Plastic bags have been demonized by the environmental movement for years. They are considered to be wasteful and unnecessary–why opt for plastic when you could have a reusable grocery bag? Yet within the battle to end the use of plastic bags, there is a camp that often goes unnoticed–animal rights activists. In coastal communities, plastic bags pose a major threat to marine life as animals  can get trapped inside of them and injure themselves. Plastic bags are often mistaken for jellyfish by sea turtles, who harm themselves by eating the bags, and large swaths of plastic bags floating on the ocean’s surface block the sunlight that algae and plankton need to survive.

California and Hawaii have already banned large retail stores from using plastic bags, and activists have now set their sights on Florida. Floridian cities are currently not allowed to control the sale of plastic bags but there are half a dozen online petitions to either ban them entirely or to initiate taxes on plastic bags. Officials from Miami Beach have mentioned several times that they would like to have a bag ban but cannot under Florida law as it stands today. A representative from Miami Beach sponsored a bill to ban plastic bags in certain regions of the state last year, but the bill has yet to get off the ground. Take a look at where plastic bags have been banned and what these laws signify for the potential bag ban in Florida.

Bans in California and Hawaii

In 2015, Hawaii banned the use of plastic bags in grocery stores across the state, encouraging shoppers to choose paper or to bring their own reusable bags from home. Hawaii’s ban came not from the state government but from the county level, as each of the four counties decided separately to enact a ban. Unfortunately, there was a small loophole in the ban that allowed thick plastic bags to be considered “reusable,” which means that the ban is often more theoretical than realistic. There are also exceptions for restaurants, pharmacies, and dry cleaning operations, which are still allowed to use plastic bags for their products. Hawaii’s bag ban, though viewed as well intentioned and unprecedented, has come under fire for not enforcing a drop in plastic use across all sectors of the community.

Meanwhile in California, activists spent years lobbying for a plastic bag ban and thought they had secured a law that would go into effect in the summer of 2016. However, after major pressure from the plastics lobby, the ban has been pushed back–citizens will vote on it during a referendum this coming November. According to NPR, a poll conducted late last year by the University of Southern California and The Los Angeles Times  found that California voters plan to uphold the bag ban by a margin of 59 to 34 percent. Yet in the months before the November referendum, any number of roadblocks could emerge to enacting the ban. Plastic bag manufacturers in other states have a strong interest in retaining the California market and have committed funding to lobbyists looking to further stall the bag ban.

Opposition

It is not only plastics lobbyists who stand against the ban though. San Jose resident Don Williams created the website stopthebagban.com because he considers it an “eco-fad” that inconveniences the public and doesn’t make a substantial contribution to conservation efforts. Although Hawaii and California have led the effort to implement state wide bag bans, their efforts have been stymied to the point that the bans may never have the impact that they were designed to. Plastic bags continue to pile up in landfills–and in the case of these coastal communities, ocean fills. Massive floating islands of garbage have built up in the center of major oceans, leaching toxins into the sea and poisoning sea life. Ocean currents move the plastic bags around the world, spreading pollution and endangering animals across the globe. The British Antarctic Survey reported that it found plastic bags as far south as the Falkland Islands and as far north as Spitzbergen, an island inside the Arctic Circle.

Banning Bags in Florida?

Although individual cities in various states have banned plastic bags, Florida state law prohibits individual cities from doing so. However, as of this January, cities along the Treasure Coast region with less than 100,000 residents are allowed to experiment with plastic bag control. Multiple cities in the region have signed up for a two year pilot program designed to decrease the use of bags, the first such program to emerge in the state. The Florida Retail Association has stated that a bag ban would not be practical. General counsel Samantha Padgett argued that:

‘Millions of visitors come to Florida each year. They are going to purchase items and they have to have some means of carrying those items.’ Reusable bags collect germs. And paper bags ‘can be very inconvenient for consumers on a rainy day.’

Proponents of the bag ban also have latched onto the tourism argument, claiming that when Florida’s famous beaches are covered in litter and the flora and fauna are suffering from being choked by plastic bags, no one will consider Florida to be worth visiting. North Shore Hawaii Turtle Tours is one of a dozen businesses that asks visitors to support the bag ban. The Florida Keys have attempted to get citizens to phase out plastic bags without legislation by launching the “Got Your Bags?” campaign, which asks Florida Keys residents to carry biodegradable and reusable bags with them every time they go shopping. Florida Keys Wildlife Rescue has gone so far as to call plastic bags a “cancer.” According to a study in the Journal of Environmental Research,

About 44 percent of all seabirds eat plastic fragments; 267 marine species (sea turtles, seabirds, marine mammals, and fish) are affected by plastic garbage. From Planet Ark, about 100,000 whales, seals, turtles, and other marine animals are killed by plastic bags each year worldwide. These numbers do not include the land-based victims; even cows have been known to eat plastic bags. Dead and surviving fish and animals, now laced with chemicals from eating plastic, transfer those chemicals to the food chain when other animals (including humans) eat them or their products.

In Cedar Key, volunteers pick up plastic bags off the beach and deposit them in dog curbing stations, so that dog owners can reuse them to pick up after their pets. This practice does not eliminate plastic bags but it does make sure that they are more than single use objects. Creative methods of reusing and recycling are important for communities hoping to limit littering but they do not provide an effective solution to the effects of plastic bags on wildlife. Without a significant reduction in plastic bag use, Floridian animals remain will remain in danger for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

Although coastal and island communities have the greatest incentive to ban bags because of the potential harm to their wildlife, multiple landlocked states have also expressed interest in a bag ban. In Arizona, Missouri, Idaho, Indiana, Wisconsin and Utah, several Republican lawmakers have moved to block regulation of plastic bags because of the groundswell of support for bag bans. Grassroots movements to decrease or eliminate use of plastic bags operate in all fifty states but coastal communities are particularly crucial battlegrounds. Plastic bags are not simply artifacts of unsightly littering. They also harm sea creatures, block flood control systems and breed mosquitoes. Past bans on plastic bags have been partially successful at best, largely due to the difficulty of monitoring and enforcing the ban on a state-wide level.

Banning plastic bags is a challenging task but that does not mean it is not worthwhile, nor does it mean that there is not a sizable portion of the population that supports the ban. As the United States becomes more aware of its environmental footprint and actively seeks to create useful conservation laws, cities should be granted the autonomy to make their own laws regarding bag bans. Building a consensus on the local and regional level will make it easier to construct bag bans on the state level–perhaps eventually we could even graduate to a national ban. For the moment, states like Florida that prevent communities from cutting down on plastic are only harming themselves, setting up their cities for increased pollution and endangering indigenous wildlife.

Resources

Aljazeera America: Miami’s Plastic Vice: Bagging the Ban on Bag Bans

Huffington Post: Loophole Undermines Hawaii’s Historic Plastic Bag Ban

HuffingtonPost: This Is How Your Plastic Bag Ends Up In Massive Ocean Garbage Patches

Tree Hugger: Hawaii’s Plastic Bag Ban Goes into Effect, But…

NPR: California Plastic Bag Referendum Could Spark Environmental Showdown

TC Palm: Treasure Coast Communities May be Able to Ban Plastic Bags

The Miami Herald: South Florida Officials Seek Help Controlling Plastic Bags

New York Magazine: The Fight Over Plastic Bags Is About a Lot More Than How to Get Groceries Home

Florida Keys Wildlife Rescue: Plastic–A Cancer in Our Environment

Jillian Sequeira

Jillian Sequeira was a member of the College of William and Mary Class of 2016, with a double major in Government and Italian. When she’s not blogging, she’s photographing graffiti around the world and worshiping at the altar of Elon Musk and all things Tesla. Contact Jillian at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

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Plastic is an absolutely amazing material. It is durable, light, portable, and malleable. It can be made into virtually any product we can imagine. It can be recast, recycled, and reused. It plays a role in every material aspect of our modern lives. But it is usually non-biodegradable, leeches toxins, and if not handled properly can be dangerous to land and ocean environments, animals, and ourselves.

One of the factors that complicated the search for Malaysia Flight 370 last spring was the Indian Ocean Gyre. A gyre is a system of cyclically moving ocean currents, tied into trade winds and the Coriolis Effect. There are five major ones on Earth: in the North and South Atlantic, in the North and South Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. The inexorable motion of the water constantly cast question marks as to where to search for the crashed plane. As the weeks dragged on, the likelihood of locating it in the predetermined locations dwindled; it could have been anywhere by then. Furthermore, search & rescue operators were deceived time and again by what they thought was plane debris. In actuality, it was plastic. The gyres are choked with floating garbage and plastic, earning them the nickname “garbage patches.”

The Earth’s major gyres, courtesy of NOAA via Wikipedia.

Among other things, the 2008 documentary “Addicted to Plastic” details an excursion to the Eastern Garbage Patch in a section of the North Pacific Gyre. Watch the trailer below.

Director Ian Connacher related that the patch is not so much a floating landfill whose contents can be systematically scooped out, but is spread out over an area the size of Western Europe requiring constant painstaking and ultimately minimally effective sifting.

Furthermore, this is not just an aesthetic problem. All new plastic begins life as a “nurdle:” a small pellet that can subsequently be made into whatever product desired. Nurdles account for a large percentage of ocean gyre garbage. In addition, plastic accumulates pollutants such as oils, toxins, and other things that we have also dumped or let run off into our oceans. To the eyes of many fish and birds, nurdles resemble fish eggs and are subsequently eaten. They can choke the animals because they are indigestible, or they can poison the animals because they are riddled with toxins. Then in a process of bioaccumulation, larger fish who eat many of the smaller fish that have ingested nurdles subsequently carry the toxins (and the plastic). Many of these fish are ones that people eat as well; the plastic and toxins work their way back to us and endanger our health, too.

Most of the plastic in the garbage patches arrived there not because it was dumped over the side of ships, but because it was carelessly tossed into the water systems or left on the shores; ocean plastic has worked its way there from the land. Therefore trying to pick all the trash out of the gyres does not stop the problem at the source. The plastic industry is highly flawed and needs to be more properly operated. Greenpeace and others have suggested that governments facilitate more recycling infrastructure and consumers be more conscientious about their use of plastic bags and purchasing products with a lot of plastic packaging. They add that a lot of potential lies with corporations, in regulating and intelligently choosing their plastics. For example, those micro beads in exfoliating products are disastrous and should be eliminated.

These things are only part of the problem, though. Connacher is of the opinion that the regulation of the recycling process and the decisions of corporations in the production process need to be more seamlessly intertwined and cooperative. That is to say, there are problems that make the recyclability of plastic less effective. The cap and ring on a soda bottle is a different type of plastic than is the container. One might be recyclable while the other is not. If they both can be recycled, that may not necessarily be at the same location or by the same means. Inevitably, things get lost in translation. There is nothing that we the consumers can do about this except put our plastics in the bins and hope that everything gets recycled–and properly. Yet these are not unsolvable problems. Scientists in parts of Europe are proposing a “circular economy” with regard to plastics, the idea of which is that “…products must be designed with end of life recovery in mind.” This process has more to do with providing incentives for people to recycle, but theoretically can be applied to the design and production process as well.

“Addicted to Plastic” also provides hope, recounting stories of people who took creative initiative in order to get some of the otherwise wasted plastic out of the environment and put it to productive use. People reduce their plastic consumption on community levels, and researchers and scientists find new types of plastic that are more biodegradable or less toxic. There are things we can do to make the production process better as well as things we can do to address the problematic plastic that is already out there. It requires more than picking it up off the ground or out of the water. It requires major changes, many of which will be difficult. A set of issues like this tends to be overlooked because it does not appear as pressing as climate change or energy regimes; however, it is operating on a global scale, and pervades every aspect of human geography and life. We can emerge victoriously out of our throwaway culture.

Franklin R. Halprin

Franklin R. Halprin holds an MA in History & Environmental Politics from Rutgers University where he studied human-environmental relationships and settlement patterns in the nineteenth century Southwest. His research focuses on the influences of social and cultural factors on the development of environmental policy. Contact Frank at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Just How Bad is Our Culture of Plastic Obsession? appeared first on Law Street.

While venturing out toward the stars may be the final frontier, the vast depths of the Earth’s oceans remain largely hidden from view and knowledge. The incredible diversity and sheer volume of life in the seas is staggering to the human mind, and consequently we have developed certain egregious impressions about the oceans and what they may provide for the needs of modern civilization. Some seem to feel that the oceans are sources of infinite resources for global fisheries. They are so big and teeming with life; surely there is more than we could possibly consume. This misnomer is compounded by increases in the technological efficiency of fishing, as well as the fact that oceans serve as common pool resources; many nations and parties may share, or compete for, their portion of fish yields.

Global wild fish stocks have been declining for a long time. In his seminal paper The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin argued that the economic forces that define our approaches to use of common pool resources are not sustainable in the long run. Namely, an individual acting in the logical manner so as to maximize his share of the resources is acting against the better interest of the whole group, because every individual is doing this and ultimately everyone will suffer. This concern has plagued high seas fishing for centuries, and continues to worsen as the efficiency and rate of fishing increases. Perhaps one of the most tangible and unsettling consequences of these dynamics is the collapse of the Northwest Atlantic cod fishery in 1992, after an epic 500-year run that shaped the economic, social, and cultural development of Europe’s early North American colonies.

The cod fishing town of Portugal Cove in Newfoundland, 1908, courtesy of Musee McCord Museum via Flickr

That is to say, there are consequences other than economics and conservation when dealing with unsustainable fishing. After so many hundreds of years, the Newfoundland locals had developed cultural identities around fishing. From fishermen to transporters, to salesmen in the markets, fishing played a substantial role in their ways of life and manners of self identification. How do the residents think of themselves, their place in society, and what do they actually do with themselves now that the fishery has collapsed? These are concerns that can crop up anywhere that natural resources are strained.

Another incorrect assumption about fishing and the oceans is that anything that might go wrong there or, our actions there in general, bear no consequences to ourselves and society. This might stem from the simple fact that we do not live in the oceans, and so we do not often see with our own eyes ecological collapse there. However it is clear, as exemplified by the Newfoundland cod fishery, that the fate of the seas and their biodiversity is tightly tied to our own state of affairs.

In light of these problematic developments, a new practice has been gaining ground. Aquaculture is the process of raising fish or shrimp in tanks on land. The most important result of supplying seafood in this manner is that it takes pressure off wildlife. There are many other advantages too, as Hiroko Tabuchi explains in a New York Times article. Fish farmers tend to already have environmentally and socially conscious motivations for doing what they do, and so it is uncommon that one’s plate of farm-raised fish will contain harmful chemicals. Furthermore, it reduces the need to import certain fish species, which may be caught by way of slave labor on fishing boats in the South Pacific. Finally, it produces local jobs while promoting economic self sufficiency.

A fish farm tank, courtesy of Bytemarks via Flickr

The Atlantic cod fishery is not the only one to have failed. Eighty-five percent of marine fish stocks are considered either fully exploited or overfished, and more than one in five fisheries has collapsed. In addition to the environmental consequences herein, it is becoming more and more difficult for fishermen to make ends meet. As their daily catches go down in volume, they yield declining pay, endangering their jobs and the financial stability of their families. As the national economy and job markets of Chile waver, for example, they have been turning to large-scale aquaculture. Having safeguarded existing jobs, produced over 100,000 more, and served as a major source of exportation, AquaChile is setting an example that is sure to be followed around the world.

How do consumer behaviors and cultural identities figure into this system? Tabuchi suggests that some people might have an aversion to eating fish raised on a farm. Somehow, it does not seem natural; real fish must be wild and from the oceans in order to be fresh and appetizing. This is a simple mental barrier that can be overcome in time. Fishing is one of civilization’s oldest practices; it will require patience and continued exposure to this new system. In addition, fish farming provides new opportunities with regard to cultural development. Just as the Newfoundland fishermen produced an identity and way of life around their jobs, so too can fish farmers. Therefore, a larger embrace of aquaculture would yield more than just the jobs themselves. Even before the days of Westward expansion Americans have taken pride in farmers. This action carries cultural baggage, tying itself to wholesome values, hard work, and individual enterprise. Thus there is something appealing to consumers in purchasing locally farmed products, and supporting the hardworking farmers. This set of relationships can certainly apply to seafood farmers in time as well.

Aquaculture also benefits other marine wildlife. World Wildlife writer Julian Smith explains that “Healthy ocean ecosystems are more resilient to emerging threats such as warming water temperatures and ocean acidification.” In addition, it has a “ripple effect,” benefiting other marine life such as sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, and seals. This raises another point of interest: salmon populations in Oregon had been declining for years as a result of dam construction on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Recently, they have been rebounding, drawing tens of thousands of birds who intend to feed on them. Local officials feel threatened by the competition for salmon, and have considered shooting the birds. The National Audubon Society cried out in protest, suggesting measures such as shooing the birds or drawing them elsewhere. Felicity Barringer of The New York Times suggested that this situation is different from people’s fights with wolves and coyotes, who raided their chicken farms, for example. While that series of episodes was still shameful, as those predators were endangered by human defensive hunting, this situation involves killing a wild predator that is competing with humans for a wild prey. Aquaculture could alleviate this competition, as humans consume more farm-raised fish, leaving the wild salmon for the birds and removing the presumed necessity of shooting them.

Cormorants of the Pacific Northwest, courtesy of Brocken Inaglory via Wikipedia

If we continue on our current course, the future of fish and the oceans themselves will be further jeopardized. In our ongoing quest for sustainable societies, aquaculture provides a partial answer and opens many new doors.

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Franklin R. Halprin (@FHalprin) holds an MA in History & Environmental Politics from Rutgers University where he studied human-environmental relationships and settlement patterns in the nineteenth century Southwest. His research focuses on the influences of social and cultural factors on the development of environmental policy. Contact Frank at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image couresty of [CAUT via Flickr]

Franklin R. Halprin

Franklin R. Halprin holds an MA in History & Environmental Politics from Rutgers University where he studied human-environmental relationships and settlement patterns in the nineteenth century Southwest. His research focuses on the influences of social and cultural factors on the development of environmental policy. Contact Frank at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Aquaculture: Farm the Fish to Save the Seas appeared first on Law Street.