One in three U.S. residents are seeing less single-use plastic bags due to new policies, according to research published in Science on Thursday, June 19. Researchers found that bans and fees reduced ...

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 ...

Plastic bags littering the shoreline is a common sight on beaches around the world. CREDIT: Prasit Photo via Getty Images. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries ...

The study adds weight to less formal analyses of plastic bag bans conducted by advocacy organizations and could inform negotiations later this summer over the United Nations’ global plastics ...

Maybe you have been annoyed by the extra charge to get a plastic shopping bag, but a new study shows the policies actually help clean up shorelines.

Using crowdsourced data from shore cleanups, researchers found that areas that enacted plastic bag bans or fees had fewer bags littering their lakes, rivers and beaches than those without them.

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

That extra fee at the grocery store for a plastic shopping bag isn’t just an inconvenience –– it is actually making a difference for marine ecosystems, according to a new study. Policies ...

Plastic bag laws in the US vary considerably by state, county and town, which made it a useful place for researchers to test the effectiveness of bag policies. Policies range from bans and partial ...

There are also steps you can take so your plastic shopping bag doesn’t end up in the environment, Papp said. For one, if you do use a plastic bag, don’t let it fly away and create litter.