By Tobi Nussbaum, Ottawa Citizen, April 2, 2018
The decision made last week at Ottawa council to allow plastic bags in the composting stream is a short-sighted one on which I and two of my colleagues (councillors Jeff Leiper and Catherine McKenney) dissented.
Increasingly as a society, we are recognizing the costs of single-use plastic bags. At the production end, plastic bags are a non-renewable, petroleum-based product that take energy to produce – 12 million barrels’ worth worldwide each year. On the consumption side, these bags take up space in our increasingly costly landfill sites – if we’re lucky. If we’re not lucky, they end up in other even less desirable places. Only recently, a study in Scientific Reports outlined how the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has grown to over three times the size of continental France, weighing in at a staggering 80,000 metric tons.
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/nussbaum-heres-why-plastic-bags-shouldnt-be-in-the-green-bin