I found this article particularly interesting because it’s a step away from the usual sources of human development which have practically ruined our city. When we think of things that harm our city, the usual things that come to mind are pollution, urban heat island effect, using of natural resources, etc. However, we don’t think about plastic bags and how they fit into the equation of messing up the environment. New York City is a great hub of everything, which includes shopping for various things. In Beijing, 3% of the house waste is usually plastic materials which adds up to 140,000 ton each year. According to New York Magazine, New York City (as a whole) goes through 5.2 billion single use plastic bags a year. That comes out to be around 10,000 bags a minute. I didn’t think much about using plastic bags before but when you look up the statistics and look at the numbers, you can see how the numbers actually add up to a lot more than you would expect. In a lot of supermarkets, the employees usually double bag every single time even when the items don’t require a second bag. Sometimes I’ve told employees to just single bag it but they continue to double bag. One way to fix this problem of plastic bags is not to get rid of plastic bags entirely (yet). First, employees should be told about not double bagging because that just doubles the negative effects plastic bags have on our environment. Once employees have understood that, it would be a good idea to give supermarkets and stores an incentive to use paper bags instead of plastic. Bloomingdales is a big retail store known for its big brown bags. If other retail stores such as Macys or Nordstrom were to implement a change like this, there is a lot of saving that could be done. Trader Joes has brown bags but those bags lack a handle which isn’t appealing to people. However, handled brown bags are an actual thing and would help a lot if they were made to be used in all of NYC. Certain parts of Canada already has the ban on plastic bags where people are required to pay a certain fee to use a plastic bag. Because of this ban, a lot of Canadians have their reusable bags and it seems to be working out well. If implemented properly, it can work out well in NYC as well.
