Banning single-use plastics helps. Not using them voluntarily helps too

Bans on single-use plastic item like drinking straws and disposable shopping bags are coming thick and fast. More than 80 countries have already enacted bans on such items.

The effects of such bans can be salutary. Turkey, for instance, has seen a 80% decline in the use of plastic bags since a national ban on them came into effect earlier this year.

The latest country to ban single-use plastic shopping bags is New Zealand, which did so on July 1 this year. Companies that flout the new ban could be fined up to $67,000. Yet such heft fines will largely be symbolic because New Zealand’s major supermarket chains have already stopped handing out disposable plastic bags to shoppers.

New Zealand, a country of less than 5 million, is hardly a major contributor to global plastic waste, however. Worldwide, of plastic bags alone an estimated 5 trillion are used annually, according to the United Nations. Most of them are used in countries in Asia, including China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.

Disposable plastic bags routinely come free with people’s shopping and are convenient for carrying newly bought goods like groceries around. Yet no customer is forced to use them. Doing so is always by choice.

Encouragingly, more and more people are choosing not to use disposable shopping bags however convenient they may be. This month we can all join a global initiative called Plastic Free July, which challenges people worldwide not to use any disposable plastic items at all for a month.

The annual event was kicked off eight years ago in Australia by Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder of the Plastic Free Foundation. By now the initiative has gone truly global with some 120 million people from across 177 countries having participated in it over the years.

Plastic waste has reached endemic proportions with more plastic produced and wasted than ever before. “Since the 1950s, the rate of plastic production has grown faster than that of any other material,” the UN explains. “We’ve also seen a shift away from the production of durable plastic, and towards plastics that are meant to be thrown away after a single use.”

In a single decade in the early 2000s, the UN, the rate of plastic production rose more than in the previous four decades combined. Today we produce 300 million tons of plastic each year, of which vast quantities end up in the environment, including the oceans where they pose an existential threat to marine ecosystems.

Worse: more than 99% of plastics are derived from oil, natural gas and coal. “If current trends continue,” the UN says, “by 2050 the plastic industry could account for 20% of the world’s total oil consumption.”