Some states are considering (or have enacted) bans on plastic bags, but in Maine, environmentalists and retailers are working together to encourage the use of reusable bags—voluntarily.

The Natural Resources Council of Maine is participating in a voluntary effort by retailers to encourage Mainers to use reusable bags instead of carrying home their groceries in throw away plastic bags. Also on board for the voluntary effort instead of an outright ban or tax is the Maine State Chamber of Commerce.  A plastic bag ban was under consideration in committee, as were taxes or fees on the throw away bags, but lawmakers chose a voluntary effort, and a hard goal of reducing plastic bag use by at least a third by 2013.

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Two separate studies conducted by ocean research groups found that millions of micro-particles of plastic are floating in the waters between Bermuda and Portugal’s mid-Atlantic Azores islands, threatening fish, ocean mammals and, potentially, the sea life humans farm for food.

The studies describe a soup of micro-particles similar to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a phenomenon discovered a decade ago between Hawaii and California that researchers say is likely to exist in other places around the globe.

“I think a lot of people have this idea that there’s a plastic garbage island out there in the sea, and that’s not really what we see out there,” Lead investigator Kara Lavender Law said. “If you’re not looking for anything, you wouldn’t see these plastic particles, but we know that there are clearly millions of them out there.”

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We recently stumbled upon an excellent resource in the battle to reduce single use plastic bag use—a recently published report from the Florida DEP on retail bag use and ways to curb it. While its data is skewed towards the authoring state, it’s chock-full of interesting and useful information to anyone—worldwide—contemplating a reusable bag program. Many of the interesting tidbits are things we at Bulletin Bag [.com] have covered in other blogs (The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, getting by without plastic bags, etc.), but we wanted to discuss one thing we haven’t touched on in any of our other writings: biodegradable bags.

While biodegradable and compostable bags aren’t new to market, there has been a relatively new push towards their use as alternative to traditional plastic bags. Even though bags that don’t persist in the environment sound like a positive step, there are serious drawbacks.

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On January 6th , I saw a great interview on The Colbert Report. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, Stephen Colbert is the host and executive producer of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series on Comedy Central. I am a huge fan of his and the show is hilarious.

Colbert’s guest was Captain Charles Moore. He’s the person who stumbled onto the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is believed to be the world’s largest dump. Plastic debris from the world over makes its way into waterways, where it’s carried out to sea and trapped in swirling ocean currents, thereby forming a trash dump in the North Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas.

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500,000,000,000: Society’s annual consumption rate of plastic bags–nearly 1 million per minute.
380,000,000,000: Number of plastic shopping bags consumed by Americans per year.
12,000,000: Barrels of oil used per year to produce plastic shopping bags used by Americans.
1,000,000: Seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals & sea turtles worldwide die yearly from ingesting plastics.
46,000: Pieces of plastic rubbish found on every square mile of central Pacific Ocean.
1,460: Number of plastic bags used each year by the average family of four.
1,000: Number of years that single-use plastic bags can remain on our planet.
75: Percentage of all grocery bags used in the US that are plastic.
2: Percentage of plastic bags produced each year that are recycled.
1: Number of high-quality reusable bags needed to eliminate up to 1,000 plastic bags.

Use One, Save 1,000.