In the Bag
In this column from our archives , Ellen Liberman digs into the first municipal bag ban in Rhode Island . Since 2013 , sixteen additional municipalities have banned plastic bags , but efforts at the state level stalled under House leadership last year .
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It ’ s early Sunday morning , and Barrington is not yet awake . But Shaw ’ s supermarket is ready with classical music piped over the sound system , the smell of freshly baked bread and stacks of paper bags . In January of 2013 , Barrington became the first Rhode Island town to ban plastic bags at the checkout . At 8 a . m ., L . J . and Cynthia Henley are among the early birds straggling out of the store with their purchases in a paper bag .
“ We like the ban ,” says L . J . “ I ’ m very pro — because of the pollution going into the river . It ’ s a pet peeve of mine , because I was always picking plastic bags off the sidewalk .”
Invented in the 1960s and adopted by national grocery chains in the 1980s , polyethylene single-use carriers are ubiquitous today , according to a United States International Trade Commission report . American consumers use more than 100 billion in a single year ; the annual worldwide estimate is upwards of a trillion .
But governments have begun to fall out of love with plastic bags . In 2002 , Ireland imposed a tax on plastic shopping bags ; within a year , consumption dropped by 94 percent . Almost an entire nation had switched to cloth bags and plastic acquired a social stigma . In other locales , plastic bags took on a more sinister aspect . That same year , Bangladesh outlawed plastic bags after determining that they had clogged drainage systems during two flooding events that inundated the country . To combat what the Chinese call “ white pollution ,” China banned free plastic shopping bags in 2008 . Currently , there are bag bans or taxes on single-use plastic bags on every continent .
San Francisco , with one of the nation ’ s most aggressive recycling programs , became the first municipality in the United States to take aim at plastic bag waste . In 2007 , it banned non-compostable plastic shopping bags . Washington , D . C ., Los Angeles and Seattle are the largest . Others have opted for
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