Plastic bag bans and fees have spread across the United States, and new research says they're doing a good job at cutting down on litter, although some rules work better than others. In places where they are in effect, plastic bag policies led to a 25% to 47% reduction in the amount of disposable, thin plastic bag litter as a proportion of the items collectioned during cleanups of America's shorelines, a study released in the journalSciencein mid-June, found. In 2023, about one-in-three Americans lived in a place where some type of plastic bag regulation was in place. "Overall, we see a significant decrease in the percentage of plastic bags in coastal cleanup efforts," in areas with some type of plastic bag policy in place, said Kimberly Oremus, a professor of marine science and policy at the University of Delaware and one of the paper's co-authors. But the bans have a history of controversy too. Previous researchhighlighted loopholesin the laws that can keep bans from working well. Meanwhile, about20 stateshave passed laws banning any plastic bag bans at all, under the argument that they preempt local control. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council created a model bill for preemptively banning such bans in2015. The researchers collected information on 611 different plastic bag policies nationwide. Of those, the most common was complete bans, which made up almost 60% of policies. The next were partial bans, 31%, which usually banned thin film bags but allowed for thicker plastic bags. The least common, 8.5%, were policies that charged for bags. But that policy, which typically charges between 5¢ to 25¢ per bag, was most effective in lowering the amount of plastic bag waste found along shorelines. Complete bans on plastic bags at certain types of stores, often groceries and large retailers, also worked, but less well. Least effective were partial bans on thin film plastic bags that allow exceptions for thicker bags. Some areas with plastic bag policies in place also allow their use for take-out food and in restaurants but not in stores. "Our hypothesis is that people treat the thicker bags as single-use, even though they're not supposed to be," said Oremus. Additionally, the longer a policy had been in place, the less plastic bag litter was found, according to the study. The paper gives a better understanding of previous research and studies, which have sometimes found that plastic bag rules can backfire, creating more absolute plastic litter rather than less. In New Jersey, a 2024 study funded byplastic bag manufacturersfound that while the number of single-use plastic bags sold declined by 60% after a bag ban took effect in 2015, the number of alternative plastic bags increased. The same thing has happened in California. The year its bag ban was passed, Californians threw away 157,385 tons of plastic bags. In 2022 that had increased to 231,072 tons, according to the report. Politicians in the state said this was because of a loophole in the original bill that allowed the sale of thicker, reusable plastic bags at the checkout stand. To fix it, beginning in2026 California stores will only offer paper bagsor washable reusable bags. There's no question that disposable plastic bags are convenient. That's why they've become so popular. The first one-piece polyethylene shopping bag was created by a Swedish company in 1962. The 1965patentwas for a "bag with handle of weldable plastic material." These bags didn't appearin U.S. grocery stores until 1979, edging out paper bags because they were significantly cheaper for grocers. By the 2000s they were everywhere, including in the landscape,harming marine animalswhen they got in waterways. They can be a significant problem. "Plastic bags, especially the thin plastic bags, travel very easily in the wind and wanter," said Anna Papp, an environmental economist at Columbia University. "Because of that, their impact on animals and ecosystems can be outsized." "When a plastic bag escapes into the environment,animals can see it as a food sourceand ingest it. It can cause entrapment and entanglement," Shelie Miller, professor of sustainable systems at the School for Environment Sustainability at the University of Michigan, told USA TODAY last year. An app calledClean Swellallows cleanup crews to track the entanglement of dead or injured fish, birds and animals. The researchers found somewhere between a 30% to 37% reduction in entangled animals in shorelines near plastic bag policies. The data isn't fully clear because plastic bags aren't the only thing that causes entanglement, they said. "We find suggestive evidence that the occurrence of entanglements decreases when these policies are in place," said Papp. The researchers took advantage of a natural experiment. The environmental group Ocean Conservancy sponsors thousands of beach, river and lake cleanups every year. It also built a simple to use app calledClean Swellthat allows cleanup groups to record information about the trash they collected. Papp and Oremus took advantage of the fact that there's a patchwork of bans and fees for plastic bags – they found 611 individual policies across the nation. Then they combined that with cleanup data from around the country between 2016 and 2023 in 182 ZIP codes. Next they combined this crowdsourced citizen-scientist data from 45,067 shoreline cleanups recorded in the Clean Swell app. Plastic bags were the fifth-most common item found in shoreline cleanups, after cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic bottle caps and plastic beverage bottles. On average, plastic bags made up 6.7% of items collected in 2023. That allowed them to look at the differences between a specific area before and after a plastic bag policy was enacted, as well as a natural control group when they looked at areas that have never had any plastic bag policies. When they looked at the numbers of bottles and straws, they found those items did not decrease, indicating that plastic bag policies were at work rather than simply changes in what was entering the environment. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Some plastic bag bans appear to be working, study says
