Milestones: State groups secure plastic bans

The rise and reign of single-use plastics

In the 1970s, Coke and Pepsi began what would become a landmark shift in their operations: They started producing more plastic bottles and fewer glass ones.

Since then, countless consumer products have adopted cheaper, lighter, more malleable or more durable plastic over other materials.

The problem, of course, is two-fold: Plastic is far harder and more expensive to recycle than glass, aluminum or paper – some would say it’s nearly impossible. And it sticks around in the environment forever.

As a result, of the 9 billion tons of plastic produced in the world since the 1950s, 7 billion tons of it have ended up as trash. The United States alone throws out enough plastic waste to fill 1.5 football stadiums every day, as evidenced by the plastic strewn throughout our streets, parks and oceans like the leftover debris from a litterbug family picnic.

Our Zero Waste team adopted a commonsense approach to this plastic pollution, one based on some good old-fashioned common sense: When your bathtub is overflowing, the first thing you do is turn off the tap. Now that our planet is being overwhelmed by plastic, the first thing we should do is stop making, selling and using so much of the stuff — especially the single-use products that we don’t need to make out of plastic, if we need to make them at all.

California bans the bag

In 1997, the oceanographer Charles Moore discovered in the remote North Pacific Ocean what became known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: a soup of plastic trash caught by ocean currents in an area twice the size of Texas.

As scientists investigated the problem, they discovered that plastic debris — in the Atlantic, the Indian as well as the Pacific — was harming and even killing ocean wildlife. For example, sea turtles were mistaking floating plastic bags for jellyfish, eating the bags and often paying with their lives.

By 2010, CALPIRG and Environment California had endorsed statewide legislation that would ban one of the worst contributors to wildlife-killing plastic pollution: single-use plastic grocery bags. “Nothing we use for a few minutes should be allowed to pollute our oceans for hundreds of years,” said Environment California’s Dan Jacobson, in a line that he, and many others, would repeat in the years to come.

The bag ban bill stalled in the Legislature. But a funny thing happened as plastics industry lobbyists focused their attention on state lawmakers in Sacramento: Our organizers and canvassers helped convince towns, cities and counties to ban the bag.

At first, smaller communities, such as Malibu and Sunnyvale, took action. As our staff canvassed support throughout the state, momentum grew. Entering 2013, dozens of local California jurisdictions had banned the bag. Yet on May 30 of that year, the California Senate voted down a statewide bag ban by a single vote — 18 to 17.

Environment California, CALPIRG and our coalition kept building the pressure. On June 26, 2013, Los Angeles became the largest city to ban the bag. By 2014, at least 140 California counties, cities and towns had done so, representing a third of the state’s population. Our staff packed up a giant inflatable turtle and took it on a media tour up and down the state, attracting attention and support for action. Actors, including Rosario Dawson and Amy Smart, joined us in lobbying state lawmakers.

Meanwhile, the economic equation for grocery stores had changed: Would they rather contend with 140 separate plastic bag bans? Or a single statewide law?

The combination of strong local support and weakened industry opposition proved unbeatable. In 2014, the Senate approved the bag ban by a vote of 22-15, a six-vote swing from the previous year. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the nation’s first statewide bag ban bill on Sept. 30.

Maryland goes foam-free

A few years later and three thousand miles away, Maryland PIRG targeted an equally pervasive and harmful form of plastic waste: polystyrene foam. It keeps our coffee hot and our take-out fresh, but it also persists in our environment for hundreds of years.

In 2019, Maryland PIRG organizers worked with legislators, environmental groups, students, activists and community organizations to win a statewide ban on single-use polystyrene products. On Feb. 7 of that year, PIRG’s Emily Scarr testified on behalf of the ban. Environment Maryland canvassers knocked on 40,000 doors and collected more than 7,000 petition signatures in support, and Maryland lawmakers passed the statewide plastic foam ban — the nation’s first — in March 2019.

More states move beyond plastic

Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Washington all followed California’s lead and adopted their own plastic bag bans. Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Virginia have joined Maryland in banning polystyrene foam food containers. Washington upped the ante in April 2021 by passing a ban not just on polystyrene foam food containers, but a whole host of other foam products as well, from packing peanuts to drink coolers. Today, 33 percent of Americans live in a state with a robust ban on some type of single-use plastics.

In addition, PIRG is advocating on the national and state levels for “producer responsibility” bills, which require companies that make products and packaging to take financial responsibility for the waste their products become — thereby encouraging them to make more of their products reusable and recyclable. This past year, with the support of our state environmental groups’ staff and members, Maine and Oregon became the first two states to pass producer responsibility bills into law.

About this series: PIRG, Environment America and The Public Interest Network have achieved much more than we can cover on this page. You can find more milestones of our work on zero waste below. You can also explore an interactive timeline featuring more of our network’s zero waste milestones.