Have bans and fees curbed shoreline litter?

The prohibition or load of plastic bags helps them to prevent them from ending up on American shores, suggests a study of the country’s litter.

The data of thousands of cleanings have shown that the areas that have tried to reduce the use of bags made it possible to fall by at least 25% in percentage of the total litter collected, compared to areas that have not tried.

Prohibitions or the load for bags worked better at the state level rather than at the city level, and had a greater impact in places that had a more important problem to start.

Despite the good news, the researchers warned that, on the whole, more plastic bags are found in the United States – they are increasing less in these places trying to solve the problem.

In the United States, plastic bags vary considerably depending on the state, the county and the city, which has made it a useful place for researchers to test the effectiveness of bag policies.

Policies range from partial prohibitions and prohibitions (where only thinner bags are prohibited), accusations on bags and pre-emption laws, where states prevent counties and cities from regulating plastic bags themselves.

The researchers used coastal cleaning data that recorded percentage bags of all the elements collected, and examined how it differs in the fields with a policy compared to those who do not.

On average, the bags represented 4.5% of the items collected in cleaning and were the fifth most common article found after cigarette butts, food packaging, plastic bottle caps and plastic drinking bottles.

Different models were used to analyze the data, which estimated that the relative decrease in bags in areas with a policy was between 25% and 47%.

By comparing 182 policies and 45,067 cleaning from 2016 to 2023, the study authors said it was the greatest analysis of the effectiveness of these policies in the limitation of the shore litter.

The results highlight the importance of policy in reducing plastic pollution, said the author of the main study Anna Papp.

A key political opportunity would be the world’s leading world treaty that 175 countries will continue to negotiate in August, after the collapse of talks in December.

“Stronger results in areas with a higher basic base of litter of plastic bags means that these policies can be particularly effective in these areas,” she said.

“It is also very important to keep in mind that the policy of the treaty and the plastic bag addresses a single part of the problem.

“More complete solutions are necessary to remedy it entirely, emphasizing the side of production, consumption and waste,” she said.

Research prevents that, despite the evidence that policies work to reduce the relative percentage of plastic bags on shores, the overall percentage of bags always increases in places with and without policies.

Indeed

In the United Kingdom, where the loads on single-use plastic bags began to be adopted in 2011, an survey revealed that there had been a drop of 80% in the number of bags washed over the beaches over a decade.