Banning plastic bags limits litter

At tens of thousands of shoreline cleanups across the United States in recent years, volunteers logged each piece of litter they pulled from the edges of lakes, rivers and beaches into a global database.

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One of the most common entries? Plastic bags.

But in places throughout the US where plastic bags require a fee or have been banned, fewer bags end up at the water's edge, according to research published Thursday in Science.

Lightweight and abundant, thin plastic bags often slip out of trash cans and recycling bins, travel in the wind and end up in bodies of water, where they pose serious risks to wildlife, which can become entangled or ingest them. They also break down into harmful microplastics, which have been found nearly everywhere on Earth.