Tim Smith, who heads Walden Asset Management shareowner engagement program, noted, "Increasingly, investors are stepping up to address the explosion of plastic pollution and, as stockholders, are urging companies to enact solutions rather than contribute to the problem." Investors including Walden also have reached out to prominent companies that belong to the Plastics Industry Association, which lobbies for statewide pre-emption of plastic bag ordinances through its American Progressive Bag Alliance division. This circular lifecycle of plastic bags from retailers to rivers to volunteer beach cleanups is irresponsible and does not collect all the plastic bags polluted. The retailers are creating plastic bag pollution that is only partially collected in the cleanups. Free distribution of plastic bags is counterproductive to these commitments and company programs. 14, Life Below Water, and support beach and litter cleanups through store donations and employee participation. Many companies have public commitments to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including Goal No. As concerned investors who incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) analysis into investment decision-making and shareholder engagement, the investors stated that each company’s limited transparency on distribution performance metrics prevents investors from making informed decisions on potential reputational and financial risks to the company. retail store performance metrics and policies pertaining to plastic shopping bag distribution. This information is known by companies through their purchasing system and easily can be publicly stated to prove company performance on reducing plastic waste and pollution.Ī group of 14 investors with billions of dollars in assets, convened by Walden Asset Management, recently wrote to the CEOs of 11 companies requesting public disclosure of their U.S. retailers showed that no company that distributes for free, or sells plastic shopping bags for a fee, reports the actual number of plastic bags that it distributes each year. What gets reported, gets reducedĪ survey of the largest 80 U.S. Plastic bag recycling schemes where customers are encouraged to return plastic bags to stores for recycling have proven to be a distracting failure for stopping plastic bag pollution. Worse, many people mix plastic bags with other recyclables, which can cause serious harm to municipal recycling systems. Plastic bag recycling schemes where customers are encouraged to return plastic bags to stores for recycling have proven to be a distracting failure for stopping plastic bag pollution with only 1 percent of bags returned in the United States.
#Retail bags free
retailers have continued to give out free plastic shopping bags and hide behind policies that "give customers better choices," "encourage customers to bring their own reusable bags" or "provide recycling bins for return of plastic bags." Retailers have lagged in reducing the plastic bag pollution that their businesses cause and often fight adoption of bag laws, as the Food Industry Alliance is doing in New York state. Plastic bag pollution still harms communities and species because U.S. The production of plastic bags has continued to grow since 2007, and plastic pollution dramatically has increased. Environmental Protection Agency, which says the average bag takes up to 1,000 years to break down. Unfortunately, too few companies are taking meaningful action.Īmericans throw away an estimated 100 billion plastic bags a year, according to the U.S. The spread of plastic bag laws is much-needed progress in stopping plastic pollution, but governments cannot solve the problem in the next decade without action by retailers. In the United States, state and local plastic bag ordinances are spreading. The call to action and others like it over the past decade have motivated about 140 countries to enact bag ordinances and, increasingly, ban plastic shopping bags altogether. The article noted, "The most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, the lowly plastic bag, is an environmental scourge like none other, sapping the life out of our oceans and thwarting our attempts to recycle it." "Plastic bags are killing us," said the headline from 2007 Salon article.