Plastic bag forest: provincial ban movement in Newfoundland

Sheilagh O’Leary spent last Sunday with about 300 volunteers, picking up and cleaning up an area of St. John’s that’s littered with garbage and plastic bags.

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And once again, O’Leary, a city councillor who describes the bags as “the bane of her existence”, is demanding a ban on single-use plastic bags.

“We know we don’t need them. We didn’t use them before the ’70’s.”

While she is running for Deputy Mayor in the city’s fall election, O’Leary says the city doesn’t have the authority to ban the bags. It must be a provincial ban she says.

“The reality is, this is our province, it’s not just our city. It’s like many things — we create false boundaries, but th

e reality is the environment bleeds out beyond those artificial boundaries,” O’Leary told CBC News in an interview this week.

Most retailers support the move, as do many consumers, with the growing awareness of the effect the bags have in the environment.

“These plastics, we’re ingesting them.”

“They say biodegradable but really what happens is they just break down into smaller micro-fibres, and that stuff gets ingested by animals, wildlife, marine animals and ends up in our diet,” O’Leary told CBC reporter Ryan Cooke.

O’Leary says the Municipalities of Newfoundland and Labrador passed a unanimous resolution in 2015 to enact a ban on single-use plastic bags, provincially.

“It’s not just about the pretty environment and how horrendous it looks on the East Coast Trail, or how it looks in the landfill, or how it drives me crazy because there’s three bags flying in my front trees in front of my personal property, it really is something that affects our health. These plastics, we’re ingesting them; we’re eating it all the time.

O’Leary says Fogo Island and Nain, and other communities in Labrador, have already enacted their own bans on the bags, but for St. John’s, the largest city in the province, the ban must be legislated provincially to really go into effect.

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