Letter to Editor: We Got It Backwards on Plastic Bags

Plastic-Free Easton is a group of your neighbors and friends who want to do something meaningful and long-lasting about plastic pollution caused by single-use plastic bags. Plastic bags end up in the landscape and our waterways and they cost us both environmentally and economically. This past Monday night we made our case to the Town of Easton.  We want to thank Mayor Willey and all of our Council members for hearing us out.  Working beside our town leadership, we hope to forge a path to eliminating single-use plastic bags.  Easton, it’s time to Bring Your Own Bags! Many thanks to our many supporters who came out to support our cause!

Here is one of the reasons we do what we do:

Have you been to a kids’ birthday party where the hosts provided plastic cups and cutlery and maybe used those thin plastic table covers? You’ve got plastic party favors, balloons, little plastic serving containers, etc. It’s so festive and colorful, and nobody has to wash the dishes, right? Clean-up is as easy as opening your trash can. You just throw it all away.

Or maybe, if you’re the host, you wash all the plastics and put them away for another party. Does that ever really happen? Be honest. It’s cheap plastic; just toss it out! Well, maybe you’ll hold on to a few pieces of cutlery for your next camping trip. Just put it in the pile with all the other take-out cutlery you saved still in their plastic sleeves.

Or maybe you try to recycle all the plastics? There’s a number on the spoon that says it’s recyclable. But, first, you’ll have to wash it—by hand. When it comes to plastics, those recycling places want clean items, but the dishwasher is not recommended. And then you’ll have to find a place that takes #6 recycling. Good luck. The sad truth is, you’ll probably put it in your mixed recycling, it’ll go to the recycling facility, where it will be sorted out, then baled with all the other plastics that are too expensive or too difficult to recycle, and get sent to the landfill.

And that plastic spoon that you used to scoop up the ice cream cake that one afternoon will sit in that landfill for a thousand years. Plastics are made of polymers and many kinds of chemicals. It’s those chemicals that will eventually break down and leach into the surrounding environment to poison the soil and get washed into the waterways. The polymers are forever. If they get out into the light of day, they will keep breaking down into invisible particles that we–and all of the earth’s creatures–are already eating and breathing in.

We got plastic all wrong. Plastic is not a cheap throw-away-and-forget-it thing. It’s a millennium-long commitment. As energy producers see the way the wind is blowing for gas-engine cars, they look for other ways to sell oil-based products. Plastic production is expected to triple by 2050.

Plastic recycling doesn’t really work. It’s cheaper just to make new products. That’s why recycling, which used to make money for communities, now costs money. For conscientious consumers like you and me, we have all enjoyed the halo of filling up the recycling bin with carefully sorted and cleaned items. The act of recycling plastic is a feel-good for the unwitting, while the plastics industry enjoys an accelerating upward climb.

Yes, plastic is cheap, but what a price we pay.

Marion O Arnold
Plastic-Free Easton