Last June, India’s environment minister pledged to “eliminate all single-use plastics from our beautiful country” by 2022. The European Union wants to ban plastic straws and plates.(2) More than 33 countries have local or national bans on plastic bags, but many of these aren’t enforced. When it comes to items like take-out containers, straws, and plastic shopping bags, “we're using a material that will last for, as far as we know, forever,” says Emma Priestland of Friends of the Earth. “But we're using this in applications that are used once, for a few seconds. It has no meaning to us. We discard it without any pause for what happens to it at the end of life.” That’s changing around the world.

No affordable, sustainable alternatives: Bans won’t work without affordable, sustainable alternatives and better waste management. And many “green” replacements for plastic, like paper bags, create more pollution than the polymer they’re meant to replace. More than a year after Kenya’s ban on thin plastic bags went into effect, bags of thicker plastic have filled the void. Swati Sambyal, of the Center for Science and the Environment in New Delhi, says reusable cloth bags, at a price range of between 50 and 150 rupees (between .60 and 1.80 Euros) “would be royally expensive” for poorer families. If reusable bags are to replace disposable plastic, they must be free or subsidized, she says. Merchants too, need alternatives. When she started a sorbet stand in Johannesburg, South Africa, Thula Matema was dismayed to learn that disposable wooden spoons were 10 times more expensive than plastic. “As a business owner, the cheapest thing is plastic,” she says.