Plastic bans work. Billions of plastic bags were avoided in the US alone | Even though the US has no national ban on plastic bags, smaller-level bans have made a sizeable difference.

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1. From the article: “The bottom line is that plastic bag bans work,” said Faye Park, president of the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, in a statement. “People realize quickly it’s easy to live without plastic bags and get used to bringing a bag from home or skipping a bag when they can.”

   Plastic bags are a victim of their own success. When they were first patented in Europe in 1965, society was shocked to see how cheap and durable they could be. Within a decade or two they became mainstream on the continent and in North America, and it wasn’t long before they started being widely used on the entire planet.

   But plastics were just a little too durable. They didn’t go away. They started accumulating in landfills and in the oceans. The environmental impact of plastic bags gained attention with the discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997. Plastic bags (and plastic in general) had left its mark on the planet in an unprecedented form of pollution.

   Fast forward a couple more decades, and countries started fighting their urge to use cheap plastics and implement bans or other measures against plastic bags — and finally, there’s some good news.

   San Francisco pioneered the movement in the U.S. by passing the nation’s first plastic bag ban in 2007. Several other U.S. cities and states implemented plastic bag bans or restrictions. By 2023, ten states had statewide bans, with similar laws proposed in others​​. To get a state of how much this of a difference this made, five studied bans resulted in an average elimination of almost 300 plastic bags per person per year​​. Overall, in the US alone, billions of plastic bags were avoided with anti-plastic bag measures.