Nichole l. Gardner | Environmental Science | May 6, 2015
Nichole l. Gardner | Environmental Science | May 6, 2015

LD 325
An Act to phase out the use of single use plastic shopping bags
LD 325
An Act to phase out the use of single use plastic shopping bags

One hundred and sixty thousand plastic bags are used globally every second of every day. China, a country of 1.3 billion, consumes three billion plastic bags daily, or one trillion ninety five billion per year, according to China Trade News. (Plastics News)
In 1965, Celloplast came up with the design on which all modern plastic shopping bags are based: a tube of plastic sealed at the bottom to allow for the packaging of goods, an open top to insert such items into the bag and handles for convenient carrying. This bag is commonly known as the T-shirt bag or single use plastic shopping bag. By the end of 1985, 75% of U.S. grocery stores carried plastic bags in addition to paper ones, and today, plastic bags have secured more than 80% of the grocery and convenience store market. When Exxon Mobile introduced these bags to the U.S. in the late 1970’s they were immediately met with controversy. Not only were people worried about the environmental impact of the plastic, but suburban shoppers preferred paper bags that would stand upright in the trunks of their cars, while city folk liked the handles on the plastic bags to carry on their walk home. Plastic bags won the minds and hearts of business owners worried about their bottom line. (Petru) Plastic bags are much cheaper to purchase than paper by up to 4 times. The plastic is also waterproof and can hold up to 1000 times its own weight.
These bags are made from High Density Polyethylene or type 2 plastic (the same type used for plastic bottles and plastic lumber).
To produce these single use shopping bags fossil fuels are used. Petroleum and natural gas are the primary sources of the key ingredients in plastic and plastic bags. These plastics are composed of polymers, which are large molecules consisting of repeating units called monomers. In the case of single use plastic bags, the repeating units are ethylene. When ethylene molecules are polymerized to form polyethylene, they form long chains of carbon atoms in which each carbon also is bonded to two hydrogen atoms. Many kinds of polyethylene can be made from ethylene.
Plastic bags are typically made from one of 3 types: 1. High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) Grocery Bags 2. Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) Dry cleaner garment bags 3. Linear Low Density Polyethylene (LLDPE) Thick glossy bags from the mall
The difference is the branching in the polymer chain. Branching influences the strength and crystallinity of the bags.
The more branched the chain is, the lower the bags strength. That’s why dry cleaning bags are so weak and flimsy, they are highly branched LDPE.
The polyethylene is usually now in the form of a small pellet. The pellets can be in different shapes depending on the machinery in use by the manufacturer.
At the manufacturing plant the single use plastic shopping bags are formed by a process known as blown film extrusion. There is a large machine with an extruder screw in the middle. The pellets are usually gravity fed from a hopper into the machine. They land on the screw which is turning in a small space. The frictional force on the pellets force them to move through the machine, heating more and more the entire time. The pellets eventually are no longer in a solid form. The liquid goes through a screening process the removes any impurities. “The melt is then forced through a die adopting the shape of the flow channel. The tubular profile from the blown film die is held in tubular form by internal air pressure and in generally externally air cooled with an air ring. The cooled bubble is collapsed at the nip rollers, slit to separate the two halves of the bubble and the resultant two sheets are wound up as rolls. The film sheets can then be converted into bags.” (Lepoutre)
Now the bags are made and they are in our stores waiting for you to bring your groceries through the checkout line and to the bagger. If you are lucky he asks “paper or plastic”? Oh no. Now what? We all have done it. You think to yourself ‘Ugh, I forgot my reusable bags in the trunk of my car.’ And you say, “Plastic is fine.” Your yummy food is tucked away neatly into the easy to carry bag and you are on your way. You get home, carry your bags inside, put your groceries away, and crumple up the plastic bag. Now what is going to happen to that bag? Maybe you, like a lot of us, have a grocery bag sock. Throw it in there. Maybe you’ll use it again to line your bathroom waste basket or pick up pet waste. Eventually, if not immediately, that bag is going to end up in the recycling bin or household garbage. Single use plastic shopping bags are so lightweight and aerodynamic that even when disposed of properly, they fly out of trash cans, recycling bins and dumpsters all the time. I’m positive that driving here today you saw at least one bag in a tree or on the side of the road. I did a four mile walk around my community and spotted seven bags.
Being a petroleum derived polymer, these single use shopping bags cannot “biodegrade”. They go through a process called photodegredation.
The plastic bag does breakdown when subject to ultraviolet radiation from the sun. When these plastic bags float near the surface of a body of water the sun breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces, but smaller is not less…
Microplastics in the oceans outnumber zooplankton 28:1. In respirometry tests, where experimenters put solid waste in a container with microbe-rich compost and then added air to promote biodegration, newspapers and banana peels decompose in days or weeks while plastic shopping bags were not affected. When plastic bags are exposed to sunshine the polymer chains breakdown, become brittle and crack eventually turning into microscopic synthetic granules. (EarthTalk) These granules may never fully decompose and will build up continually in marine and land environments as well as the stomachs or guts of wildlife. Initial studies have found that 99 percent of sea water samples from the Maine coast contain microplastic particles. These samples contained an average of 17 plastic particles per liter of water.
These tiny particles attract toxins that adhere to them. Ingested by small marine life, they move up the food chain, where the toxins bioaccumulate in larger marine animals, birds and humans. (Conservation) Here, fat-soluble compounds pass from prey to predator. The more prey that are eaten, the greater the magnification of the compound as it travels up the food chain. Humans tend to eat fairly high on the marine food chain. Predatory fish - fish that eat other fish that have eaten still other fish and animals - will have some of the highest concentrations of biomagnified chemicals and plastics. Many popular fish are also rich in fat and fish oils, which is where many toxins are stored. Such organisms at the top of the food chain as humans or polar bears, can receive the highest concentrations. This process is sometimes referred to as biomagnification, since the concentration of pollutant in the predator is a large multiple of that measured in the prey.
Plastics are having a dramatic effect on our marine life right here in Maine. Stephanie Wright from the University of Exeter explains her study on lugworms. “Basically, we went to collect lugworms from the beach. We also brought them back to the lab with some natural sediment. We wanted to see whether these tiny pieces of plastic, which can be smaller than a grain of sand – these microplastics – could cause any harm at all to important species at the bottom of the food web, which is why we focused on the lugworm. And so, in the lab, we maintained them in sediments, some were exposed to sediment containing different levels of microplastics which overlapped with some environmental levels. And then we kept them in these conditions for about 4 weeks, making observations throughout that time, and at the end, we also quantified their energy reserves as well. What we found is that actually, with very high levels of microplastics, the lugworms reduce their feeding activity. In some levels, which overlapped those reported for the environment, they actually had a lower amount of energy available for important processes such as growth and reproduction. In the stomach of these worms, which would normally be a space for nutritional plant matter or sediment grains laden with a vital resource, but what we found is actually this microplastic is taking up space and these worms, they're exerting energy trying to digest them. Essentially, these lugworms are almost getting plastic constipation. This species in fact is very important, it churns the sediment through its feeding activity. So, when you see those casts on the beach, that's a product of it reworking the sediment, like earthworms in soil. So, it’s very important to maintaining their health. So, any impacts on it seeding actually, it could have knock-on effects of the animals which live in the sediment. In terms of the wider implications, there are lots of other species that feed in a similar way, that ingest sand and don’t show any selections. So, if the plastic is there, they could ingest this, things like sea cucumbers and certain crab species and other worm species. So, there are much wider implications.”
Moving a bit further up the food chain we run into the beautiful sea turtle. Sea turtles rely on jellyfish for a large part of their diet. While you and I can see the difference, a sea turtle has a hard time differentiating between a jellyfish and a plastic bag floating in the ocean.
Even farther up there is the gray whale. The whale pictured here was washed up on the shore of Puget Sound of West Seattle in Washington State in 2010. This was the fifth gray whale found dead in two weeks. This whale was in seemingly good health. The stomach contents included a pair of sweatpants, a golf ball, surgical gloves and an alarming twenty single use plastic shopping bags. A number of the other gray whales found were malnourished. Probably due to the amount of plastics ingested but never digested.
The answer seems easy. Why don’t we recycle these plastic bags? I see, and I am sure you do too, a large bin at every store asking you to return your plastic bags. Great there is a place to bring them. We fill these large containers and then what? Unfortunately, more times than not a store employee is asked to dump this box into the store compactor or dumpster. It’s a numbers game. The economics behind it are harsh. Leo from EcoMaine explained it costs about $4,000 to process and recycle only one ton of these plastic bags. They are difficult to clean. Plastic needs to be broken up into small pieces in something like a blender before recycling. This type of plastic just binds up the machinery resulting in costly repairs. That original one ton of plastic can then be sold for only around $30. A loss of $3,970. It is much cheaper to produce new plastics than recycle old.
So where do we go from here? What is Maine going to do about this?
In steps Maine Representative Mick Devin, representing the citizens of House District 51 - Newcastle, Damariscotta, Edgecomb, Bristol, South Bristol and Monhegan Plantation. Representative Devin is also a marine biologist. He sponsored a bill in the Maine Legislature noted as LD 325 An Act To Strengthen Recycling of Single-use Plastic Shopping Bags. This bill requires a retailer to assess a 5¢ surcharge for a plastic bag designed for one-time use distributed to a customer at the point of retail sale. A retailer retains 2¢ from the surcharge for administrative costs. The revenues from the plastic bag surcharge are credited to the Plastics Recycling Fund administered by the Department of Environmental Protection for the purpose of promoting recycling efforts related to plastics. A retailer may provide recyclable paper bags to bag products at the point of sale. A retailer must provide reusable bags for purchase by a customer. (Devin) This bill was referred to committee on February 12th 2015 and on March 23rd 2015 at 9:00am there was a hearing held in front of the Environment and Natural Resources Committee at the Cross Building in Augusta Maine. The committee heard public testimony of more than twenty people. Some very much in favor of the bill passing, some opposed and some nether for or against but just making sure their voice was heard. Some statements included: * 19 other states already regulate the use of plastic bags * If I were charged a fee for forgetting my reusable bags I may be more apt to remember them * Ireland charges 33¢ per bag * The bottle bill has had success in Maine, this will too * Is this a plastic problem or a people problem? * I think the bag is the victim here
On April 1st 2015 the committee held a work session. There were revisions and amendments made to the original bill LD 325. This amendment, which is the majority report of the committee, replaces the bill and changes the title. It prohibits a retailer from using plastic bags to bag products at the point of retail sale or otherwise make plastic bags available to customers, with exceptions for certain types of plastic bags. This prohibition is effective September 1, 2020. A retailer may provide recyclable paper bags to bag products at the point of sale and must provide reusable bags for purchase by a customer. The amendment also makes changes to existing law regarding retailer collection and recycling of used plastic bags to ensure consistency with the implementation of the plastic bag prohibition. The title will now be An Act To Phase Out the Use of Single-use Plastic Shopping Bags. There was more debate among the committee members and they ended up a split vote with a majority, seven members voting ought to pass as amended and six voting ought not to pass.
The bill will now go to the Senate and House of Representatives to be voted on. Unfortunately, senator Saviello who sits on the committee is convinced that if the bill passes through all proper channels the Governor will veto it once it gets to him. Even if the governor does veto the bill hopefully we have brought some light to the topic. Even if we made a difference to one or two people who will remember their reusable shopping bag next time they get out of their car to go into the grocery store. It is worth it.
Works Cited
Conservation, Adventurers and Scientists for. 2014 New England Microplastics Project - Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation. n.d. 26 April 2015.
Devin, Mick. Legislature.Maine.Gov. n.d.
EarthTalk. Plastic Grocery Bags How Long It Takes Them To Decompose. 10 September 2010. Document. 22 April 2015.
Lepoutre, Priscilla. "The Manufacture of Polyethylene." n.d. X-Polymers-J-Polyethylene-5. PDF. 26 April 2015.
Petru, Alexis. "A Brief History of the Plastic Bag." (2014). Article.
Plastics News. "China Trade group reports on drop in plastic bag use." 2009.