When you outlaw or discourage the sale of plastic bags, fewer of them end up as litter on beaches. That’s the intuitive finding of a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, which involved an ...

Plastic shopping bags, which have low recycling rates and often become litter when they blow away in the wind, are among the biggest culprits of plastic pollution in the ocean and along shorelines.

Researchers find that nationwide policies to ban plastic bags may be paying off, with fewer showing up during coastal cleanups. Ever since their invention in 1959, plastic bags have become synonymous ...

Plastic bag bans and fees have spread across the United States, and new research show they're doing a good job at cutting down on litter, although some rules work better than others. In places where ...

State and local policies to regulate the use of plastic bags have significantly reduced how many of them are found littered along U.S. shorelines — potentially cutting that type of waste in half in ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. It’s been more than a decade since ...

SPOKANE, Wash. -- "How many store bags did you use?" is the question replacing the old "paper or plastic?" in Washington. For years, shoppers have been paying for bags at grocery stores, convenience ...

Washington shoppers will pay 4 cents more per plastic grocery bag starting in January. But the bags themselves won’t get any thicker for at least another two years as lawmakers fine-tune the state’s ...

This is what the data says about plastic bag bans. Plastic bag bans have been popping up across the country for the past decade, but a lawmaker in one state is looking at walking back the law enacted ...