By MARK GOLD
In the film “American Beauty,” Ricky, the young filmmaker, observes a plastic bag blowing in the wind as a thing of beauty. With many of the 1.63 million tons of plastic bags discarded in the United States each year ending up littering the environment, the image of endless swarms of plastic bags “flowering” on trees or “swimming” through the ocean is anything but attractive.
For months after a rain, the streamside vegetation and in-stream habitats of Los Angeles’ rivers are littered with seemingly endless piles of plastic shopping bags, and creek bottoms in urban areas are often buried under layers of bags. Rivers and storm drains carry still more plastics to the ocean where the bags mimic sea jellies, a food favored by many species of marine life, including endangered sea turtles and ocean sunfish. An estimated 1 million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, hundreds of sea turtles, and countless fish die annually in the north Pacific due to entanglement by or ingestion of marine debris, including plastic bags. Indeed, this migration of plastics to the ocean is so voluminous that an island of trash larger than the United States is floating in ocean currents north of the Hawaiian Islands. In these waters, the weight of accumulated plastic debris is six times that of plankton.
Because plastics take hundreds of years to degrade, the problem of plastics in the environment is growing exponentially. Further exacerbating this problem is our ever-growing addiction to plastic. An estimated 19 billion plastic bags are used each year in California alone; the average consumer uses over 500 plastic bags annually. The bags are designed for minutes of use, yet impact our ocean environment for centuries.
Meanwhile, there are legal requirements in the Los Angeles Region that prohibit trash discharge to certain water bodies such as the Los Angeles River, Ballona Creek, Legg Lake, Compton Creek, and Machado Lake. To meet these and future requirements, the city of Los Angeles has committed more than $30 million to install trash screens on more than 17,000 catch basins and is also spending millions more on technologies to keep trash out of local water bodies. In contrast, little has been done nationally or in California to control the sources of plastic trash, such as bags. The physical properties of plastic bags make them difficult to recycle, and there are currently no successful bag recycling programs in California, although the recent law mandating recycling at large stores should help to some degree.
Some cities and countries have demonstrated leadership by banning or taxing plastic shopping bags. Paris recently adopted a law prohibiting the distribution of plastic bags, with all of France to follow suit by 2010. Countries as far away as South Africa, Rwanda, Zanzibar, and Bangladesh also have banned plastic shopping bags, with numerous other countries considering similar measures. Other innovate source-control measures have been employed elsewhere. Ireland implemented the “PlasTax” in 2002, applying a 15 cent fee on each plastic bag in the country. The Irish government reported a 90 percent reduction in the use of plastic bags, and millions of dollars raised in tax revenue. Here in California, the city of San Francisco set a precedent for the state by banning the distribution of plastic shopping bags. Now other jurisdictions in the state are considering similar actions, including Oakland and the county of Los Angeles.
Just recently, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a feasibility study on banning plastic bags. This study is a proactive, yet a small step given that bag bans are already in place and functioning elsewhere. The impact of a countywide ban on plastic bags would be felt statewide and at the national level. At the very least, county action will hopefully motivate the administration of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to follow suit: a worthy step for a mayor who ran on a platform of making Los Angeles the greenest major city in America.
This progressive action will help clean polluted waters, protect aquatic life and guide people away from their continuing addiction to the convenience of plastic shopping bags. The bottom line is that there are currently numerous reusable and biodegradable substitutes for plastic bags.
The urgency for local, state and national government to take action has never been greater. The legacy of our growing addiction to single use, non-degradable, non-recyclable plastic packaging will be felt in the marine environment for centuries to come. When Mr. McGuire addressed Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” with his one word of wisdom, “Plastics,” I don’t think he envisioned the global consequences of an insatiable appetite for convenience at the expense of the future health of our rivers, lakes and oceans.
Mark Gold is president of Heal the Bay, an environmental non-profit dedicated to cleaning up Southern California coastal waters and watersheds, including Santa Monica Bay.
