Ban Plastic Bags in Hamilton, NJ.. then Mercer County, then Statewide!

Americans dispose 100 billion plastic bags a year. Where do they end up? Everywhere they're not supposed to be.
How many plastic bags do you have balled up and stored in another plastic bag around your home? Too many to count right? We do not bring these plastic bags back to grocery stores and reuse them; we just keep collecting more and more. This increases the demand to manufacture and purchase more.
Plastic is a manmade material and is not part of the natural Earth. It does not decompose before our feet. The sun can slowly break down plastic into smaller pieces, however this releases toxins into streams, soil, and oceans. The fragments are called microplastics which enter our food chain and increase in abundance to higher trophic levels. Microplastics have even been examined in the fish we eat and since this is recently discovered information, scientists are unsure the effects this will play in humans lives. But I assure you, swallowing plastic is not healthy.
The production of plastic uses petroleum, oil, which pollutes the atmosphere and increases the carbon dioxide concentration. Petroleum is a non-renewable resource and requires drilling into the Earth. This leads to a high risk of oil spills,
I'm sure you've seen plastic bags caught on tree branches, blowing across beaches or the streets, and the videos of marine life suffocating on plastic bags. Turtles are known to drown from consuming plastic bags, thinking they are jellyfish. We need to protect our wildlife, our oceans, and our planet.