Department of Environmental Science & Policy, University of Southern Maine, 106 Bailey Hall, Gorham, ME 04038 USA.
Waste Manag. 2017 Dec;70:3-12. doi: 10.1016/j.wasman.2017.09.003. Epub 2017 Sep 19.
In the USA, local governments have the primary responsibility to manage MSW. However, local governments lack the authority to explicitly shift costs or responsibility back onto the producer for specific problem wastes. A particularly problematic waste for local governments is the single-use plastic bag. In 2014, in the USA, 103.465 billion single-use plastic shopping bags were consumed. Because of their extremely low recyclability rate, plastic bags remain a significant source of land-based litter and marine debris and impair stormwater management systems. They also reduce the effectiveness of automated recycling systems. In response, local governments increasingly have adopted a variety of measures specifically intended to reduce the store-level consumption of single-use shopping bags in 5 major categories: bans, imposition of fees and taxes, establishing minimum product design of bags, requiring consumer education, and mandating retailer take-back programs. As of September 2017, there were 271 local governments in the USA with plastic bag ordinances covering 9.7% of the nation's population. The majority (95%) of the ordinances is a ban on single-use plastic bags; 56.9% of these bans also include a mandatory fee on paper and/or reusable bags. For the fee-based ordinances, the mode is $0.10 per bag; every tax/fee ordinance allows retailers to retain some or all the collected fee. As local governments continue to increase their actions on plastic bags, 11 states have enacted laws to prohibit local governments from regulating single-use plastic bags. Because of the success with single-use bags, local governments are also enacting similar ordinances on single-use expanded polystyrene consumer products and other single-use plastic products.
在美国,地方政府承担着管理 MSW 的主要责任。然而,地方政府缺乏将特定问题废物的成本或责任明确转嫁给生产者的权力。对于地方政府来说,一个特别成问题的废物是一次性塑料袋。2014 年,美国共消费了 1034.65 亿个一次性塑料袋。由于其极低的可回收性,塑料袋仍然是陆地垃圾和海洋垃圾的重要来源,并损害了雨水管理系统。它们还降低了自动化回收系统的效率。作为回应,地方政府越来越多地采取了各种措施,特别是旨在减少商店层面一次性购物袋消费的 5 大类别:禁令、征收费用和税款、设定袋子的最低产品设计、要求消费者教育、以及强制零售商回收计划。截至 2017 年 9 月,美国有 271 个地方政府制定了涵盖全国 9.7%人口的塑料袋条例。这些条例中的大多数(95%)是禁止一次性塑料袋;其中 56.9%的禁令还包括对纸和/或可重复使用袋的强制性收费。对于基于收费的条例,收费模式是每个袋子 0.10 美元;每个税收/费用条例都允许零售商保留部分或全部收取的费用。随着地方政府继续加大对塑料袋的行动力度,有 11 个州已经颁布法律,禁止地方政府监管一次性塑料袋。由于一次性塑料袋取得了成功,地方政府也在对一次性发泡聚苯乙烯消费品和其他一次性塑料制品颁布类似的条例。