Background
To a sea turtle, a plastic bag floating in the ocean looks a lot like dinner: a jellyfish, to be precise. That's why the plastic bags that find their way into the Atlantic pose an often-fatal risk to wildlife. We're working to build support for a ban on plastic bags in New Jersey.
The average American uses 500 plastic bags a year – that’s 100 billion bags a year that we use on average as a country, and all this plastic not only clogs up our landfills, it hurts our ocean and marine wildlife. Off of our coast swirls a sea of plastic soup. This floating trash island is full of plastic bags and other artificial debris. If we don't start cleaning up our act here in New Jersey, it will only keep growing.
New Jersey’s shore and waterways are a key part of our culture and economy. From the Barnegat bay to the Delaware water gap, plastic pollution poses a huge threat to the places we cherish and to our natural ecosystems. We need to do everything we can to protect it, and the easiest thing we can do is ban plastic bags. They clog our shores and swirl in our ocean, killing millions of sea turtles and marine life every year.
Of course, the companies that make and sell these billions of bags every year are fighting to maintain the status quo, fronted by the lobbying team from the American Chemistry Council. But we need to do what is best for the Atlantic Ocean and our future.
Action
The rest of the country and world is already taking action. More than 25 countries have plastic bag bans including India and China, and more than 81 cities and counties across the country have banned bags as well. It’s time for New Jersey to take a stand in cleaning up plastic pollution in the U.S. We've gotten a good start. Already, cities in New Jersey have proposed plastic bag bans.
This year, we're working to get the 4 cities our chapters are in to ban single-use plastic bags. While this will do good immediately, we will also work to leverage that action towards more bans in the future!
Nothing we use for 5 minutes should pollute our oceans for 500 years.