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But
are they truly effective?
Kenya has the strictest penalties for bag use, but the consumer alternatives to
plastic have come with growing pains.
“Okay, they are polypropylene, but they’re reusable and they’re not the
thin bags that can be carried by the wind,” he says. “The UN says that
Kenyans were using 100 million bags a year by supermarkets alone, so
we have saved 100 million bags. I would rate success at 80 percent.”
Even the most ardent proponents of bans are aware of the limitations.
Plastic bags are in the top five items found in beach and river cleanups
and the harm to wildlife has been well documented. Once in the sea,
they can quickly degrade. In a dramatic experiment at Plymouth
University in Britain, Richard Thompson, a marine scientist who coined
the term microplastics, and two of his students fed pieces of a plastic
bag to amphipods, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans, and found critters
could quickly shred a single bag into 1.75 million microscopic
fragments.
Bags are also consumed whole by sea turtles, dolphins and whales. In
the last month alone, two more dead whales, stomachs crammed with
bags and other plastics, washed up on beaches, adding to a growing
tally. In Kenya, it’s cattle and elephants.
In Denmark, which passed the world’s first bag tax in 1993, residents
use, on average, four plastic bags per year. By contrast, in the United
States, which is the largest generator, per capita, of plastic packaging
waste, Americans use almost one bag per person daily.
In the United States, the bag industry has sought legislation that would
improve recycling. Meanwhile, it has invested in bins placed at store
entrances in hopes that shoppers will drop off used bags that will be
remade into new bags, completing the circle. But trying to persuade
consumers in a nation with a nine percent recycling rate to take the
extra steps and cart used bags back to stores may prove to be a
Sisyphean task.
Once it took effect, the ban prompted the creation of “bag cartels” that
smuggled illegal plastic bags from neighboring Uganda and Tanzania.
Although the arrest of a roadside fruit seller caught with his apples in a
plastic bag was featured in media accounts, most of the enforcement
has focused on distributors, not lone sellers or consumers. Even so,
enforcement has been spotty and incomplete, as has a clear accounting
of the numbers of arrests and fines levied so far.
“The ban had to be drastic and harsh, otherwise Kenyans would have
ignored it,” says Walibia, the activist.