{"id":60774,"date":"2015-07-13T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T11:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=60774"},"modified":"2015-07-10T21:36:14","modified_gmt":"2015-07-10T20:36:14","slug":"hawaii-just-banned-plastic-bags-at-grocery-checkouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/07\/hawaii-just-banned-plastic-bags-at-grocery-checkouts\/","title":{"rendered":"Hawaii Just Banned Plastic Bags at Grocery Checkouts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hawaii is the first US state to ban plastic bags from being distributed at grocery store checkouts. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"Credit:<\/a>

Credit: Margaret Monroe. WordPress<\/p><\/div>\n

July 7, 2015 – <\/em>Like France<\/a>, the state of Hawaii (US) seems intent on leading the rest of the world into a sustainable era. Recently news was shared of its plans to transform old buses<\/a> into homeless shelters, and now the Huffington Post has just released word<\/a> of its latest plan to reduce pollution by banning plastic bags from being used at grocery stores.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

With between 500 billion and trillion plastic bags consumed worldwide<\/a> each year, reducing their use is one way to ensure they no longer \u2018sack\u2019 the environment.<\/p>\n

And Hawaii is ahead of the game, as the City and County of Honolulu is now enforcing a ban <\/a>that prohibits stores from handing plastic bags to customers at checkout. This makes Oahu the last <\/em>populated island in the state to give the bags the boot. Some plastics are exempted, however, including compostable bags and those used within a store for bulk items or those used for medical or sanitary purpose.<\/p>\n

Because the United States is one of the biggest <\/em>contributors to ocean garbage patches, initiative taken by states like Hawaii and California (which passed a similar ban approved by state legislature<\/a>\u00a0but has since been put on hold) should hopefully inspire action elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The issue concerning plastic is that even if one consciously re-uses their bags, they are still more than likely to end sitting in a landfill, adding to the 28 billion pounds of plastic already clogging up the oceans. <\/a>Furthermore, they may then be ingested or otherwise harm marine animals, causing even more detriment to the environment.<\/p>\n

\"Credit:<\/a>

Credit: CarbonSolutions.com<\/p><\/div>\n

For this reason, one of the best things consumers can do is to bring their own reusable bag to a store and opt out of using plastic bags completely. In stores (Vitamin Cottage in the US is a great example) where bags aren\u2019t even offered<\/em> \u2013 only boxes to be recycled \u2013 no alternative can provide incentive for humans to form habit of bringing their own bag(s) to the store.<\/p>\n

Slowly but surely, it can be done, and Hawaii has taken the first steps<\/a> of making such a vision possible.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

Share your thoughts<\/strong>, Join the Discussion below!<\/em><\/p>\n

This article (Hawaii Just Banned Plastic Bags At Grocery Checkouts<\/a>) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a <\/em>Creative Commons<\/em><\/a> license with attribution to the author and <\/em>TrueActivist.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 trueactivist.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hawaii is the first US state to ban plastic bags from being distributed at grocery store checkouts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}