A small town in Tasmania, an island off the south coast of mainland Australia, is making itself an environmental role model by becoming the country's first plastic bag-free town. Since April 28, Coles Bay's population of 175 and its tourist shoppers have been using reusable paper or cloth bags to carry their shopping. Ben Keamey, a local businessman who supports the bag ban, said it would cut  the amount of waste and prevent damage to native wildlife that try to eat the plastic. "Most businesses here come from the tourism and that's all based on the environment, so people were pretty supportive," he said. Every year Australians use more than six billion plastic bags. More than half of these come from the supermarket. Since it takes years for the bags to biodegrade , tens of millions end up polluting the environment. They kill about 100,000 sea-birds and animals, which mistake bags for food, every year. Only in the past few months have major Australian supermarkets begun cutting on their use of plastic bags. Environmental groups are pushing for a plastic bag fee like that in Ireland. There, since plastic bags cost 10 pence (about 1 yuan) each, their use has been cut by 90 per cent. Pollution caused by plastic bags is a big headache for countries all over the world. As early as 1999, Beijing said that only plastic bags of certain thickness could be used. This was to encourage them to be used again and again, since an average of six million plastic bags are used there every there every single day. Plastic bags will not be used by the native people of Coles Bay because they   _  .
cause the environmental pollution are not easy to be reused are not as good as cloth bags are not strong enough