The quantity of plastic bags we take home is staggering: the average family accumulates 60 bags in only four trips to the grocery store; the average American adult takes home close to 1,500 bags annually. Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute.  Eliminating single-use plastic bags will force consumers to bring their own bag, without charging a fee that many of our citizens and others who shop in our community could not afford to pay.

Even when disposed of correctly, plastic bags routinely blow out of collection sites, ending up in our neighborhood trees, roadsides, sewers, and streams. Dealing with this stream of single-use plastic is expensive.  Single-use plastic bags are the bane of sewer districts and recycling centers, clogging up drains, equipment, and time. Belleville already has an out of date water treatment plant in need of repairs. This leads to cities having to pay more for recycling, which gets passed on to every citizen. Some cities are even getting rid of recycling because it is too expensive. 

Living Lands and Waters- a local conservation organization- collected 8,798 plastic bags in 2017 from the Mississippi River Watershed, which encompasses 1/3 of the United States.  As a major shopping area for smaller towns and unincorporated parts of St. Clair County, getting rid of the bags here will have a major impact on the entire Metro-East region!