From BBC
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Climate and science reporter
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Banning or charging for plastic bags is helping stop them ending up on US shorelines, a study of the country’s litter suggests.
Data from thousands of cleanups showed that areas which tried to reduce bag use saw them fall by at least 25% as a percentage of total litter collected, compared to areas that didn’t try.
Bans or charging for bags worked better at state rather than town level, and had a bigger impact in places that had a bigger litter problem to begin with.
Despite the good news, the researchers cautioned that, overall, more plastic bags are being found across the US – they’re just increasing less in those places trying to tackle the issue.
Plastic bag laws in the US vary considerably by state, county and town, which made it a useful place for researchers to test the effectiveness of bag policies.
Policies range from bans and partial bans (where only thinner bags are banned), to charges on bags and pre-emption laws, where states prevent counties and towns from regulating plastic bags themselves.
The researchers used data from shoreline cleanups that recorded bags as a percentage of all items collected, and looked at how this differed in areas with a policy compared to those without.
On average, bags made up 4.5% of items collected in cleanups, and were the fifth most common item found after cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic bottle caps and plastic drinks bottles.
Different models were used to analyse the data, which estimated that the relative decrease in
