Dear Editor:

It saddens me to see some writing in defense of single use plastics. Yes, plastic bags from the grocery store make convenient linings for waste bins. They also end up traveling away from landfills, and into the ocean where sea animals either ingest them accidentally, or mistake them for food and clog their digestive tracts. Whales are washing up dead with their stomachs compacted full of plastic waste.

Plastic also does not biodegrade, but only breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that end up being consumed by the sea life we eat. The plastic we see washed up on beaches, or even concentrated on the surface of the ocean as in the pacific garbage patch, is only a tiny fraction of the total plastic currently in our oceans. Every year 32 million tons of plastic enters the environment, including eight million tons in the ocean. Banning single use plastics will not completely resolve the problem of plastic waste, but it is certainly a step in the right direction, and I implore all Maine towns to follow suit with bans on these senselessly wasteful products.

Nicole Graffam

Wiscasset