Below is the letter I sent to Mr. Cornell, the CEO of Target addressing their usage of plastic bags!

Dear Mr. Cornell, 

 My name is Julia Walsh, I am 14 years old, and I am from Massachusetts. I am very passionate about preventing climate change, and with so many terrible floods occurring each month, extreme heat, and rising sea levels, I think that it is important to find ways to tackle the climate crisis. As a businessman, I am sure that you understand how severe global warming truly is and I’m positive that you want to help as well. The reason I am writing you is in regards to Target’s usage of plastic bags. Target is clearly a very successful company, however, a byproduct of this success is a significant amount of distribution of plastic bags. According to Action for the Climate Emergency, nearly 20 billion plastic bags are used each year. In the process of making these bags, 12 million barrels of oil is produced, creating a colossal amount of pollution that leads to these devastating effects such as floods, extreme heat, and rising sea levels. ¹ These plastic bags take 1,000 years to break down, but even then they are not truly gone.²

They turn into microplastics which pollutes the land and can get into streams and lakes. Animals can eat them and because of this eventually end up on our plate. If you made a plastic bag today in 2023, traces of that same bag would still be on Earth in 3023. To show how long ago that was, 1,000 years ago, it was 1023. 

So why listen to a teenager telling you to charge money for your plastic bags, switch to paper, or bring your own bag? Because Target alone is an incredibly large contributor to climate change. With the amount of money Target makes each day let alone each year, hundreds of thousands of plastic bags are poured into the environment, along with hundreds of thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide. Target has clearly been very successful, but now has the power, ability, and opportunity to pave the road to a clean and sustainable future. The number of businesses and organizations that will be carbon neutral or carbon positive soon is amazing, and being one of the only plastic-using stores will reflect badly on Target. Business may not go down because of this yet, but if I am not the first to send you a letter about your plastic bags, I most certainly will not be the last. However, I’m not just going to tell you everything you are doing wrong and not give a solution. By charging just 37 cents, plastic bag usage fell by 90% in Ireland.¹

I suspect if you charged for bags, or encouraged customers to bring their own, plastic bag distribution would drop substantially. Given Target’s significant customer base, this would result in a significant reduction in plastic bags that end up in our environment. 

It surprises me that a business as large and successful as Target has not made the switch to eco-friendly bag policies, especially considering so many other smaller and larger companies have already done so. If for nothing else, make the eco-friendly switch to give your kids and their kids a future that is sustainable. Isn’t that what we all want?

Thank you so much,

Julia Walsh

Image: Yurasits, Brian. “Trash lot close-up photo.” Unsplash, 15 August 2019, https://unsplash.com/photos/IvWEUvMwmlg.

1. https://go.acespace.org/page/104097/petition/1?locale=en-US
2. ACS Publications. 2020. “Degradation Rates of Plastics in the Environment,” Pages 3495, 3499-3500, 3503. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635