As have many Maine towns, Brunswick and Topsham are both trying to resolve the issues relating to packaging and plastic contamination of our oceans. We’re all used to getting bags at the store. The average American gathers 320 bags a year, and our combined use requires 100 billion barrels of oil plus lots of natural gas to make these bags. Once home, some may line a wastebasket, or pick up do waste. Up to 17 percent will be recycled; 83 percent will not be. Some plastic bags will go to landfill, where they will not break down. The rest will blow across the fields until they find a lake or rive, on their way to the ocean. In each ocean there a huge gyres where nothing lives, because plastic fills the ocean so intensely. Some are 200 miles wide, but the Pacific gyre is twice as large as Texas at it smallest, and almost the size of the USA when it expands.

We did this in only 50 years of plastic use. According to a UN Environmental research station, there are 46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of ocean. Paper bags require four times the carbon emissions to manufacture and transport that plastic bags require. And those carbon emissions are warming and acidifying our oceans so that lobsters are continuing to move north, and clams and mussels are having an increasingly hard time to grow their shells. That’s why many cities, states and countries are banning POS bags.

Do you like fish? It’s not a good idea to turn our oceans into areas where nothing lives, and watch these areas grow. Eating fish that have consumed a great deal of carcinogenic plastic is not an encouraging thought, but it is an increasing reality. Not only are we destroying the Earth’s largest habitat, but we are reducing the world’s food supply as our population continues to grow, and we move our fishermen to a life of unemployment. We’re now very used to plastic, and it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. But fifty ears ago, asbestos was a normal part of or industrial processes.

POS packaging fees have been set in many coastal cities, and the state of Hawaii. Twenty-five percent of the nations around the world have banned plastic bags. The cost of packaging is high for retailers, too, and the chances of slightly lowering prices in stores are much better if the cost of bags is eliminated, and we all shop with the reusable bags that we have gathered for the last ten years. Otherwise, we all pay a much higher collective cost of clogged sewer lines, over-fill landfills, increased toxicity of the air from waste to energy plants, increased toxicity of the air from waste to energy plants, increased toxicity of the fish we eat, and ultimately dead oceans where nothing lives. We can do better in Maine. Let’s have a world left for our kids!

Jim Wellehan is president and co-owner of shoe retailer Lamey-Wellehan and is a recipient of the Natural Resources Council of Maine’s lifetime achievement award.