Why well-intended bans don’t always work
Before California banned plastic shopping bags statewide in late 2016, a wave of 139 California cities and counties implemented the policy themselves. Taylor and colleagues compared bag use in cities with bans with those without them. For six months, they spent weekends in grocery stores tallying the types of bags people carried out (she admits these weren’t her wildest weekends). She also analyzed these stores’ sales data.
Taylor found these bag bans did what they were supposed to: People in the cities with the bans used fewer plastic bags, which led to about 40 million fewer pounds of plastic trash per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for other purposes, like picking up dog poop or lining trash bins, still needed bags. “What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned,” she says. This was particularly the case for small, 4-gallon bags, which saw a 120 percent increase in sales after bans went into effect.
Trash bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags. “So about 30 percent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags,” Taylor says. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper trash per year.
Plastic haters, it’s time to brace yourselves. A bunch of studies find that paper bags are actually worse for the environment. They require cutting down and processing trees, which involves lots of water, toxic chemicals, fuel and heavy machinery. While paper is biodegradable and avoids some of the problems of plastic, Taylor says, the huge increase of paper, together with the uptick in plastic trash bags, means banning plastic shopping bags increases greenhouse gas emissions. That said, these bans do reduce nonbiodegradable litter.
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This is typical of concerned people that are overly focused on one particular issue and fail to understand the overall system. The phosphate dishwasher detergent ban is another example, as are many proposed green energy regulations.
Anything we do will have some impact, so the best you can do is try to minimized that impact overall. Another issue with the reusable bags is they tend to get dirty and spread contaminants. Plastic bags are new and clean every time so they don’t have that problem. Everything has its tradeoffs.
I’ve always though the best pathway to “greeness” is to try to maximize efficiency as much as possible. Oftentimes this doesn’t even require anything new, just optimization of existing systems. There was an article in an engineering magazine back in the 90s about hybrid cars and fuel savings. The article stated that optimizing the timing of existing traffic signals everywhere in the country to minimize traffic starts and stops would save approximately the same amount of fuel as replacing every car on the road with a hybrid. Obviously the light timing is a simpler way to save fuel, with less overall impact (no new cars to build, no old ones to dispose of), but it was never done.
Another benefit of optimizing efficiency of existing systems is that as new systems are gradually phase in (more hybrid cars, for example), you continue to have the efficient gains so you end up saving even more.
Bill
"I’ve always though the best pathway to “greeness” is to try to maximize efficiency as much as possible."
That and to "Carry ones own trash".
Peter,
It's been widely reported that paper bags have a worse environmental footprint than plastic bags; see, for example, this article in the New York Times: "Even though paper bags are made from trees, which are, in theory, a renewable resource, it takes significantly more energy to create pulp and manufacture a paper bag than it does to make a single-use plastic bag from oil. Back in 2011, Britain’s Environment Agency conducted a life-cycle assessment of various bag options, looking at every step of the production process. The conclusion? You’d have to reuse a paper bag at least three times before its environmental impact equaled that of a high-density polyethylene plastic bag used only once. And if plastic bags were reused repeatedly, they looked even better."
Cotton bags have their own problems. According to the New York Times, "Making a cotton shopping bag is hardly cost-free. Growing cotton requires a fair bit of energy, land, fertilizer and pesticides, which can have all sorts of environmental effects — from greenhouse gas emissions to nitrogen pollution in waterways. The study found that an avid shopper would have to reuse his or her cotton bag 131 times before it had a smaller global warming impact than a lightweight plastic bag used only once."
I reuse the small plastic bags by using them in small bathroom trashcans.
Bastiat wrote about this phenomenon in 1850.
On I side note I eagerly await a study on the banning of plastic straws.
Plastic straw ban. Don't get me started on that stupidity.
Here are a couple of questions that reveal my ignorance: Irrespective of how much plastic I use, I know exactly where it ends up. The non-recyclable ones go to the landfill. I know the name of the drivers who take them, and the route they use to get there. The rest go in a recycling depot run by our regional government. The worst case for this plastic is that there is no market for it and it ends up in the same landfill.
- Whenever the problem is presented in the media, the stories concentrate on plastic covered beaches or huge floating masses in the ocean. Who is producing this waste and how does it get there?
- Is the problem of plastics primarily one of waste, or is it as the comments in this discussion suggest, the energy used to make them as compared to their alternatives?
Developing countries in Asia tend to be the worst offenders. A lot of electronics “recycling” and ship breaking is done in those countries due to the lax, or nonexistent, environment regulations. Ocean currents then carry the waste around.
The US isn’t a major contributor to waste in the ocean. I don’t think the western world is, since most of the really nasty processes have been outsourced to other countries that aren’t as concerned with the quality of their local environment.
Bill
I've always questioned that assumption regarding US contribution to ocean waste. I would think that we were a large contributor due to the fact that we buy products which were manufactured in China. We may not be a large direct contributor but I suspect we're a major contributor indirectly.
It's a sad state the oceans. Talk about a tragedy of the commons. I'm a strong believer that privatizing waterways and oceans has the potential to result in much better outcomes.
Malcolm,
Q. "The stories concentrate on plastic covered beaches or huge floating masses in the ocean. Who is producing this waste and how does it get there?"
A. Many of the bags come from developing countries that lack efficient solid-waste disposal plans. I've read that sources include countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Of course, anyone who litters near a river, whether in Cambodia or California, is responsible for polluting the ocean. Americans produce an unusually high volume of waste, so we aren't guilt-free.
Another problem with the flimsy plastic bags grocery stores use is that when they end up in a recycling center, they clog up the machinery.
1]What percentage of single use plastic gets reused? The OP contains a statistic about increase of garbage bags. Percent increase, compared to what?
2] Paper decomposes unlike plastic, so while on one end it takes more energy, it is not here for 100 years.
3]The push is not for paper, but reusable, which might also be plastic but last for years.
The real issue is that all single use products be they paper or plastic should be mandated to be recycled content. Whether it is paper or plastic, bags or paper towels. We have a problem creating recycling with no end use.
Plastic breaks down over time too, it just takes longer. If you want to use plastic bags that will break down most quickly, use white or clear bags. The black pigment acts as a UV inhibitor so black bags break down more slowly when exposed to sunlight compared to the white and clear kind.
Bill
"Bugs would eat the wax. And one day there would be a mutation, and we will have new ones that can digest concrete, dissolve steel and suck up the acid puddles, fatten on magic plastics, lick their slow way through glass. Then the cities will tumble and man will be chased back into the sea from which he came."
From a Travis Mc Gee novel.
I caught this on NPR as well and while I appreciate studying the effects of these bans, and agree a fee is a better idea, my frustration is that I feel this issue fails to put things in the appropriate scale. I'd argue the energy and resource consumption of grocery bags, whichever type you use, is so minuscule in the scope of human environmental impact as to be practically irrelevant, where as single use plastic waste in the environment is proving to be a huge problem on a global scale. Is there a study that attempts to put these two impacts in perspective? If we weren't cutting open dead whales to find stomachs full of plastic nobody would be talking about the carbon footprint of various grocery bags. Besides, if you use a paper bag twice and then it becomes cellulose insulation, that sounds like a reasonable plan to me. If cellulose insulation had to be made from virgin fiber how would it stack up?
I recently bought a bag made in Ghana, that was sewn from old water bags. It probably took more energy to ship it here than it saved, but I'll use it for years to come.
I think we should ban pets to reduce plastic bag use...
Peter
Ban people... oh wait. ;)
Ugh. A reasonable policy finds *enthusiastic proponents*, who procede to promote it in just about any way they can imagine, regardless of whether it makes any sense.
The plastic bag ban was never about resources. Thin <1mil plastic consumes very few resources.
It was about cleaning the damn things up from our waterways and trees and beaches and estuaries. It might cost one tenth of one cent to make a cheap plastic shopping bag and sell it in bulk, but it costs $2 to remove from a big oak in a waterfront park at American wages with some kind of pole tool. They trap air so they float on top of the water, they won't sink, once dry they blow around in the wind and get in the most inconvenient places. Paper bags decompose rapidly, plastic bags decompose much slower. Since they float, as they go down a river they catch on every little bit of vegetation (read: "the most sensitive ecosystem habitat that we haven't bulldozed yet"). Since they float on the wind, as they're being processed into a landfill, every gust of wind can pull them back out of it.
It's a policy that makes a lot of sense in cities and tourist areas that feel the need to clean their streets. It doesn't make a lot of sense in rural Nebraska. Nevertheless, the fact is that a 5 cent tax (nearly free) makes an *enormous* difference in the number of bags consumed (80%-90% reductions), and the degree of municipal resources expended on cleanup. We don't like employing full-time government workers to clean up literally ($5 worth of plastic shopping bags) * (the fraction that escape) per person-day.
This is a classic externality.