Indiana’s ban on plastic bags was signed into effect in March of 2016. The bill prohibits municipalities from banning, taxing, or restricting the use of single use plastic bags. The bill saw mostly Republican support in the Senate. Senator Brent Steele, the bill’s sponsor, said that business and industry groups were opposed to regulating plastic bags as the rationale for the bill (IndyStar). Multiple municipalities and states across the country have been doing the exact opposite of Indiana’s bill by taxing or restricting single use plastic bags. In fact, several municipalities within Indiana were in the process or already restricting plastic bags. One of these specific municipalities was Bloomington, IN. Bring Your Bag Bloomington was founded in 2014 had been working for two years to get city council members to restrict plastic bag use in Bloomington. Then the bill was signed into law and more or less eliminated all the work this group had done in an attempt to help do their part. Ron Bacon, the bill’s author, says that the state did not want a patch-work of plastic bag policies across the state, and that keeping plastic bags would help save jobs. The members of the group believe that this issue should have been one handled by local governments and not the state (Downing, K). As mentioned earlier many states across the country have done the opposite of Indiana and banned or restricted in some form the use of single use plastic bags. While in most states this discussion is left to local municipalities, California was the first state to ban plastic bags across the state. It has now been over a year since the plastic bag ban was implemented in California and as the Los Angeles Times put it “this momentous change was not a big deal.” There was no substantial conflict after the ban was implemented; people just had to adjust their lifestyles to live without plastic bags. Businesses that used plastic bags also did not see too much of change after the change was implemented. The only big difference California has seen is less plastic bags on their beaches. In fact, plastic bags now only account for 3.1% of the state’s litter. This is down from 7.4% in 2010. Indiana is a minority in this issue, meaning that in numerous states and cities within the U.S., England, Mexico, India, Italy, Burma, Bangladesh, Rwanda, and Australia, there are bans against plastic bags. Australia’s ban alone was an attempt to cut down on 6.7 billion plastic bags used annually- and that’s just in one part of that one country! For those who have not banned them, there is an economic tax to disincentivize people from using them. Countries which have enforced this include Belgium, South Africa, and Ireland. California, well-known as a leader in global environmental politics, banned plastic bags on July 1, 2015. While at first this was a controversial issue solely due to convenience, the culture in California has transformed over the past two and a half years. Now, anyone who visits the sunshine state will notice that everyone has culturally begun to carry reusable bags with them at all times. If they do not have one, they are able to buy one at most stores for less than a dollar, or use paper bags instead. The statistics are insane. There are 500 billion bags consumed annually, and 1 billion of those are thrown in the trash as soon as the carrier arrives at home. The truth of these statistics are that millions of animals die each year from plastic pollution in the environment, and plastic bags are a huge contribution to them. These bags are suffocating animals, or being eaten by turtles who mistake them for floating jellyfish in the oceans. They also break down to tiny pieces of plastic which are ingested by fish, dolphins, seals, turtles, and other animals unfortunate enough to feed where these bags fatefully end up. There isn’t a person alive today who can’t say they haven’t seen a plastic bag floating in the air, or on the ground, or stuck in a drain pipe we all know leads to water sources and, inevitable, the ocean. The phenomena even made it to fame in Katy Perry’s infamous “Firework,” in the lyric “Do you ever feel | like a plastic bag | drifting through the wind | wanting to start again?” Furthermore, retail businesses are said to spend about $4 billion dollars on plastic bags each year. The banning bill doesn't even prohibit stores from charging customers for each plastic bag used. Wouldn’t it be a win-win, for customers as inhabitants of planet earth, and businesses as economic vacuums, to reject plastic bags altogether? We think yes. Retail giants like Walmart can start doing so to save money on plastic and promote sustainable shopping, meanwhile showing social responsibility to investors. As college students, we probably couldn't do much to revert the decision of the bill. What we can do is to become self-aware of the consequences when we use plastic bags in stores, and try not to use them. It is very simple to bring your own reusable bags to Walmart, Target, or grocery stores. People should embrace this plastic-free lifestyle (the way shopping for groceries was like before plastic bags even existed) and responsibly reuse the plastic bags we already have. So why did Indiana lawmakers make this counterintuitive decision? Well, we know Indiana has been a historically very, very red state. Relative to presidential elections, the state has voted Republican in every election except in 1964 and 2008. When the ever-so-lovely past Republican Governor Mike Pence (now Vice President of the United States) signed the bill into effect in March of 2016, it became effective immediately. The state government was absolutely not considering that they were second-handedly contributing to clogging their sewers, landscapes, and farming equipment. They didn’t consider the wildlife that falls prey to this material. Instead, they were focusing on ensuring that smaller communities from creating policies that could be any threat or detriment to businesses at all. You can read more about this at this Sierra Club link: https://www.sierraclub.org/ohio/blog/2017/12/why-are-so-many-states-banning-plastic-bag-bans Is the pollution our planet suffers really worth the “convenience” of bringing your chips and milk to your car, and then from your car to your home? Those collective 45 seconds contribute to a problem that will persist for hundreds if not thousands of years. Regarding the bill itself, we believe it should be overturned. Conclusively, it can actually benefit businesses economically not to have plastic bags, and there are some things that should just be viewed as more important than this sort of political chess- like the health of our environment, and the suffering wildlife that has no say in what is going on. -Yuxuan Chen, Cole Janssen, and Sabrina Sutton **If you want to follow this issue on twitter, here are two accounts that tweet continually about this issue: Bye Bye Plastic Bags https://twitter.com/BBPB_bali Ban Plastic Bags UK https://twitter.com/BanPlasticBagUK Bibliography Bill banning local plastic bag restrictions signed into law. (2016, March 23). Indy Star. Retrieved March 6, 2018, from https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/23/bill-banning-local-plastic-bag-restrictions-signed-law/82183114/ Downing, K. (2016, March 25). Bloomington group outraged at Indiana's prohibition on "plastic bag bans". Retrieved March 07, 2018, from http://fox59.com/2016/03/25/bloomington-group-outraged-at-indianas-prohibition-on-plastic-bag-bans/ Plastic Bag Ban Locations (n.d.). Retrieved March 18, 2018, from http://www.factorydirectpromos.com/plastic-bag-bans
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AuthorsThese blog posts are written by students in the POL 327 Spring 2017 class. Archives |