Telling plastic to 'bag it': Seattle is the latest U.S. city to ban plastic grocery bags out of concern for the environment.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

Two years ago, a dead gray whale washed ashore in Seattle's Puget Sound. When scientists examined the contents of the whale's stomach, they found more than 20 plastic bags.

"It was a gut-wrenching experience for me," says Robb Krehbiel, 23, of Seattle. "Nothing that we use for a few minutes should ever end up in the belly of a whale. That's just so wrong."

For the last seven months, Krehbiel has been working on a campaign to ban plastic grocery bags in Seattle. The ban passed in December and will go into effect July 1.

Seattle will join cities like San Francisco; San Jose, California; Portland, Oregon; Brownsville, Texas; and Westport, Connecticut, as well as the Outer Banks of North Carolina and several counties in Hawaii, that have already banned plastic grocery bags. And Washington, D.C., has begun charging a five-cent tax on plastic bags to discourage customers from using them.

Since 2009, 12 states have considered a variety of plastic-bag bans, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. No statewide bans have passed. But the list of cities and counties with bag bans is growing.

Americans use between 70 billion and 100 billion plastic bags annually, with families taking home an average of 1,500 a year.

Paper Vs. Plastic

Environmental groups say plastic bags, which are made from petroleum products, increase America's dependence on oil and are a chief cause of litter. It takes about 12 million barrels of oil to make the plastic bags used in the U.S. annually. Most plastic bags eventually end up in landfills, where it can take hundreds of years for them to decompose. But first, or instead, many become litter.

"They're hanging from trees and littering our beaches," says Eric Goldstein of the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

Plastic bags are also a major source of pollution in the ocean, where they can harm sea turtles and other ocean creatures that mistake the bags for food and eat them.

But Mark Daniels of Hilex Poly, a plastics maker based in South Carolina, calls the bans "badly misguided efforts."

He says 90 percent of Americans already reuse plastic grocery bags--as garbage bags, to pack school lunches, and to store household items.

"Moving consumers away from plastic bags only pushes people to less environmentally friendly options, such as paper bags, which require more energy to produce and transport, and reusable bags, which are not recyclable," Daniels says.

The plastic-bag manufacturing...