The Fight Over Plastic Bags

The fight over plastics bags is about a lot more than how to get groceries home.

- Adam Sternbergh, photographs by Bobby Doherty

Lauren Kuby had a simple ambition: She wanted to get something done. Kuby works by day at a sustainability institute that’s part of Arizona State University in Tempe, but last year she decided to run for City Council. President Obama had called for state and local action in his State of the Union address in 2015, encouraging municipalities to act as laboratories for progressive change, and Kuby took his words to heart. After she was sworn in to her new council seat in January, she started looking for a project to take on. She quickly found one: plastic bags. You are no doubt familiar with plastic bags—you probably own several dozen of them right now, likely folded in a drawer, or crammed under your sink, or stuffed inside other, larger plastic bags. (A singular feature of the plastic bag is that it’s one of the few pieces of refuse that can, cannibalistically, contain itself.) Because if you are a typical New Yorker, you go through roughly 620 single-use plastic bags a year. If that figure sounds high, consider this: It’s about two a day. Now think about the last 24 hours of your life. Did you get a plastic bag at the deli? At Fairway? Did a bag come wrapped around your Seamless order? All of the above? In a year, New York City as a whole manages to go through 5.2 billion single-use plastic bags. That’s about 10,000 bags a minute—the vast majority of which end up as landfill.