New Yorkers use a lot of plastic bags. The city of 8 million goes through 23 billion plastic bags annually. It’s a stat that would’ve seemed unbelievable to me before I moved here until I walked out of a C-Town grocery store with $30 of groceries in six plastic bags. Plastic pollution is a severe environmental problem, but some have suggested that focusing on cleaning up plastic pollution is distracting us from other more challenging risks like climate change. But there are ways to combat both, and the recent plastic ban in New York sets a perfect example.