Story at a glance
- Banning single-use plastic bags, utensils, straws, cigarette filters and foam food containers can considerably reduce plastic waste.
- A new report from the Ocean Conservancy found that banning these five items can reduce the amount of plastic in circulation by 1.4 million tons a year.
- The five items are part of longer list of the most commonly found items polluting beaches and waterways.
Five single-use plastic items like cigarette filters and plastic straws should be banned to reduce the amount of plastics polluting our oceans, according to a new report from the Ocean Conservancy.
Bans on single-use plastic bags, straws, cutlery, cigarette filters and Styrofoam food containers in the United States would reduce plastics usage by about 450 billion pieces a year.
That reduction would shrink the country’s plastic waste by 1.4 million tons, according to the report.
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Eliminating these five plastic items would help keep oceans cleaner and safer for wildlife and help fight the battle against climate change.
Stopping the production of these products would mean about 7 million metric tons fewer CO2 emissions would be produced every year or the equivalent of taking 1.5 million cars off the road a year, the report notes.
The Ocean Conservancy argues that the five items can be effectively banned since things like plastic straws or plastic bags “are not needed or because they can be easily replaced with reusable options.”
The organization also proposed banning the products since they are not recyclable.
Almost 70 percent of the items most commonly found polluting beaches, including the five items in the report, are not recyclable, according to an Ocean Conservancy analysis of International Coast Cleanup (ICC) data.
“We have nearly 40 years’ worth of cleanup data showing that these five items are some of the most common and harmful types of plastics found on beaches worldwide, and what ties them all together is that the only viable solution is to eliminate them altogether,” said Anja Brandon, associate director of U.S. plastics policy at Ocean Conservancy.
“Not only would eliminating these items have an immediate positive impact on beaches and waterways, but it would also help us improve recycling by keeping some of the most common non-recyclable items from mucking up our waste stream.”
The five items are part of a larger ICC list of the most frequently found things polluting beaches and waterways which includes bottle caps, lids and candy wrappers.
More than 30 countries including Chile, Kenya, India and Canada have passed national bans on some of the five single-use plastic items mentioned in the report.
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