Legislation limiting plastic bags is slowly being introduced in jurisdictions around the world, from individual municipalities to entire countries, but there’s always room for improvement. This is what Dalhousie University Master of Resource and Environmental Management candidate Shen Molloy is seeking to address in her research.

Shen, with the guidance of her research supervisor Dr. Andrew Medeiros, has designed a survey to better understand public perception of plastic bag bans in Atlantic Canada. Currently, there is a ban in place on Prince Edward Island, bans coming later in 2020 for Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador, but no plans for a ban in New Brunswick. Shen hopes that the results of this research will be used to make recommendations to legislators on the importance of taking action against plastic pollution.

“I hope to gain a better understanding of how people are feeling about the ban and what their concerns are surrounding single use plastic and future legislation,” said Shen. “I want to know: do people want this bag ban? Do people want more plastics banned as well? The two provinces that I’m really interested in are PEI and New Brunswick. On PEI, has the ban gone over well? How can it be improved? And then how can we use what I find and apply it to future legislation that will be hopefully implemented elsewhere (i.e. New Brunswick)?”

The survey gives respondents the opportunity to reflect on what they’re already doing, what they’d be willing to do, and what they’d like legislators to know. Shen hopes that this inspires respondents to also make more eco-conscious choices going forward.

Shen acknowledges that moving toward a zero waste lifestyle is a difficult adjustment, something that may be frustrating to some and insurmountable to others. But she was quick to share some information that might illustrate the severity and ubiquity of plastic pollution in our everyday lives: the presence of microplastics in the air, in our water, and even in the food we eat.

“People may eat a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” said Shen, citing a study commissioned by WWF and conducted by the University of Newcastle, Australia^{3 4}. This study was an aggregation of over 50 studies about the ingestion of microplastics and has for the first time shown that the average human intake of plastic each week is 5g, about the amount of plastic in a credit card.

Microplastics find their way into our environment through plastic pollution. Plastic bags, cups, packaging, and more make their way into our waterways. Tossed in the current, the plastic gets shredded into small, almost microscopic pieces, but never fully breaks down. That plastic finds its way back to us in many ways. Eliminating the production of plastic from the beginning is the easiest way to reduce the amount of plastic present in our environment. Plastic bag bans are just one of the many ways that governments can begin to take action.