OUR VIEW: A ban on plastic bags at big groceries makes sense

Posted Feb 23, 2019 

Anyone who lives in the city of New Bedford has seen them.

Those plastic bag flowers that sprout up on trees in the wintertime. Tangled in the branches and blowing in the wind, they seem to hang on for months until the next growing season. In New York City there are so many plastic bags in trees that wags joke that they are the city flower.

Along urban shorelines, and even along some suburban ones, everyone has seen the ubiquitous plastic water bottles along with the plastic baggies clogging up storm drains. In parts of the Third World there is so much plastic debris in landfills that it has sprouted recycling industries where the desperately poor eke out a marginal living. A wide swath of the north Pacific Ocean is now known as the Great Pacific Garbage Dump, even despoiling the beaches of Hawaii with throwaway plastic.

Ward 6 Councilor Joe Lopes this week proposed for the second time that the city of New Bedford join the growing list of communities trying to do something about plastic bags, which environmentalists say can take from 400 to 1,000 years to break down in the environment. When they do break down, they break into smaller and smaller toxic bits, contaminating the food chain, especially in the oceans. Marine mammals are at particular risk to eating or becoming tangled in plastic in the ocean.

Other communities have already restricted or banned the use of plastic bags, like Boston and nearby Dartmouth.

Lopes’ proposal is a compromise. Instead of a ban on all plastic bags, he’s suggested a ban on their use just in the multi-state and national grocery chain stores. In New Bedford, that means only Market Basket, Stop & Shop, CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid would be affected. Mom and pop convenience stores, liquor stores, etc. would be exempt.

In Massachusetts, there are no fewer than 93 municipalities that have already proposed or enacted plastic bag restrictions, according to MassGreen.org. California has banned plastic bags outright and New York is considering it. In Ireland, purchasing a plastic bag will cost you a 15 cent tax.

It’s easy to complain that you don’t want “the government” infringing on your personal life with a plastic bag ban. But the government is really just another name name for ourselves organized collectively. And if acting as a group we can’t protect ourselves from plastic taking over the planet, then our future will truly be hopeless.

The chemicals used in the production of plastics have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and impaired immune and endocrine systems. In landfills, chemicals from plastic seep into groundwater and flow downstream to other bodies of water. The nature of plastic repels water and accumulates more dangerous pollutants to itself. Plastics are not a commodity we can live productively with on the scale to which they have overtaken human manufacture.

Councilor Lopes’ proposal is a good first step on plastic bags at the local level. It is worth the Mitchell administration researching the best way to begin a ban. The City Council should strongly consider approving a measure and it should be implemented at the macro level, as Lopes has suggested.

https://www.southcoasttoday.com/opinion/20190223/our-view-ban-on-plastic-bags-at-big-groceries-makes-sense