Last week, Free the Nation, a Pitt organization that focuses on environmental issues, joined… Last week, Free the Nation, a Pitt organization that focuses on environmental issues, joined forces with a similar group at Carnegie Mellon University to get professors across all disciplines to discuss the causes and implications of global climate change. One of the group’s major objectives for the year is to lobby the Pittsburgh City Council to pass a plastic bag tax, an initiative that has proven successful outside the United States.

In 2002, lawmakers in Ireland imposed a tax on plastic grocery bags, which required customers choosing to use the bags to pay an additional 33 cents per bag, according to The New York Times. And eight years later, the initiative, which came hand-in-hand with an advertising awareness campaign, has proven incredibly successful. Plastic bag use in Ireland has dropped more than 94 percent, and as Irish citizens became used to carrying their purchases in reusable cloth bags, plastic bags became socially unacceptable, The New York Times reported.

Ireland’s plastic bag campaign was an incredible success for environmental preservation and awareness, but American lawmakers have struggled to replicate similar initiatives in the United States. As a country, we use about 100 billion plastic bags – which take about 1,000 years to degrade – per year, and most of those bags end up in landfills or as litter. Lawmakers in Los Angeles and New York have tried to pass similar legislation limiting plastic bag use, but they’ve faced resistance from businesses and only achieved limited success, at best.

While city governments continue to struggle to pass legislation that would limit plastic bag usage, some retailers have gone ahead and done away with the bags on their own. Environmentally conscious grocery chain Whole Foods recently announced that it would begin to phase out plastic bag distribution – instead using recycled paper or cloth bags – with Earth Day as its target date to eliminate plastic bag distribution completely.

We encourage local retailers to follow Whole Foods’ example. Retailers have as much of a responsibility to cut down on plastic bag use as consumers, and by simply supplying reusable bags as an affordable alternative to plastic – an action Giant Eagle has already taken – we can begin to cut down on plastic bag use in and around Pittsburgh.

It’s unlikely that a national plastic bag tax like Ireland’s will be imposed in the United States any time soon, but as socially conscious retailers like Whole Foods and cities like San Francisco, which fought business resistance to pass a plastic bag ban last year, continue to fight the trend and change the image of plastic bag use, we are curbing the effects of global climate change.

We encourage the Pittsburgh City Council to consider Free the Nation’s arguments on a plastic bag tax. Fighting the effects of global warming and pollution has to start on a local level, and, as we struggle to keep our young people in the area, it’s time for Pittsburgh to show the rest of the country that we are an environmentally conscious city.