Monday, August 13, 2012 by Tara Gallagher

I was in Ireland back in 2002 just after that country passed a tax on plastic bags equal to 24 U.S. cents per bag. I wasn’t aware of the tax and had just bought a week’s worth of groceries when I was informed of it. It had obviously become socially unacceptable to use plastic bags at all – everyone I saw had cloth bags or boxes. I pressed my three-year old twins into service and we all carried armloads of groceries out the door.

​Ten years on and the Republic of Ireland’s program is widely considered a success. Within weeks, usage dropped more than 90%. The per-bag tax was raised in 2007 to about 33 cents and remains a strong incentive – dropping the percentage of litter due to plastic bags from 5% to .25% and providing visitors like me with litter-free views. 

Worldwide, we use one million plastic bags every minute. Moreover, these single-use bags have a poor recycling rate of about 6%.  Usually, we only use them for a total of 20 minutes – a poor use for our limited supply of petroleum.  After a few weeks in Ireland, I began to see plastic bags as quaint anachronisms from the age of T.V. dinners – the first sandwich bag was introduced in 1957. Still, we can’t seem to break our global addiction.

Worldwide, a patchwork of approaches is in place to control plastic bag use. Some governments have enacted taxes. These must be high, like Ireland’s, to change consumer behavior, although Washington D.C. has a fee of only five cents and has still managed to cut use from 22 million to three million bags per month. Some grocery chains offer five cent “rewards” for shoppers who bring their own bags but this approach does not seem powerful enough to make a significant difference.  Several North American cities, European, Asian, and East African nations have banned the bags. In May, Los Angeles became the largest U. S. city to enact a ban estimated to prevent the use of 2.7 billion plastic bags per year.

For those of us who don’t live in a city or state likely to pass bag legislation, we can pin our hopes on the retail revolution.  It only takes a short time for new habits to stick — especially when there is a cost for backsliding. I’m tired of waiting for change. What group of retailers will step up and save us from ourselves?