When was the last time you took part in a creek clean up?  It had been a while since my last one, so I thought it would be worthwhile to spend some time cleaning up my community and learning about the state of the waterways. Wow, was it educational.

Over the past 18 months I have participated in countless meetings on disposable bags - the paper and plastic bags that are commonly provided at grocery stores and other retailers. The environmental side will tell you about the horrible toll that these bags - in particular the plastic - take on our environment. They will site studies that show the volume of plastic bags in our waterways and the thousands of birds and sea creatures that die every year from these bags. The other side - typically made up of a few lobbyists from the plastics industry -  are quick to call into question those studies, reminding us of the convenience that these bags provide us in our everyday lives. They claim that bags are only a tiny fraction of the waste that pollutes our streets and waterways.

So I thought a little time spent in a local creek might shed some light on exactly who is right. What I saw in Stevens Creek was crystal clear: it’s true that by weight plastic bags make up only a minor percentage of waste, but by quantity they were easily 40% of all the waste items we removed! Not only were they numerous, they were in various phases of degradation, resulting in thousands of tiny bits of plastic. Since this stuff never fully decays, it’s easy to see how it is ingested by wildlife or will eventually wash out to sea, ending up in the gigantic plastic swamp in the Pacific.

So, to answer the question, plastic bags are a real problem. And at a consumption rate of 500 billion plastic bags per year globally, they are a huge problem. I am more convinced than ever that we need to get rid of non-biodegradable plastic bags entirely…and while we’re at it, we need to get rid of the wasteful and energy-intensive paper bags as well. It’s time that consumers be rewarded for making reusable bags an everyday habit.