Just How Effective Are Plastic Bag Bans?

It hasn’t been that long since plastic bags were seemingly everywhere. What is perhaps the ultimate disposable object was so ubiquitous that it was prominently featured in an Academy Award-winning film at the end of the 1990s. Nowadays, bans on plastic bags, and other single-use plastics, have become much more familiar.

As many of these ordinances have been in place for a few years now, it’s time to ask the question: do the bans actually work? A cursory look into the online debate over the issue reveals a lot of conflict, with some people optimistic about the reduction in garbage that accompanied the bans and others championing a return to them in the style and manner of the plastic straw resurgence. That’s where Anna Papp and Kimberly Oremus, researchers from Columbia University and the University of Delaware, respectively, come into the picture — they’ve just published a paper that makes a convincing case for the benefits of bag bans from at least one perspective.

“[W]e leveraged the patchwork of hundreds of state and local plastic bag policies that were adopted across the United States between 2017 and 2023,” they explained in the paper, which was published earlier this month in Science. “We combined this with crowdsourced citizen-science data from >45,000 shoreline cleanups, in which participants counted and categorized the items they found.”

New York City Just Got Its First Pizza Box Recycling Container

It’s in Central Park, and more could be on the way

The study found that beach cleanups in areas with plastic bag bans had between 25% and 47% fewer bags as a share of total items collected compared to locations without bans. Their findings also suggested that there was “no evidence of rebound or spillover effects,” and that the larger a given area affected by a ban was, the greater its effect on pollution there. In other words, a statewide bag ban had more impact that a town-wide one.

As Niamh Ordner pointed out in an article for the Los Angeles Times on the study and its findings, the momentum of these laws seems to be continuing; California’s own plastic bag ban is set to go into effect next year.