Ohio shoppers are still able to use as many free plastic bags as they want.
But in places like San Francisco, which banned plastic bags in March 2008, the question of “paper or plastic” is irrelevant.
A representative for the Ohio branch of the Environmental Protection Agency said while there have been several conversations to ban plastic bags in Ohio, there are no plans to implement a ban.
Gary Silverman, the director of sustainability at the University, said the way to get the ban in place would have to be done legislatively.
“There’s really no difference in the set up from San Francisco to here, it’s just a matter of political will,” he said. “Whether or not we’re interested in doing the right thing.”
He said the ban itself is just a minor change in lifestyle, but can have a much larger overall effect.
“There would be some minor modifications in the way people live their lives now,” he said. “The long term though, would be [that] we wouldn’t be implicated by all of this plastic.”
Plastic bags are causing a problem, according to the Environmental Literacy Council, an independent council that researches various environmental problems. According to their Web site, more than 500 billion plastic bags are used each year, and less than 1 percent of them are recycled. The problem is that most plastic bags are non-biodegradable.
In January, the Department of Environmental Protection in Florida started to establish guidelines to ban plastic bags by 2015.
This follows bans in other parts of the United States, such as San Francisco and Washington D.C., which passed a plastic bag tax in June 2009 and was implemented last month.
The tax in Washington, D.C. means residents need to pay 5 cents for each plastic bag they use in stores. The extra tax is estimated to cost families in the area $5 million in 2010, according to ELC’s Web site.
EPA spokeswomen Karen Thompson said the plastic bag issue isn’t being proposed in the United States.
“There are no plans to make this a national ban or tax,” she said.
Other countries like Ireland, U.K., Australia and China have implemented taxes on plastic bags as early as 2002.
