Is the plastic bag headed for history’s trash heap?
Despite Toronto’s bold move, it is just the latest in a string of jurisdictions around the world to ban the bag
I searched for years I found no love I’m sure that love Will never be A product of Plasticity — Frank Zappa, Plastic People, 1967 They whirl in the wind, riding the currents until they perch in trees or in hydro wires, like unearthly jellyfish far from the sea.
In the oceans, surrounded by Styrofoam and cigarette butts, cutlery and bubble wrap, water bottles and flip flops, they swirl and swirl until they wash up on shore or coagulate into what’s known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, quite possibly the world’s largest dump, twice the size of Texas, a continent of plastic perhaps 30 metres deep.
And they whip through our lives, 350 per person per year, in use for an average of 20 minutes but lasting for an estimated 400 years, says Environment Canada.
According to the environmental website Plastic Oceans, we use a million bags a minute worldwide, perhaps as many as a trillion per year.
Now, or at least as of Jan.1, 2013, singleuse plastic bags, our favourite grocery carriers, garbage pail liners, even pooper scoopers, will finally come to a rest, no longer to clog our storm drains, float on our great lake or strangle our wildlife.
Last week, daring to go where not even our greenest mayor David Miller ever dared to go, Toronto city council, when asked to scrap the five-cent fee on single-use plastic bags, scrapped the bags altogether.
“I think we’re gonna get sued,” Mayor Rob Ford said. “I don’t see how we’re gonna win that. It’s gonna be very difficult. It’s not a smart move by council to ban plastic bags. I don’t think it’s gonna hold up.” Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Benjamin: Yes, sir. Mr. McGuire: Are you listening? Benjamin: Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire: Plastics. Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean? — The Graduate, 1967
Gone is the plastic fantastic promise of 45 years ago in Mike Nichols’ now-classic satire of modern life, in which a very young Dustin Hoffman is advised to buy into the then-nascent plastics industry.
The plastic bag was just a glimmer in the retail industry’s eye then. It was still a paper bag world.
But thanks — or no thanks — to Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin, the planet would rapidly morph into “paper or plastic, ma’am?” to no choice at all, to “how many bags would you like?” and five-cent fees, to outright bans.
Rwanda, despite its horrendous recent history, outlawed them long ago. Bangladesh blew them off in 2002. They’re restricted or banned in Italy, Ireland, New Delhi, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., as well as parts of the U.K. and Australia. Seattle’s ban begins next month. Los Angeles banned them this year.
Many trace the multiplying municipal bans back to 2007, to the English hamlet of Modbury, the first plastic-bag-free town in Europe.
In 2006, town native Rebecca Hoskins, a camerawoman, returned from a BBC shoot about marine life in the South Pacific. She was shocked by the plastic bag pollution she captured.
“It really affected me,” she told the Guardian newspaper. “It broke my heart to see animals entangled in plastic, albatrosses dying in plastic, dolphins trailing plastic and seals with their noses trapped in parcel tape roll. The sea is now like a trash can and the plastic is there forever.”
Upon her return, she went diving and discovered that even the English Channel was polluted with plastic.
“So I booked the Modbury art gallery, invited all the (retailers) and showed them my film. At the end, they all said they would give up plastic bags.”
There’s some debate as to whether bags and other plastics are biodegradable, and to what extent they break down. It’s possible they end up as tiny bits and settle on the ocean floor — which ocean life then mistakes for plankton. It’s also been reported, according to a 2009 Japanese study, that they totally disintegrate.
But plastic is not just a choking hazard to marine life. A product of petroleum, with lettering and logos often made of lead-based paint, it is also a poison.
The amount of plastic dumped in the ocean represents 12 million barrels of oil, according to estimates. That means toxins are being poured into the seas.
The once great future of plastic bags is behind them. The Earth has inherited the whirlwind.
Plastic bags are coming full circle.