Fun you can have with plastic bags

Think of all the fun things you can do with plastic bags.

You can wrap them around tree branches. You can see them wash into a street drain, which can worsen flooding during rain and snowstorms. You can go visit them in the corner of the pedestrian bridge at 235th Street and Henry Hudson Parkway. Say hello and admire the bag’s beauty as it rests on top of dead leaves, a store logo bending with the wind.

You can pack the bags together tightly, wrap rubber bands around them and make them into a basketball that doesn’t bounce. Some kids in third-world countries use plastic bag wrappings as balls to play soccer.You can wear one as a pretty hat. You can watch videos of them strangling sea turtles or birds. You can read about fish ingesting them and dying. You can find out that a bag going into a storm drain is now floating as part of the gyre of plastic trash growing daily in the Pacific Ocean, which now weighs about 270 million tons. 

Not impressed?  

So, perhaps we can support the idea of charging for the use of plastic bags in New York City stores. Two City Council members have been pushing for a 10-cent fee on plastic and paper bags for holding the goods you purchase at stores. Their effort to pass a bill is currently stalled in the City Council. They need about seven more votes to approve it. 

It’s incredibly convenient to use plastic bags. They’re flexible. They’re durable – they last for thousands of years. People complaining about how awful it would be to pay 10 cents a plastic bag at the grocer should consider the costs of plastic bags to our environment, of which human beings are actually a part.

Making plastic burns carbon. New York City residents throw away about 5 billion bags a year. To produce that much plastic requires burning 12 million barrels of oil (source: thinkprogress.org) each year. Plastic itself is, of course, a form of oil. We know what oil does to our atmosphere. It heats up the air.