BAGGING PLASTIC.

• Author: Bubar, Joe

New York has become the latest state to ban disposable plastic bags. But not everyone is on board.

Paper or plastic? That's a question New Yorkers won't hear at the supermarket checkout counter anymore.

A ban on disposable plastic bags went into effect in the state of New York at the start of last month, in an effort to cut down on plastic waste.

"For far too long, these bags have blighted our environment and clogged our waterways," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a statement proposing the ban last year.

New York has joined a growing list of places enacting legislation on single-use plastic bags (see map, facing page). Three other states--California, Hawaii,* and Oregon--already have bans on plastic bags, and four more states recently passed bans that will go into effect either later this year or next. More than 400 cities, towns, and counties have also banned plastic bags or placed taxes or fees on their use. But a number of states have moved in the opposite direction: They've banned plastic bag bans, arguing that they do more harm than good.

To many environmental advocates, though, New York's law is the right call. They hope it leads to the end of single-use plastic bags in a lot more states.

"This is the first really big push back against disposable culture," says Peter Iwanowicz of Environmental Advocates of New York, which promoted the ban. "This feels to me like a seminal moment," he adds, "like the first indoor smoking bans or tobacco taxes."

Four Million Tons of Bags

There are exceptions to New York's ban, such as food takeout bags used by restaurants. But the aim is to promote alternatives to plastic: paper--which individual counties in New York can decide to put a 5-cent fee on--or reusable bags made of cloth or other materials.

Americans today use a lot of plastic bags. In fact, we threw away 4 million tons of plastic bags and wraps in 2017, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Less than 10 percent of that waste was recycled.

Most plastic bags pile up in landfills, where they take as much as 1,000 years to break down; they blow across streets and get caught in trees; or they end up in rivers, lakes, and oceans. Once in waterways, plastic bags pose a serious threat to birds and marine wildlife, which often get caught in them or mistake them for food, choke on them, and die. Bags can also fill up an animal's Stomach, making it impossible for the creature to eat, causing it to starve.

Many environmental advocates...