Baltimore County should ban single-use plastic bags

I’m writing to you as a citizen of Baltimore’s Westgate community, a neighborhood situated on the city-county line. I frequently obtain groceries within county limits and am in support of Baltimore County’s proposed plastic bag ban, also known as the Bring Your Own Bag Act. People living in our neighborhood are constantly picking up plastic bags in our yards and streets from retailers clearly within county lines. These bags end up unrecycled, in our trash cans and oftentimes missing the dump trucks and ending up back in our streets and yards (“Baltimore County lawmakers introduce measure to ban plastic bag sales,” Jan. 3).

Even though plastic film recycling programs exist in grocery stores like Safeway and Wegmans, this requires people to return their plastic bags to the store after single-use, and it is clearly an ineffective method for recycling plastic film. In fact, according to the Ecology Center, a nonprofit out of Berkeley, California, only about 9.1% of the 4.8 million tons of plastic film generated is recycled. Where do these bags end up? Right in our landfills which, according to the Baltimore County Solid Waste Work Group of 2021, the county has increased from 304 tons to 1,840 tons of waste per day for the last five years.

Eliminating plastic bags from retailers is one way we can reduce the strain on the county landfill stream and help reduce the amount of plastic trash that ends up in the surrounding neighborhoods. In fact, according to Sierra Club Greater Baltimore Group, residents use almost 1 million plastic bags per day. So, eliminating them would appear to be common sense legislation. Additionally, more than 94% of patrons that frequent Baltimore County stores that have already eliminated bags voluntarily bring a reusable bag, so it is time to expand this already culturally accepted practice and ban single-use plastic bags in this jurisdiction.

— Kaytlynn Marceaux-Galli, Baltimore