How a Ban on Plastic Bags Can Go Wrong

My family has been using reusable bags whenever possible for several years now, and they do require frequent cleaning.

Bags collect condensation from cold products, which attracts mold. They collect dirt from raw vegetables and from other surfaces they come into contact with. (Imagine how the seat of your pants would smell if you rode a city bus for a week without washing it. American public surfaces are filthy!) Worst of all, some grocers just can't seem to keep the bottom of milk cartons and other dairy products clean. A hint of stale milk + condensation + fabric + time = a perfect recipe for food poisoning.

One problem is that most reusable bags aren't designed for frequent cleaning. Canvas bags get ragged after only a few cycles of typical washing & drying. Some bags are built much stronger and heavier, but they need to be hand washed and thoroughly air dried. I just can't see getting enough uses out of them to offset their carbon footprint.

The article's journalism is pretty pick-and-choose. For example, the author goes through a list of environmental issues that aren't just weight - biodegradability, animal ingestion, lack of recyclability - but when it comes to comparing canvas bags, suddenly the only thing that matters is carbon emissions.

Similarly, it's written as though the policy was a total failure and should be removed. There's no hint that a modification to the policy could possibly make it work just fine: adding a stronger public education commitment.

Does Austin allow give-aways of re-usable bags? I am not familiar, but I somewhat doubt it. Those bags typically sell for 99c in San Francisco. The 10c charge is for single-use bags (typically a paper sack, but plastic at some establishments).

If they're 99c, I would think that people are thinking of the value just fine. It's just that they're not thinking of using such a bag 130 times, and throw it away after, say, 25 uses.

Actually, Austin has the per-bag fee as well. Source: I'm in Austin. I don't remember if it's $.25 or $.99, but I can honestly say that I tend not to notice it when I forget my bags... adding a few cents to a grocery bill of $30 or more is barely noticeable.

My family uses reusable bags now, and I'm happy for the ban because we probably wouldn't have otherwise, but studies like this one do seem to indicate it wasn't everything it was sold to be.

That said, I rarely ever see a plastic bag stuck in a tree these days, and that's a welcome change.

I remember when the ban first came about, HEB would make you buy the reusable canvas bags instead of having those heavy duty plastic bags. I don't know why they switched. Like you said, every other store in town will give you recyclable paper bags if you forget to bring your own reusables. Unfortunately, since HEB is the only low cost grocery store in town (besides Super Targets and Walmarts), their decision to give out an alternative plastic bag is hurting the effort of the ban.

I ended up ordering a carton of the thin plastic bags off Amazon.

Before: I would get two uses out of them (carrying groceries and disposing of used cat litter)

After: I get a single use out of them.

The cat is happy either way, but which makes more sense?

> Single-use plastic bags pose outsized problems in the form of visual pollution on the landscape -- South Africans joke that plastic bags are their "national flower," due to their propensity to hang on branches -- and damage and delays at high-tech recycling centers. (Reusable bags usually aren't eligible for recycling, but when they end up at centers by mistake, they often wrap around and jam moving equipment.) Single-use bags can also pose health hazards to wildlife and livestock -- during a recent trip to Dubai, I heard a plastic recycler lament that ranched camels frequently die from ingesting the plastic bags that are constantly catching flight in the desert wind -- and even when they do wind up at landfills, they take centuries to decompose.

If the desirable outcome is to reduce overall usage of plastic bags then banning them is absolutely the right decision.

The evidence shows that people don't value reusable bags highly enough. Which is understandable because stores only charge 10 cents for them (at least in the Bay Area). The solution isn't to repeal the ban: it's to raise the mandated price of reusable bags to something like $5. Tax undesirable behavior and it will go down.

My take on the article is that it was the encouraging the use of recyclable plastic bags that's the problem. Various towns and retailers around Australia followed the same approach in banning plastic bags, replacing them with 'environmentally friendly' bags [1] which appear less disposable than plastic bags, so people don't get in the mindset that they should throw them out.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/GreenBag.jpg

From someone who lives in Austin, the problem isn't the bag ban. It's the low impact of skirting around it. As another commenter mentioned, the only major retailer that sells reusable plastic bags in Austin is HEB. And HEB does move a very significant percentage of all groceries in Austin.

Whole foods, Randalls, Sprouts, Fiesta and Walmart all use paper bags. If HEB either switched to paper or charged more for each plastic bag this story wouldn't exist.

Plenty of other places have bag bans, if they have not had similar problems, this suggests that differences between Austin and the other places, in terms of the details of the band or relevant context, should be examined to understand why Austin's ban had the undesired results.

But, a single failure in one of many implementations of the idea is not a reason to abandon the idea.

A lot of places use similar policies in the US, including Montgomery County, Maryland, which I lived in not too long ago. Rather than a ban, they cost 5-10 cents per bag.

Ireland (ROI) is a bit different as most shops have completely got rid of the thin bags, meaning you have to buy the thicker reusable bags. I was living there just after they introduced the ban and hardly ever rembered to take the reusable bags (I usually got shopping on the way home from work), so had to buy a new one each time. The only thing I used the reusable bags for was storing other reusable bags at home...

I prefer that in the UK you can still get them but you have to pay a small fee. The thinner bags can be reused in rubbish bins etc and easily stored in your coat pocket.

Were plastic bags really the problem in Mumbai? To me, issues like clogging the drainage system felt like the obvious consequence from so many people throwing their garbage out into the street.

I guess it means that the particular bag can be used more than once, a handful of times perhaps, before being thrown out. Not all reusable bags mean perpetual reuse, some just mean more than once.

It's not a failure if you make plastic bags or you're a retailer.

Do they charge you for a bag in Chicago?

They can't even be used as a garbage bag in a small wastepaper bin, because they're too small.

It's as if one can't legislate away every problem.

Oh, they're different. They cost more, take five or ten times as much plastic to make, take more fuel to transport, and take up more space in landfills.

Think about just how little material the thin bags use, and think about how many of them you'd have to stack to equal the thickness of the thick bag.

> I go to a thai place in SF that skirts the ban by using the heavy "reusable" bags as disposable ones. There's no difference between these and actual disposable bags other than that they are thicker. They're still small and worthless to reuse. And there's no chance to ask not to get one.

If there is no chance to ask not to get one, they aren't, as I understand it, "skirting" the ban, they are straight-up violating it just as much as if they were using the regular disposable bags in the same role rather than the heavier, notionally reusable ones (presuming, of course, they are covered by the ban at all; I think there are scale rules on who is covered, so they may be a non-covered entity that just has been less able to source the old bags because of the ban.)

Without plastic bags.

Well, you don't (hopefully) need a shopping-bag size plastic bag for dog poop.

For dog poo, I buy dedicated poo bags which cost a few cents each and are biodegradable (and blackened, so you don't need to admire the content as with clear bags).

Over here (Finland), the shopping bags we use cost 20 cents each. That is not a tax, but money that the shops collect to their pockets and have thus conveniently avoided any specific plastic bag tax.

The grocery shopping plastic bags are typically something like 15-20 litres in volume and can carry perhaps 10 kg of groceries if you're careful. After carrying home, people often use them for household waste, and then they go with the contained waste to landfill or nowadays incineration.

Small, thin bags are free (for instance for packing vegetables) but they are useless for carrying anything in the sense of a shopping bag; they're just there for cleanly keeping different items apart within a shopping bag.

Myself, I often use a small blue IKEA bag for groceries (when kids were teenagers, we bought so much stuff that we actually used a large IKEA bag which might weigh perhaps 30 kg for a week's main shopping round...).

Or a rucksack or a bike bag if I go to shop on the bike. However, if I don't have one with me, I'm quite happy to get a thinner single-use bag instead of having to buy yet another more robust bag (of which we have many).

Plastic bags are around 0,2 % of household waste; not very much, but I prefer to avoid even that if possible.

Fortunately our local Greens finally suffered a complete defeat and we now have a waste incineration system instead of an ideological system of much talk about recycling and a landfill (even if the amount of waste we produce is generally lower than in the US; in most of Europe the figure is somewhere around 1 kg per person per day; in California it is 2 kg per person per day).

Making a plastic bag takes about 40 % less energy than making a paper bag, BTW.

Eventually the paper bag makers will catch up and you'll see all the bag sizes I grew up with. There were large bag ("garbage bag" size), and a smaller version of that, a shorter version of that smaller version, a lunch bag size, and a penny candy bag (about a cup and half in volume).

I reuse all the plastic bags I get from the market until their shreds. There's a woodturner who lives on my street that recycles his plastic bags and the bottle caps from pop bottles into chisel mallets and pen turning blanks.

Paper is a step back, IMHO, but the plastic bags have to go. Too many people today litter and the things are blowing all over the place.

I'm not an expert, but they are obviously better. Paper decomposes fairly quickly (in comparison to plastic), and most paper products are made from paper tree farms, not hardwood forests. In addition, some of the paper used to make the brown paper grocery bags usually comes from recycled paper, not wood. Tree farms plant fast-growing trees, and then replant continuously, so the net effect on the environment of using paper is actually very low. Ultimately, the net impact of paper bags is the extra CO2 involved in transporting the bags around during shipment from manufacturing, recycling, and to their destinations, at grocery chains. This seems low compared to the footprint of plastic, which is made from oil products.

Yes many of them do.