Plastics have shaped nearly every aspect of society. Now what?

O On a blustery spring evening in Provincetown, Massachusetts, year-round residents of this New England beach town crowded into an auditorium for their yearly town meeting – that democratic exercise where locals vote on everything from school budgets to fire department personnel to playground construction. They considered pier repairs and stormwater improvements, fence maintenance and rental restrictions. Then, around 8 p.m., and after many gavels, they began to discuss Article 17, the agenda item that had brought Madhavi Venkatesan, associate professor of economics of sustainability at Boston’s Northeastern University, to this wind-swept tip of Cape Cod. Dr. Venkatesan is the founder of Sustainable Practices, a nonprofit environmental action group that is working to reduce plastic waste and use across the region. Over the past four years, she and other grassroots activists had mobilized towns across Cape Cod, including this one, to ban single-use plastic water bottles. But this evening, she hoped to push the town’s anti-plastics stance a step further. She and other volunteers had helped organize a citizens’ petition that introduced a policy to ban single-use plastic food takeout containers and utensils. It would be a small but important move, Dr. Venkatesan says, in fighting what has become a global deluge of plastic production, consumption, and waste. It would also be part of a trend. Nearby Nantucket, Massachusetts, had implemented similar regulations some months earlier. Other municipalities across the country had banned everything from plastic bags to plastic straws to plastic takeout boxes. And governments big and small, from California to Mexico City to China, have passed bans with similar goals – a sign, many say, of a growing public awareness, and concern, about the world’s proliferation of plastic.