NEW YORK PLASTIC BAG BAN 

As of October 19, 2020  ​
the NY State plastic bag law
with a 5-cent fee on paper bags (in NYC)
is being enforced.
​Let's make sure it is enforced!
 If you see  NY stores handing out #singleuseplastic bags at checkout,
post on social media and tag @NYSDEC.
Details about the NY Bag Waste Reduction Law: ->

Make your own
no-sew reusable bag
(and face mask)
from an old t-shirt 
 - 5 steps in 10 minutes!
Watch our short how to video ->
​

100 billion plastic bags are used annually in the US 
and only about 2% of them are recycled.  
Plastic bags are polluting
from the start of production to end of life.
MICROPLASTIC MADNESS 
the movie and impact campaign

Interested in getting a plastic bag  ban passed where you live?
Scroll down ⬇︎ 
​for youth-action inspiration!

A HUGE shout out to all the students in Cafeteria Culture's programs (since 2014), who debated the pros and cons of a bag fee, collected plastic bag litter data, advocated for a bag bill, met with policy makers, testified at City Hall, educated neighbors, repurposed t-shirts into beautiful reusable  bags, and handed out thousands of free reusable bags while educating community about the plastic pollution problem! 

​Cafeteria Culture students from PS 34 Franklin D. Roosevelt, getting ready for NYC Bag Bill Rally at City Hall, NYC, March, 2015

THANK YOU:
 NYC Council Members Lander and Chin
for years of dedication to 
get the NYC bag bill passed!,
to all of our policy makers who 
supported this legislation,
and to  all of the amazing  NY
environmental organizations
who worked together to get this bill passed.! 

Students from CafCu partner schools with NYC Councilmembers Brad Lander and Margaret Chin spoke up at the City Hall Rally on April 13, 2016 ( MS246 Walt Whitman 8th graders, NEST+m 3rd graders,, Tompkins Sqaure Middle School 7th graders, and The Earth School 5th graders).

Some NY bag ban bill history:

NRDC Expert Blog
New York City Council Adopts Environmental Fee on Paper Bags
April 18, 2019 Eric A. Goldstein
​By a vote of 38 to 9, the Council adopted the legislation as a complement to the recently enacted New York State ban on carryout bags made of plastic. Taken together, the state ban on plastic bags and the city’s five-cent fee on paper bags represent one of the most significant waste reduction initiatives undertaken here in years. 
​ (read more ->)
​

Bag Waste Reduction Law​,  from NY DEC:
The plastic bag ban, which went into effect on March 1, 2020, was not enforced per an agreement between the parties in a lawsuit brought by Poly-Pak Industries, Inc., et al., in New York State Supreme Court. The Court issued a decision on August 20, 2020, upholding the law and most of the Part 351 regulations. DEC will begin enforcing the law and the regulations, in accordance with the Court's decision, on October 19, 2020.

As of October 19, 2020, any "person required to collect tax" must not distribute any plastic carryout bags to its customers unless such bags are exempt bags as provided for in the Bag Waste Reduction Law.

​

PS34M 5th grade change-makers from Cafeteria Culture's ARTS+ACTION program debated the NYC bag bill, made bags to give away to neighbors, and went to City Hall to share their knowledge with City Council Members.

National Park Service Ranger Dan Meharg - at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in NYC - explains to students how plastic bags threaten turtles and birds.

Bag Fees Work!

 WHY WE NEED A PLASTIC BAG BAN WITH A FEE
Plastic bag bans without fees on paper fail to change consumer behavior, leading everyone to switch to paper bags. Paper bags have their own negative environmental impacts.

Chicago and Honolulu first enacted bans without a fee,
​only to repeal their laws within months.

Survey shows big switch to reusable bags in Suffolk County
A 5-cent fee on plastic bags was imposed by the county on Jan. 1 of this year.
NEWSDAY, April 19, 2018
By Joan Gralla @JoanGralla

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Cities and countries around the world have already enacted successful bag fee laws.
Washington DC reduced single use bags by 60%
​with just a 5 cent fee!
​
England's plastic bag usage dropped 85%
​since a 5p charge was introduced The Guardian, July 29, 2016
​

NY State uses 23 Billion plastic bags per year and New York City continues to spend $12.5 million/year to send over 9 billion plastic bags to landfills and incinerators annually,
​
According to an estimate by the World Economic Forum, “without significant action, there may be more plastic than fish in the ocean, by weight, by 2050.”

NYC waters are no exception to plastic bag pollution and #whales are returning as regular visitors nearby! If you care about the health of our oceans, wildlife, & seafood, call your @NYSenate - ask to sign bag fee/ban bill. @BagItNYC @gothamwhale pic.twitter.com/Yp8WnrLMhE

— Cafeteria Culture (@CafeteriaCu) April 13, 2018

Whales are back in NYC coastal waters.
Read about NY coastal whales at Gotham Whale.
Let's keep plastic bags out of their stomachs!

From THE GUARDIAN, June 2, 2018

Follow Cafcu for updates
FACEBOOK               YOUTUBE- CafCu Media
INSTA @CafCu         TWITTER @CafeteriaCu

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Watch LITTER MONSTERS, with youth-made stop motion animation!
Learn how plastic street litter flows into our rivers and bays on rainy days to become deadly marine pollution

Watch LITTER MONSTERS on Vimeo here ->​​
​

What NYC students say about the #BYObag law:

10 reasons why NY needs a bag fee/ban law (2019)

• NYC spends $12.5 MILLION a year just to send ​91,000 tons of thrown away plastic bags to landfills and incinerators every year!​
• New Yorkers use and discard 10 billion single-use carryout bags per year!
• In New York City, on rainy days, large amounts of water can cause plastic street litter to wash into our sewer systems and out to our local waterways, eventually ending up in the ocean.
• Plastic bags, utensils, and straws are the most common debris (litter) items found during beach cleanups.
• About 80% of plastics found in the oceans come from land based sources. 
• Many marine animals, birds, and fish consume plastic, either because they mistake it for food or ingest it accidentally. 
• Marine plastic pollution has impacted at least 267 species worldwide, including 86% of all sea turtle species, 44% of all seabird species and 43% of all marine mammal species. The impacts include fatalities (death) as a result of ingestion (eating), starvation, suffocation, infection, drowning, and entanglement.
• Every minute, the equivalent of one truck load of garbage is dumped into the oceans worldwide. If no action is taken, this is expected to increase to two garbage track loads per minute by 2030 and four truck loads per minute by 2050. (The Guardian on Ellen MacArthur report)
• Plastic litter does not biodegrade (or break down into organic material). Instead, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, due to sunlight and physical factors, becoming microplastics. 
• The scientific community is racing to understand how growing amounts of microplastics in our oceans are effecting organisms "as well as the risk posed to human health though consumption of contaminated food." (UNEP frontiers Report 2016)

watch CNN's:  PLASTIC ISLAND - How our throwaway culture is turning paradise into a graveyard 

Nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists today. More than five trillion pieces of plastic are already in the oceans, and by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish, by weight, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Some 8 million tons of plastic trash leak into the ocean annually, and it's getting worse every year. 

PLASTICS AND HUMAN HEALTH

- READ THIS! 
​ IMPORTANT NEW REPORT on the human health impacts of plastic 
​throughout the lifecycle - from cradle to grave

Cafeteria Culture and young citizen scientists are looking closely at the microplastiics found at Valentino Pier, NYC Park in Red Hook Brooklyn.

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​Microplastics are in New York City's waters and on our beaches
 NY/NJ Baykeepers Report, estimates
​165 million particles floating in NYC waterways

Is there plastic debris in our seafood? ​
Five questions for Dr. Chelsea Rochman about Plastic in our Seas and Seafood. 
​Huffington Post, Jan 20, 2016

Our data went straight to our stomachs—the ghost of waste management’s past is indeed coming back to haunt us on our own dinner plates...

For humans, all we know at this point is that there is no doubt we are eating plastic when we eat seafood. Studies have shown plastic debris in shellfish, fish and even sea salt. So, yes, we need more research to answer questions about how plastic debris may impact food security (i.e. fish stocks) and food safety.

​But more importantly, our results suggest we take our waste management more seriously now to prevent plastic debris from ending up on our dinner plate period.
​

Plastic bag litter is a threat to our public health and the health of our seafood web!

Plastic bags are made from the polymer, polyethylene (PE), which when in the oceans, "has the highest capacity of toxification among all plastics."         from Professor Hideshige Takada, PhD, who presented at the United Nations, June 2016  
read the full statement from International Pellet Watch

• 80% of all plastic marine litter originates on land.
• Plastics are made with toxic chemicals. We all know better than to eat our plastic bags, right? But plastic bags become even more toxic once they break down in the marine environment.
• Plastic bag litter easily breaks down into tiny pieces called microplastics, which act like sponges in the ocean and absorb toxic chemicals, such as PCB's and flame retardants. So, when a fish eats a piece of plastic, it is eating these chemicals too.
• New research shows that fish are eating the plastic that we dump into the oceans . See this study showing how "fish are exposed to a mixture of polyethylene [what plastic bags are made of] with chemical pollutants sorbed from the marine environment, bioaccumulate these chemical pollutants and suffer liver toxicity and pathology"

SEA OF PLASTIC TRASH
Plastic debris in oceans a growing hazard as toxins climb the food chain
The Japan Times, BY TOMOKO OTAKE, July 19, 2016

excerpts:
According to Hideshige Takada, a professor at the laboratory of organic geochemistry at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and a foremost researcher in the field, 90 percent of microplastics come from plastics that we use in daily life that fall through the recycling system, such as plastic waste that blows out of trash bins and washes into rivers or fetches up on beaches.
When exposed to ultraviolet rays in strong sunlight, plastics decay and break into small pieces. When they become tiny particles, they are easily carried offshore and accumulate in the oceans...
​
Microplastics also absorb pollutants from the ocean. Among the chemicals that stick to them are carcinogenic and highly toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), industrial chemicals that were widely used in electric appliances until the 1970s, and PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers), which are used as flame retardants and affect thyroid function.

The level of pollutants accumulated in the human body, therefore, is not yet high enough to pose a health risk. But if the volume of marine plastic debris continues to swell, the amount of chemicals we consume through food could eventually threaten our health, he added.

NYC youth take action to reduce plastic marine pollution.

Learn more about Cafeteria Culture's
PLASTIC FREE WATERS curriculum -  
​citizen science and civic action.
with media and the arts 

Your tax-deductible donation 
will help us to share this curriculum
for all schools to use for free!

Support environmental-STEM education in NYC underserved public schools

​Learn more about plastic marine pollution here ->

Reasons to Support A Bag Ban in Your Community

Turtle pooping out a plastic bag. (photo credit: Kensuke Yokoi for "It's Everybody's Ocean" - a documentary by Atsuko Quirk)

Plastic bags cost the public money

•  New York City pays an estimated $10 million to transport 100,000 tons of plastic bags to landfills in other states each year.
• Shopping bags jam expensive machinery at recycling plants and contaminate the recycling stream, increasing costs.

Above: SIMS Municipal Recycling Plant in Brooklyn. Endless NYC plastic bag trash must separated from recyclables, which are then sent to landfills, adding cost and greenhouse gas emissions to the recycling process.
​

PLASTIC BAGS are made from fossil fuels.

POLLUTING PLASTIC BAGS ARE EVERYWHERE.
PLASTIC BAGS cling to our trees, fill up our gutters, clog our sewers, make our parks ugly, and end up in oceans, our marine wildlife and in our seafood dinner!

POLLUTING PLASTIC BAGS HAVE NO BORDERS. 
We now have a staggering 270 million metric tons of PLASTIC MARINE POLLUTION, degrading into tiny microplastics in our waterways and contaminating our food chain.

Plastic bags are eaten by marine animals,
​blocking their intestines and starving them to death.
Studies show that tiny toxic microplastics are entering fish tissues.

EVEN THE PLASTIC BAGS YOU "THROW AWAY" ARE A PROBLEM!
When we throw "away" plastic, it is either burned in an incinerator or exported in carbon spewing trucks to out-of-state landfills - in somebody else's backyard - to stay forever. 

​TEACHING STUDENTS to be ADVOCATES  
ARTS+MEDIA for Climate Action

PS 34 M students made their own reusable bags from Tee shirts and handed them out to neighbors on Ave. C in Manhattan, as part of Cafeteria Culture's ARTS+MEDIA for Climate Action program.

BAG BILL LESSONS! 

•  PS 34 5th grade students participated in a Socratic discussion, sharing view points of the pros and cons of NYC's bag bill. 
• Students learned how to make no-sew, sturdy reusable bags from old or no longer used tee shirts! 
• Students designed BYOBag logos! This intro to Communication & Design lesson is an excellent way to heighten student awareness of the role that design and advertising play in our everyday lives. 

Pictured above, a master reusable bag maker and PS 34's 5th grade teachers testing out the bags!

• Bag Give-away! Students went out into the neighborhood to promote positive "green" behavior.
• Cafeteria Culture organized a Round Table discussion with NYC Council Member Rosie Mendez! 100 4th-5th graders from  PS 34 M, Children's Workshop School and The Earth School.

•  Persuasive Writing - The students are knowledgeable  inspired, and eager to share their well informed opinions!

PS 34 M students sharing opinions and ideas with NYC Council Woman Rosie Mendez and 100 students from neighboring schools on the NYC Bag Bill. CM Mendez later signed onto the bill, Intro 209!

Children's Workshop School students sharing opinions and ideas with CM Rosie Mendez and 100 5th grade students. Thank you, CM Mendez!

A bag making expert at PS 34 M! #MYObag

More Resources from plasticbaglaws.org

Resources for banning plastic bags in your community from MassGreen.org ->

​Looking for K-12 Lesson Plans on Marine Debris?
NOAA - TURNING THE TIDE ON TRASH
K-12 Lesson plans and background information on Marine Debris topics