Plastic baggage are in every single place - littering our streets, clogging up our rivers, and choking wildlife within the ocean.
However after years of campaigning from environmental teams, many locations have banned them completely.
Over 100 international locations now have a full or partial ban on single-use plastic baggage. Between 2010 and 2019, the variety of public insurance policies meant to part out plastic carryout baggage tripled.
The outcomes of such robust guidelines are beginning to present.
So how do plastic bag bans work - and what do locals consider them?
What's a plastic bag ban?
A plastic bag ban is a regulation that restricts using light-weight plastic baggage in outlets. Typically they're completely banned, and generally shoppers need to pay a payment to purchase them.
The bans typically solely apply to skinny plastic baggage, with thicker, reusable ones nonetheless out there for buy.
Bangladesh grew to become the primary nation to introduce a ban on plastic baggage again in 2002.
Globally, bans are imposed with numerous levels of severity. In Kenya, manufacturing the baggage - which clog the nation’s infrastructure and trigger flooding - can land you with as much as 4 years in jail or a €36,000 nice.
Such whole bans are widespread all through Africa and Asia. These areas import a lot of the World North’s ‘recyclable’ garbage and so face the implications of plastic mismanagement extra acutely.
Along with plastic baggage, many international locations ban different varieties of single-use plastic like within the EU which has removed single use cutlery, straws, balloon sticks, and occasional buds.
Which European international locations use probably the most plastic baggage?
In Europe, 18 international locations have imposed bans on skinny plastic baggage - together with France, Germany, Italy, Iceland, and Albania.
An additional 23 international locations require shoppers to pay a payment. Two extra - Switzerland and Norway - enable the plastic business to impose a ‘voluntary cost’ on using the baggage.
Plastic bag consumption is highest within the Baltic and Nordic international locations, Eurostat knowledge from 2019 reveals. Latvia (284 baggage per particular person, per yr) and Lithuania (332) consumed much more plastic baggage than some other European nation. This might change, nonetheless as from 2025, Latvian outlets will now not be permitted to present away free plastic baggage. An analogous prohibition will come into pressure in Lithuania this yr.
The bottom utilization may be present in Portugal (8), Belgium (17) and Poland (23). Portugal banned the baggage in 2021, two years after Poland.
Do plastic bag bans work?
Plastic bag bans have to this point been extremely profitable. A ban on skinny plastic baggage in California decreased consumption by 71.5 per cent.
Analysis reveals that taxes work too. Based on a 2019 overview of present research, levies and taxes led to a 66 per cent discount in utilization in Denmark, greater than 90 per cent in Eire, between 74 and 90 per cent in South Africa, Belgium, Hong Kong, Washington D.C., Santa Barbara, the UK and Portugal, and round 50 per cent. in Botswana and China.
And the affect is seen on the bottom too.
At a 2022 annual seaside clear in New Jersey, US - the place a ban was just lately launched - the variety of plastic baggage collected dropped 37 per cent on the earlier yr. Straws and takeaway containers dropped by an identical quantity.
“It’s actually, actually encouraging to see these numbers trending down for the baggage, straws, and foam containers,” mentioned Clear Ocean Motion Government Director Cindy Zipf. Clear Ocean Motion is a charity that's instrumental in organising the seaside clear.
What does the general public consider plastic bag bans?
Taxes are often acquired negatively by the general public.
However plastic bag taxes are a unique story. In Eire - the place plastic bag utilization dropped 90 per cent after the implementation of a tax - the coverage was very fashionable.
"The Irish plastic baggage levy has proved so fashionable with the Irish public that it will be politically damaging to take away it,” wrote researchers in a 2007 paper.
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