly because of floating plastic garbage. For example grazers stumble upon them and mistake the bags for a unique and tasty snack. However, not only does plastic have absolutely no nutritional value, but it is indigestible! A necropsy was done on an animal which died from consuming plastic products: “In one widely reported case, a dead cow was found to harbor a clot of plastic weighing seventy-seven pounds” (Moore, Phillips 233). Land animals happen upon plastic while trying to feed, and either mistake it for food or consume it accidentally and it slowly kills them. As Captain Charles Moore writes not only is this death “horrendous, but horrendously needless” (233). While we have yet to eradicate this unnecessary homicide of livestock in America, the issue of animals consuming bags was tackled, and dealt with firmly in India to protect their sacred cows: “Several Indian states have banned or restricted use of the plastic bag…Cow deaths from plastic bag ingestion are estimated at one hundred per day in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Cows in India can be something like opportunist feeders in the marine environment, owing to some dairies freeing their stock between milkings to forage in the streets” (Moore, Phillips 231-232). Cows have a greater cultural significance in India, and therefore the bag problem was assessed immediately and effectively. India has a plastic bag SWAT team, which will heavily fine, or arrest store owners for distributing bags to consumers! The authors referenced opportunist feeders in the marine environment, and it is very important to mention that the ocean is also being destroyed by these flimsy, plastic, indigestible monsters.

In the ocean, plastic grocery bags also float along, carried by wind and snagged by the fingers of waves lapping at coastal shores. Once submerged, the bags waft along currents, and confuse passerby marine animals. Sea turtles in particular, are infamous for mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish: “In 1985, George Balazs, a NOAA turtle specialist posted in Hawaii, confirmed seventy-nine cases of turtles with guts filled with various types of plastic debris. Upon conducting necropsies of dead turtles, researchers in the Mediterranean found that nearly 80 percent had ingested marine debris; mostly plastic...Sea turtles are famously prone to mistaking plastic shopping bags for one of their favorite foods, jellyfish” (Moore, Phillips 223). Hungry turtles don’t stand a chance against indigestible plastic grocery bags. The bags block up their insides and usually never make it through their digestive systems. Sadly, these turtles starve to death, and we know only of those which have washed up onto shore-meaning that the numbers are most likely much higher than reported. Not only are plastic bags and eyesore and indigestible, but they are nearly impossible to recycle.

The American consumer has been told to recycle their plastic grocery bags, when in fact this is no easy feat. Plastic bags are difficult to recycle and cause many facilities more trouble than they are worth. Kitt Doucette writes: “They are also a nightmare to recycle: the flimsy bags, many thinner than a strand of human hair, gum up the sorting equipment used by most recycling facilities. ‘Plastic bags and other thin-film plastic is the number one enemy to the equipment we use,’ says Jeff Murray, vice president of Far West Fibers, the largest recycler in Oregon. ‘More than 30,000 plastic bags are removed from our machines every day- and since most of the removal has to be done by hand, that means more than 25 percent of our labor costs involves plastic-bag removal’.”  The bags are too thin for the machines to handle, their oily content become a nightmare when recyclers attempt to reprocess them, apparently less than 4% of plastic bag are actually recycled, and after reading Murray’s account, it is easy to understand why.

Where do plastic bags go when we are finished using them? The chasing arrows symbol printed on the bottoms of the bags lead us to believe that they are shipped off to a recycling facility, much like many other products we are familiar with. Plastic grocery bags are made of high density polyethylene-HDPE which is the #2 chasing arrow. Numbers 1 and 2 are the most widely accepted plastics to most facilities-supposedly. My trash is collected by Waste Management, and I began to wonder what the company did with the bags we threw out. I went onto their website and watched recycling videos, poured over diagrams, and learned that our recycling is hauled away to a warehouse somewhere, the recyclables are dumped from the trucks onto the floor, where huge bulldozers scoop up the plastic, paper and aluminum trash and dump it into a giant funnel. Here the recyclable soup is channeled off onto a conveyer belt, along which are multiple stations with workers wearing gloves, masks and hard hats are assigned to pick out certain items. The very first station is in charge of pulling out two items from the conveyer of trash: large cardboard items and-wait for it- plastic bags. They snatch the bags from the mess and toss them into a big black bin. And that was all I could find out on the site. I have been left to assume they go to the landfill, or worse, to China. Charles Moore and Cassandra Phillips said it best: “Much of recycling is an elaborate charade” (294).

We, the consumers of the United States, have been swindled to put it kindly. We have been taught to believe that plastic grocery bags are 100% recyclable, and that by using them, and disposing of them in the proper containers, they too will receive a new life much like aluminum and paper products. I am sorry to inform, that after all of my research, the truth of the matter is quite the opposite of what we have been taught to believe. Mark Murray is the executive director of Californians Against Waste (CAW) which was formed in 1977. He has spent a substantial amount of time and resources looking into the truth behind the plastic bag recycling reports. Murray said: “The plastic bag is a problem product. I’m not suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the bag is one of them” (Frienkel 146-147). He has targeted plastic bags as a huge, wasteful issue in the state of California. Murray has lead the activism against bags and has been exposing the failure of plastic bag recycling: “’By every measure, plastic bags remain a recycling failure,’ Murray said. ‘The reported growth in plastic bag recycling volume from 2009 to 2012 was completely swamped by the [Environmental Protection Agency’s] reported 220 million pound growth in plastic bag generation during the same period,’ Murray said” (Verespej). So many bags are being produced that those numbers are overruling the amount being recycled. Actually recycling them is a failure because machines are unable to! So when the bags can’t be recycled, they are sent “away”.

And where is “away”? Landfills, and Asia. As “Bag It” narrator, Jeb Berrier says it, there is no such thing as “away”, it is an illusion. The bags are piled into shipping containers and are shipped across sea. Here they try to recycle them, are incinerated, or dumped into huge, filthy piles. Incinerating bags is a huge problem, because when they are burned, the plastic releases harmful neurotoxins known to cause cancer and other dangerous health effects. There was a comment at the bottom of the Verespej article, which said: “It costs too much to recycle and resell than it does to buy ‘fresh’ film…China has stopped recycling plastic bags from other countries for this reason and the pollution created by it. Recycling does not make cents” (Tony Anonymous, commented on the Verespej article). I feel obligated to question the validity of this comment, due to the fact that he provided no last name or organization-the other commenters were Steve Russel, the VP from the Plastics Division of the American Chemistry Council, a man from the Department of the Environment, and one other private citizen. Tony though, claims to have been studying the topic of recycling plastic bags for two years, and I felt his comment was important to include here. Because this means that they are not being disposed of in China anymore, the bags had nowhere to go in the beginning, and now, those who have been attempting to clean up after our messes are refusing to do so anymore. As Tony said, “recycling does not make cents”!

Multiple solutions have been presented to solve the issues plastic bags pose. Countries have imposed bans, some states have placed fees and others have offered compostable bags. The most common, and likely solution is reusable, canvas bags along with a ban or fee for plastic or paper bags. “There’s a clear consensus on this issue: reusable bags are the best” (Phelps).Bans and fees however, have faced some heavy opposition from none other than the company reaping the profits of the bags, the American Chemistry Council.

As of today, the American Chemistry Council has been one of the top reasons anti-plastic bag legislation has failed to pass. The ACC has spent millions of dollars on lobbying, media ads, and generally halting anti-bag movements-but this is only the tip of the plastic iceberg. To prevent environmentalists from causing “irreparable harm” to their business, the ACC have been filing specialized lawsuits: “The suits-known as Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation, or SLAPP-are a form of corporate bullying, designed to intimidate and silence opponents who lack the resources to defend themselves against billion-dollar companies” (Doucette). So, not only is it difficult for a grassroots activist to begin a movement promoting litigation banning plastic bags, but the ACC is waiting around the corner to stamp out the sparks before they set fire. This company is the reason we have seen little change concerning the fate of plastic grocery bags. They would rather spend the money to implement recycling facilities-which do not work- than to lose valuable profit. “The ACC has sued every city or county in California that has passed anti-bag legislation, demanding that local governments pay for expensive, independent studies on the environmental impact of disposable plastic bags” (Doucette). The American Chemistry Council is determined to prevent any and all measures that would make their product difficult to access. Ignoring the obvious harms caused the bags, the ACC towers on its pedestal of profits to fund an environmental disaster which few, if any can stand up to.

Another problem associated with fees is public reception. Among the nonchalant customers who are gung-ho for reusable bags, are the ones who are outraged by the fees. They interpret it as a tax, but if you think about it, no one is being forced to purchase plastic bags in the first place. If anything, they are nearly being forced to pay for reusable bags, which, if used properly, will save them the money they would be spending on plastic bags in the long run! Bans on the other hand have faced a torrent of opposition and sneaky lobbying from the ACC.

The voices of the American Chemistry Council claim that bans on plastic bags will lead to an inevitable rise in consumption of paper bags. Shawn Query writes: “Keith Christman, senior director of packaging for the American Chemistry Council, says banning plastic bags forces consumers to use paper, which is more energy- and resource-intensive than plastic. He estimates plastic bag manufacturing uses 40 to 70 percent less energy than paper, and emits less than half the greenhouse gas emissions as producing paper bags. ‘Plastic bags are a more environmentally responsible choice,’ Christman says.” While Christman is correct when he states that paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic, ultimately the costs to the environment even out. Paper bags lead to deforestation while plastic bags degrade the environment in innumerable ways and never fully decompose. So this leads to the ultimate question: paper or plastic?

                The war waged between these two most popular products for toting our groceries has been going on for years. Team plastic claims that paper bags are terrible for the environment and plastic bags are the truly environmentally friendly choice. The paper bag side counters that the plastic bags are toxic, unable to decompose, and unnecessary. So which is better? To begin, paper bags are not remotely sustainable whatsoever. These bags are costly to make, and require four times as much fossil fuel to create and distribute as compared to plastic. One article I found described the facts as so: “Paper bags meanwhile, generate 70% more pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants from plastic bags, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This is because four times as much energy is require to produce paper bags and 85 times as much energy is needed to recycle them” (Plastic-Bag Ban Full of Holes). Paper bags are extremely resource intensive and are not an environmentally friendly choice. These bags are large, bulky and expensive. Frienkel writes: “But the most persuasive factor in the new bags’ favor was basic economics: plastic bags cost a penny or two, paper bags cost three to four times as much, and because they were heavier  and bulkier, they were more expensive to transport and store” (144). Plastic bags on the other hand are outrageously cheap, and a much easier choice for a consumer to make in the checkout lane. As cheap and efficient as the bags may seem, they consume valuable natural resources as I mentioned earlier: “According to various environmental organizations, it takes about 12 million barrels of oil to make 380 billion plastic bags and approximately 14 million trees for all the paper bags used each year in the United States” (Bagging Plastic). Trees or oil? Which are we more willing to sacrifice? Clean air, environmental sustainability, fuel; paper or plastic? It may be a relief to know that the answer is quite simple: neither. Reusable bags are an easy and almost too obvious answer. Canvas is best, then they can be washed and kept clean. Various websites sell small canvas bags for fruits vegetables which also may be washed, and of course, reused. Although the reusable bags are gaining momentum, bag bans are as well. So far there have been a great number of countries which have banned the bag-from Ireland, to China. And we have even managed to succeed in some parts of the US.

                Although the ACC is constantly at the bags defense, some areas of the United States have managed to implement anti-bag legislature. Frienkel reports that: “In 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban plastic grocery bags, joining dozens of other cities and countries on every single continent that have taken moves to rid themselves of the bags” (141). This was a huge victory for the environment. San Francisco pushed for the victory. The government in the city felt it wise to take initiative to protect the multi-million dollar tourist industry surrounding the beaches. Another success was in our nation’s capital. “In Washington DC the ACC’s power faltered: “A five-cent fee on plastic and paper bags went into effect in January, levied in every business that sells food or alcohol. And it worked – in just the first month, plastic bag use plummeted to 3.3 million at food retailers, the city reported, down from an average of 22.5 million a month in 2009” (Markoe). Washington DC imposed the bag fee to raise money to clean up a local river which had been horrendously polluted by plastic trash-mainly plastic bags. As said above, plastic bag use drastically dropped almost immediately! This goes to show, that anti-bag laws are effective, and should be taking place all over the country. But until that happens, what can the average consumer do to stem the flow of needless plastic bag use and waste?

                Taking a stand against plastic grocery bags means saying “no” to a disposable society. These bans and fees are more than possible, they are inevitable. Kitt Doucette quotes Sarah Sikich, the director of coastal resources for Heal the Bay: “Banning plastic bags is ultimately a statement against the disposable, throwaway culture we all have become accustomed to and dependent upon. If the plastic bag falls, what’s next? Styrofoam? Plastic water bottles? We’re going to keep pushing this issue. It’s a battle we can win. In the end, public awareness and the grassroots movement will overcome the deep pockets of industry groups like the ACC.” (Doucette) There is hope; there is a possibility for a more sustainable future for the planet. It all starts with the small act of refusing plastic grocery bags.  The damage this product has caused to the earth, animals and people is near irreparable-but this needless damage can, and must stop if humanity as a whole hopes to salvage the remains of our scant supply of natural resources and to appreciate the same levels of biodiversity in future generations.

Works Cited

Bag it. Dir. Suzan Beraza. Perf. Jeb Berrier, Anne Reeser. Reel Thing Films, 2012. DVD

“Bagging Plastic.” State Legislatures 37.5 (2011): 10. Academic Search Premier. Web. 29 Mar. 2012

Battle of the Bag: Deconstructing a Consumer Culture Icon. Films Media Group, 2008. Films on Demand. Web. 15 April 2012 <http:11digitalfilms.com/portalplaylists.aspx?aid=4050&xtid=39585>

Doucette, Kitt. “The Plastic Bag Wars.” Rolling Stone 4 Aug. 2011.

Frienkel, Susan. Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Print

Markoe, Lauren. “How D.C. Beat the Plastic Bag Lobby”. OnEarth Magazine (2012). Web. 14 April 2012

Moore, Charles. Phillips, Cassandra. Plastic Ocean. CITY: Avery Books, 2011. Print

Phelps, Megan. “The Wise Demise of Plastic Bags.” Mother Earth News 222 (2007): 24. Academic Search Premier. Web. 29 Mar. 2012

“Plastic-Bag Ban Full of Holes.” USA Today n.d. 2007, Academic Search Premier. Web. 29 Mar. 2012

Query, Shawn. “Plastic Industry Strikes Back.” E: The Environmental Magazine 19.4 (2008):13. Academic Search Premier. Web. 29 Mar. 2012

Verespej, Mike. “Latest Statistics Show Big Increase in US Film and Bag Recycling.” Plastic News (2012). Web 9 May 2012. http://www.plasticnews.com/headlines2/html?id=24423