It’s Time for Dry Cleaners to Stop Using Plastic Film

There’s that unpleasant moment when you get home from the dry cleaner: You remove the plastic film covering your clothes, and since most curbside recycling programs won’t accept it, you have no choice but to throw it in the trash and feel guilty about how you’re contributing to the plastic pollution crisis. You’re right to worry. Every year, dry cleaners use more than 300 million pounds of this plastic film in the U.S. alone. (They are sometimes known as poly bags because they are made from a kind of plastic known as polyethelene.) The vast majority—96%—will end up in a landfill or the ocean, where it will slowly break into particles that eventually end up in the food chain, and inside animals and humans. But it doesn’t have to be this way.