NEWYORK BANS PLASTIC BAGS

New York state has become the latest state in banning the plastic bag from the store.

On Sunday morning, a new law that went into effect, the use of plastic bags prohibits the distribution of single-use of it.

The state, which uses an estimated 23 plastic billion bags a year, announced it will delay enforcing its 2019 plastic bag ban for a month after a lawsuit from bodega owners and a plastic-bag manufacturer, means the stores will not be fined for disobeying the new rules until 1 April.

A full page as in the New York Post was there by the two grocery chains earlier on the ban as an absurd law, with warning that billions of trees will die. 

These all things have been there from years across the country, but maybe this year, 2020 the actions reached a new level. In 2019, six state ban bags,  many of which will go into effect this year, and more are advancing in legislatures across the country in places like Maryland and Colorado, plus in February, an unprecedented federal plastics bill proposed in Congress.

In 2022, China is boycotting all non-degradable bags. Experts say the bans are a crucial tool to cut pollution and emissions, but they face tough obstacles before they can make their full potential impact on the climate.

Eric Goldstein, New York City environment director at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), says, Plastic bags are a first-class environmental nuisance, and noting that many end up as litter, clogging storm drains and polluting waterways. 

According to the World Economic Forum, in 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by weight. Rosenthal added, a bag bans cut reliance on fossil fuels because plastic is made from oil and its byproducts.

He also says that single-use plastic bags are also an economic engine for the fossil fuel industry. If we want to take on the climate crisis, if we want to cut back on global warming, we've gotta find ways of reducing our reliance on single-use plastics.

This strategy in all around the country, is tackling a global problem that has risen from the local level, with city bans leading to state policies. According to New York state, Elizabeth Moran, environmental policy director at New York Public Interest Research Group, there was a perfect storm of local changes that inspired change. China decided to stop importing American plastic in 2017, which caused a recycling crisis, and in New York and its around the state, various municipalities began passing local bans, though its ban was later overturned. 

She says, I think it's particularly notable with different environmental policies, particularly ones dealing with plastics, they started on the local level. "There's a lot of ground level support for this."

According to Sarah Nichols, from the Natural Resources Council of Maine, which pushed for the bill, said a similar local chain effect took place in this ahead of Maine’s 2019. Starting with Portland in 2014, different cities and towns began passing differently worded bag bans until the retail industry threw up its hands.

"They were tired of fighting it," she says. "They knew at some point we probably could've passed a bill without them because there was so much momentum in the state. They recognised that and they wouldn't have gotten something they like." 

Experts say it must be effective. A fee on paper bags too, instead, environmentalists and retailers got together and worked out a policy that was stronger than the previous local ordinances. 

"If all that happens is a shift from plastic to paper, that's trading one set of environmental problems for another," says the NRDC's Goldstein. "They're not really the solution either." 

What is required is a total shift away from single-use plastics. Total eight states are on this way to the goal which are, California, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Vermont and Oregon have passed various types of bag bans in the last few years. Meanwhile, thanks in part to the well-funded and effective plastics lobby, 15 states have so-called pre-emption laws, which prevent governments from regulating plastic and other types of container. 

The plastic ban conversation has also reached new heights nationally. In early February, Senators Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley, as well as Representatives Alan Lowenthal and Katherine Clark, all Democrats, unveiled the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. The proposed law would require plastics producers to fund recycling programs, reduce or ban various non-recyclable, single-use plastics, and would freeze new plastics production facilities ahead of an expected doubling in production over the next 20 years.

Jennie Romer, from the Plastic Pollution Initiative at the Surfrider Foundation, helped craft the bill, and she says it's an unprecedented step at the national level to treat plastics as a consumption issue, not solely a recycling one. 

"This is definitely the first attempt to really regulate it from really a source reduction angle, and in a comprehensive way," she says.

As a law student, Romer interned on the Board of Supervisors as San Francisco became the first city in the country to pass a bag ban. She's been waiting for this moment for years. 

She says, "We wouldn't get to the point where we are now if we hadn't seen bag bans 10 years ago to get people to start thinking about it."

But whether America gets any further on plastics at a national level depends on who sits in the White House, and who controls Congress. 

This thing has to be stop now as it is ruining our environment.