Two weeks ago Lancaster Township supervisors in Lancaster County voted to ban single-use plastic bags in the township joining more than 20 other Pennsylvania municipalities and over 450 across the country. The Lancaster Township action encourages consumers to utilize reusable bags and will allow businesses to charge customers for paper bags.

Single-use plastic bags are bad for the environment or they.? A report in 2020 from the Pennsylvania Legislative Budget and Finance Committee found that less than 1% of litter collected in 2019 in Pennsylvania was single-use plastic bags.

With us on The Spark Monday was Faran Savitz, Zero Waste Advocate, with the environmental group PennEnvironment who talked about why single-use plastic bags have a detremental impact on the environment,"The real problem with single use plastics and single use plastic bags is we use them for just a couple of minutes on average, and then we throw them away and don't really think about them. But the problem with plastic is there is no away whether that bag is going to a landfill, whether it's ending up in an incinerator or even worse, straight in our environment, it's harming us in some way, shape or form. Plastic bags can choke our wildlife. They can clog storm drains, making flooding worse. They can the effects of heavy rainfall worse, they break down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic called microplastics that we know they're in our air, they're in our water, they're in our food. We're eating, breathing and drinking them. Our wildlife consume them and they can cause a whole host of health effects. And that's not even to mention the fact that plastic comes from somewhere. Plastic is made, by and large from fossil fuels which harm our climate. They harm our air quality, our water quality. So at every step of the way, those plastic items we use for a couple of minutes are harming us. They're harming our health and they're harming our environment."

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