Plastic bag bans and fees reduce harmful bag litter on shorelines

Papp, Anna Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Methodology; Project administration; Validation; Visualization; Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing
Oremus, Kimberly L. Conceptualization; Methodology; Project administration; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Writing - review & editing

¹School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York NY, USA.
²School of Marine Science and Policy, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.
³Department of Economics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.
⁴Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.

Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] (A.P.); [email protected] (K.L.O.)

Received April 22, 2024

Received in revised form September 25, 2024

Accepted April 08, 2025

Science 388(6753), June 19, 2025. | DOI: 10.1126/science.adp9274

Plastic pollution threatens marine and freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide. Although plastic bag bans and taxes are increasingly implemented worldwide, their effectiveness in reducing plastic litter remains unknown. Leveraging the patchwork of bag policies across different geographic scales in the United States and citizen science data on 45,067 shoreline cleanups, we assess the impact of these policies on plastic bag litter. We find that plastic bag policies lead to a 25 to 47% decrease in plastic bags as a share of total items collected at cleanups relative to areas without policies, with taxes possibly further reducing shoreline litter. At a time when many jurisdictions are considering bag policies, while others are preemptively prohibiting them, our study provides evidence that they mitigate shoreline plastic pollution.