In U.S., plastic shopping bag still rules
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Australia and China are phasing them out, Germany and Ireland tax them, but in the United States, the plastic shopping bag is still king.
Outside supermarkets across the country, Americans push shopping carts laden with a dozen or more plastic bags full of groceries to their cars. Even the smallest purchase, such as a magazine at a newsstand, seems to come in a plastic bag.
Americans use 100 billion plastic shopping bags a year, according to Washington-based think tank Worldwatch Institute, or more than 330 a year for every person in the country. Most of them are thrown away.
A handful of U.S. cities and states have made moves to cut that number and Whole Foods Market, a supermarket pitched at the organic and natural food shopper, on Tuesday said it would phase out plastic bags out by Earth Day on April 22. But critics say the United States is years behind countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.
"We are still in the stage of taking baby steps," said Eric Goldstein, a director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. environmental group.
Plastic bags, favored because they are durable and cheap, have been blamed for clogging drains, filling landfills and choking wildlife. They can take from 400 to 1,000 years to break down, and their constituent chemicals remain in the environment long after that, environmental groups say.
Made from crude oil, natural gas and other petrochemical derivatives, an estimated 12 million barrels of oil are used to make the bags the U.S. consumes each year.
Countries from Taiwan to Uganda, and cities including Dacca in Bangladesh, have either banned plastic bags outright or impose a levy on consumers. Australia aims to phase them out by the end of this year, and China by June 21.
Ireland charges shoppers 22 Euro cents ($0.29 cents) per bag, a move credited with reducing plastic bag use by 90 per cent. Some European cities first imposed fees as early as the 1980s.
In Britain, which uses 13 billion single-use plastic bags a year, or more than 200 per person, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has urged the country's biggest supermarket chains to cut use faster than planned and said Britain can eliminate them altogether.
DISMAL SITUATION
But in the United States, the federal government has been reluctant to impose measures that would interfere with competition and be unpopular with consumers.
"Pay for bags? I think we have to pay for enough," said Melvin Perry, a shopper with four or five bags in each hand coming out of a Pathmark supermarket in Brooklyn, a borough of New York city.
Kaitlyn Tycek, pushing a shopping cart full of groceries in plastic bags, said they are so thin that items must be double- and triple-bagged to avoid splitting.
"They end up using three or four bags. They are pointless," said Tycek, who said she would switch to reusable cloth bags given the right incentives such as discounts for customers who bring their own bags. Continued...
