A sea of plastic bags upon an ocean of trash

A new academic study, published this week in the journal PLOS ONE, gives a hard number to the amount of plastic garbage littering our oceans. It’s a sobering figure: 5.25 trillion particles of plastic.

That’s a number so large as to be incomprehensible. So, picture it this way: 269,000 tons of water bottles, Lego pieces, disposable pens and lighters, take-out coffee lids, Barbie heads, detergent containers and, of course, lots of plastic bags floating atop the sparkling blue horizon. Still having trouble visualizing this? Then think of a modern suburban house. It weighs about 45 tons. Now think of roughly 6,000 of them floating around, endangering shipping, whales, fish and anything else that relies on the ocean.

Hopefully, that image will helpful if you run across one of those petitions being circulated by the plastic bag industry trying to stop California’s ban on single-use plastic bags.

A group of plastic bag makers, most of them from outside the state, are spending millions on misleading ads and paid signature gatherers to get a referendum on the bag ban on the November 2016 ballot.

If the referendum qualifies for the ballot, it will postpone the July 15 bag ban implementation date until after the 2016 election. We don’t think the ban would be overturned by voters, who, according to polls, are mostly supportive. The plastic bag industry probably doesn’t either, but qualifying a referendum will give them more than a year reprieve.

It’s impossible to say how many more plastic shopping bags will be added to the Pacific Ocean during that time, but it’s a fair bet that a good portion of the 14 billion plastic grocery bags used in the state each year will end up in storm drains that flow into the ocean.

Though the bags can be recycled, hardly any are. Some are used a second time, especially by dog or cat owners, but most end up in landfills where they will sit for generations before breaking down. Many, however, escape their confines, catching the wind in their unique parachute design until they end up strewn about the state’s wild places – clogging up rivers flowing through the Valley, wrapping around Joshua trees in the desert and tying up manzanita bushes in the mountains.

There are ways for Californians to derail the plastic industry’s fight to keep profiting from polluting our state. The easiest: Don’t sign the petition.

The plastic bag industry is pulling every trick out of its, er, bag to win back waning public support for plastic bags: spurious claims that it’s no more than a crooked deal between politicians and grocers, who can charge a fee for paper bags; baseless job-loss claims; and even absurd warnings that using reusable bags will spread disease.

The second way is for elected leaders in cities that have held off enacting local bans to do it now.

It would send a strong message from the capital to the main supporter of the bag-ban referendum, South Carolina-based Hilex Poly, that Californians are done being complicit in the trashing of our precious natural resources.

We don’t expect a single-use plastic bag ban in California to stop the flow of plastic trash into the oceans. That would be too easy. Opponents of bag bans rightly point out that plastic bags are just one of the many sources of trash. But every difficult journey begins somewhere. Stopping the flow of one significant source of plastic stuff is a great way to begin.

This story was originally published December 11, 2014 at 4:39 PM with the headline "A sea of plastic bags upon an ocean of trash."