♻One Ban Many Reasons ♻
By: Sydney Williams
Today in class we watched the Brian Lehrer show that was talking about New York City's Plastic Bag Ban. I thought it was incredible that New York City made it this far, even though when you look up you see plastic bags swinging from the trees. This bag ban is supposed to dramatically drop the 23 billion bags that New Yorkers use every year. I don’t disagree with the ban but, we could’ve banned plastic bags years ago when it wasn’t a huge problem, and now we’re here and are now banning plastic bags in 2020.
We are now creating thick plastic bags, which are still made out of plastic but are supposedly multiple use. To add on, these bags are going to have to be a certain thickness, and it will be more expensive for companies to produce these thicker plastic bags. I still disagree with making thicker plastic bags just because it’s still plastic. Even if this new plastic bag is going to be multiple use, I doubt that many people are going to keep them for very long. The only thing that New York and the rest of the world are yet to find out is, How will this affect our planet?
In the podcast I was able to pick these words from Brian Lehrer, “If a lot of stores “adopted” these bags (the thicker plastic bags) instead of going with the ban, the load on the environment would be even greater, the situation would be worse. Instead of 23 billion really thin single use plastic bags we’ll have 20 billion really thick bags.” I totally agree with Brian on this one since we are going to end up with about the same amount of plastic that we had before the ban, by making thicker plastic bags.
Now I want to talk about what things will be like after the ban or law is passed. A lot of people are probably going to wonder, When I’m done shopping, or when I’m done buying things, what will I get at checkout when I’m paying. The answer is probably a paper bag. There will be a 5 cent fee on paper bags just so the companies will get you to stop buying paper bags and to buy your own reusable bags. Novolex is one of the three major bag making companies and said that New York State is going to require 4 billion paper bags per year. In addition, New York State alone will save at least 12.5 million dollars by cutting down on plastic bags.
One last thing is if you call 311 you can recieve reusable just to get used to not having plastic bags.
Overall I think that it’s amazing that New York City is banning plastic bags, and I think we need to start over and just get rid of the plastic. Think about it New York is saving millions of dollars because of the bag ban in New York City.
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