How Green Is That Grocery Bag Ban? (2014) [pdf]
reason.org
reason.org
Have any of us taken a close look at the arguments contained within? I noticed that on page 44 where it finally gets into the meat of the argument in environmental impacts, it actually noted that given the projections of San Francisco's office of the comptroller, the ban actually has positive effects. Then it constructs its own "scenario 2" under which is would have negative effects. And then as far as I can see it never argues which scenario is valid! It just jumps to a conclusion later on (p56) that things are "uncertain" so a ban is therefore "irrational".
That just smacks of propaganda draped in the clothes of academia. For some counter arguments see: http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/10/08/californias-plas...
Personal experience - every single bag I get from the grocery store is used again to dispose of garbage. Doesn't everyone do that?
Making me buy garbage bags is much more wasteful.
I also use a reusable bag for most my grocery shopping. I know a number of people who use cloth bags.
I do know there are programs which seek to collect plastic bags and recycle them, but I've never actually looked into what they are being used for.
If you feel like your contribution of recycling grocery store bags is meaningful, I don't think you should stop.
That's an absurd assumption. You can purchase a small amount of ziploc style bags for such cases, which are right-sized and thus less wasteful and also are better suited for the task as they have a proper seal.
Ziploc bag with a slider seal, 15c a bag https://www.amazon.com/Ziploc-Slider-Storage-Bags-Count/dp/B...
Most common trash bag, 11c a bag https://www.amazon.com/Kirkland-Signature-Drawstring-Kitchen...
And as you correctly noted, ZipLoc bags are not a staple of most households, one needs to remember to purchase them. Trash bags are in a "must have" league with toilet paper and tooth paste.
If the grocery store uses bio-bags then that's a win for the environment. It's all about putting pressure on those nasty 1000 year bags until we see change for the better.
- Quibbling over whether building them consumes oil or natural gas.
- Badly reporting other reports (5% of bags are littered vs bags make 5% of all litter). It looks like neither figures are correct, anyway, which is the point the paper wants to make, but basic proofreading should have caught it.
- They say that the fact they only make 1% of the matter clogging storm drains makes them unimportant, ignoring their mechanical properties (their robustness and large surface make them retain other debris)
I stopped reading at that point.
The scope is too wide considering the research it draws from - pick a sub-topic like "plastic bag restrictions effect on tonnage of plastic recovered from street surfaces".
Drawing a chart of "number of bag bans"? Really? We could make that down to one if we just outlawed it nationwide. It isn't a sensible thing to measure.
I really want to see this research done well, but sadly this isn't it.
http://reason.org/trustees_and_officers/ http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Family_Foundations
There is no disclosure of these facts in this report.
This is very much a political topic. When you take into context where the funding came from, the "research" presented in this abysmal paper looks a lot more like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
A lot of it is devoted to caricaturing arguments for plastic bag bans and "debunking" them. For example,
> Are Plastic Bags Killing Millions of Marine Animals?
It's also full of logical fallacies. For instance,
> By any measure, plastic bags constitute a small proportion of all litter. So, it would be foolish to focus any strategy intended to reduce litter primarily on plastic bags.
Apparently this is meant to imply that no effort at all should be spent on reducing plastic bag litter.
For instance if you look at Section 2.3 and the bottom of page 18, it cites reports that Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags per year, then says "A look at the data, however, reveals a very different picture." It goes on to give data that in no way contradicts that figure, but instead focuses the argument on how small a fraction of the mass in landfills comes from plastic bags.
The abstract gives 6 claims, e.g. #1 is "The bans, fees and taxes on shopping bags have a minuscule impact on litter." But the paper is not organized so as to actually go through a demonstrate these claims. You cannot figure out from the introduction or Table of Contents where in the paper one of these claims will be demonstrated, if anywhere.
The support is disappointing due to goalpost-moving, e.g. the main supporting evidence for #1 is that plastic bags only make up a small percent of litter, therefore nothing we could possibly do involving plastic bags can have a large impact on litter.
I could go on, but it's not worth any more time. I'll just close by mentioning that the authors reveal themselves at the end of the abstract, when they write
> Those people who are genuinely concerned about reducing litter and other environmental problems should focus their efforts on solutions that have been proven to work.
Pretty clearly the authors are not including themselves in the list of people who are genuinely concerned about reducing litter or "other environmental problems".
This paper talks about the Irish experience but not from an anti-litter perspective, rather looking at how total plastic bag usage shifted. And it's definitely true with a bag tax in place, you need buy more bags, because they don't accumulate through grocery purchases. But that wasn't what the tax was for.
And of course it raises revenue in a way that is easy to avoid if you're motivated, so it is naturally progressive.
[1] http://www.marlisco.eu/The_plastic_bag_levy.en.html?articles...
In place of plastic bags the supermarkets put their good used boxes at the head of the store and I can handily truck my shopping away in one of them. That then winds up at the recycling center later on, and in the worse case scenario of it being chucked outdoors by someone cardboard is biodegradable.
It is true that buying a 'bag4life' would emit more CO2 and extrude more plastic net but that wasn't the real issue since those effects are marginal. The amount of litter did reduce.
Now I would like to see us implement the German approach to bottles. They pay people money to collect them, I think it is 25c per bottle, and this has been very effective at keeping them off the streets as well as putting some money into the hands of those who could do with a bit of cash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElYT8SMl-qI
I reckon on this being cheaper than hiring more street cleaners and cleaner machines so I view it as using a market mechanism.
Paper bags also may see fewer reuses than plastic ones.
The question whether paper bags are more environmentally friendly than plastic ones is not an easy one to answer.
Most discussions on this I have read conclude you should bring your own bag, rather than single-use plastic or paper bags.
The city even recommends using them for yard waste and other compostables as the bags are perfectly biodegradable.
Side note on them, target used to have these really nice fabric bags. I have two and would love to buy more but none of the stores seem to carry them anymore. Now they just have those thick plastic like ones.
I currently live in St. Petersburg, Russia, and very few stores hand out plastic bags for free; most charge a small fee (5 ruble is the most I've seen) per bag. The net effect is that most people do end up getting a small collection of durable bags that get used for everything for as long as the bag lasts. (St. Petersburg has rather unpredictable precipitation, so it's not unusual to use plastic bags to protect whatever you're carrying with you either). Ultimately, the bags stay in use as long as they are fit for use.
Similarly, when I was still living in in the US in Washington State, the city I was in did a bring your own bag initiative, which has been taken further this year, apparently. [1] My experience at the time was that you'd get a small fee added to your grocery bill to account for the number of bags you used, but if you elected to bring your own bag, this was instead deducted. With the WA initiative, it was much more environmentally minded.
Ultimately both initiatives had the same effect - new bags were acquired by customers less frequently and reusable bags were more frequently used without much complaint. Once in a blue moon I see (saw) small breakdowns over charging for the bags, but most of the time people don't seem to care. WA cities weaned themselves onto the BYOB initiative. In St. Petersburg, I'm under the impression it was more of a "why wouldn't we charge for it?" sort of thing from the stores. Regardless of what direction cities decide to adopt, people will adjust pretty quickly and easily it seems - $.05 isn't much in USD, but 5 RUB here and there can add up to a transit pass pretty quickly in Russia right now. (30 RUB for surface transit, 35 for subway). Excess use of plastic bags is a habit of laziness.
[1] https://www.cityoftacoma.org/government/city_departments/env...
All in all I still throw out fewer bags.
I also used store bags to take my lunch. Does anyone not reuse plastic bags?
In the UK a few supermarkets had holes in their free bags. I haven't checked the new paid bags.
Section 2.1 disagrees with the notion that plastic bags consume lots of natural resources by quoting someone who claims that they consume a lot of oil, and disagreeing with him, saying that they are made from mostly natural gas. This is just silly: technically they're not wrong, but their argument is only compelling if you for some reason believe that natural gas is a less valuable resource than oil.
Section 2.2 starts off well, citing a study saying that HDPE bags aren't actually that big a component of litter overall. Point in favor there. They also cited the same study to demonstrate that plastic bags aren't that big of a storm drain problem. It goes downhill from there: the section on the marine ecosystem basically consists of them disagreeing with more reliable sources without actually citing any evidence. Then, it for some reason goes into a discussion of the Pacific garbage island, which seems irrelevant.
That section turns around at the end, proposing a better way to reduce litter and citing a successful example of such a program.
Section 2.3, on whether or not restrictions on HDPE bags actually reduce waste. The first section establishes that plastic bags aren't that big a fraction of landfill waste: This is the beginning of a good argument, but to complete the argument they would need to show that bag restrictions have cost larger than that small benefit, and they did not do this.
Landfill decomposition: This is a good argument, +1 point here.
Section 2.4, Global Climate: The life cycle analysis in section 3 does a good job of supporting the argument that plastic bags don't significantly contribute to climate change.
Section 4 cites various anecdotes about the long term effectiveness of bag restrictions. There are only six such examples cited. That suggests cherry picking, since there were many more such examples even two years ago.
This section does also reiterate the previous good argument that an effective plastic bag ban wouldn't help that much if at all with greenhouse emissions.
Further on, in section 4.6, the document tries to make the argument that bag restrictions are expensive, but the numbers they describe seem similarly small to the damage described in section 2.3. While completing the argument, it doesn't actually make it compelling.
The health argument is one I've heard a lot, so I won't try to address it here: that argument is all over the place.
Overall the document makes some good points, some suspect ones, and some irrelevant ones.
They banned plastic bags in Chicago. The thin ones. All that happened was now every store gives you a free "reusable bag." These new bags are the same bags as before, but thicker. They are not reusable bags. So in this town it's very clear the regulation was a net negative on reducing plastic consumption.
Everyone I know just pays for the new thicker bags. It's $0.30 for three bags on a $100 grocery bill.
The real annoyance comes from people not knowing exactly how many bags they need, and usually guessing too low (not wanting to be wasteful), so the baggers take longer trying to figure out how to squish everything in the bags... and sometimes the customer has to pay an extra $0.10 if they need another bag. Which gets them to dig around for a dime. This probably slows down checkout lines by a significant amount (10% or so?).
$15,750,000 per week in lost productivity from wasted time at check outs
(.75 minutes per checkout X 3 times per week / 60 minutes per hour) X $60 an hour average salary X 7 million people
To me the tax is insane and doesn't help the environment. It just got voted on and passed too. Just force paper bag use, and the environment would be cleaner. Simple, it'll save the economy and do more.
I realize this seems like an (and is likely a slight) over estimate of the cost. However, you can do it yourself, we waste a lot of times due to this.
"Do you want the bags? That will be 10 cents"
"Ugh, yeah - give me three please"
Then occasionally I screw up and need another. Or the bag rips because I have too few. That takes like an extra 4 or 5 minutes plus money. Plus if I'm doing it on an automated machine there is usually a lot of lag.
Regardless it's not just the 15 seconds for me. There is a rough average of 2 people in line ahead of me so:
15 seconds for me + 30 seconds for others ahead in line
An EXTRA five minutes? That also sounds very unlikely.
Maybe time yourself with a stopwatch next time? I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Are you kidding me?
Also, I worked in retail when I was younger. Most bigger stores keep an eye on the lines and will move more employees to the checkout registers if the lines are getting too long.
I self checkout my groceries (the scanning and payment as well as the bagging). Normally I interact with zero people while shopping for groceries. High payroll taxes and near 0% cash use makes it a natural direction to go.
I bag the groceries in the store so that costs no extra time at checkout.
On that note, whenever I've seen these bans I always assumed they worked similar to what Aldi's does around where I live (And I presume everywhere): They have no bags at all, and simply have things like discarded boxes that you can use to carry your food out with. You can purchase an actual reusable bag, but besides that there are no bags. That said, I can see how that might be tough for stores with more customers, and in places where you may be carrying your food a ways and not just to your car. Being from a suburb in Ohio I can't say I know tons about living in Chicago ;) But the setup does work well over here and absolutely decreases the number bags. Aldi's is the only one that does it though.
Judging from my own behavior as a rather lazy consumer and from observing the people around me, it seems to have been pretty effective. Most of the people around me bring a bag to the store and personally I buy many fewer 10c bags these days.
Starting with the fact that Europe is much less car focused, which leads to more trips with smaller amounts being bought each time. The more condensed European cities lend themselves to that kind of behaviour, since the trips are going to be pretty short and likely to be made on a bike, walking, or using public transport.
From my experience, I would estimate maybe 20% of checkouts include a 10c bag, the rest just use their own backpacks, cotton bags or the reusable sturdy kind of plastic bags. I don't even know when I last saw someone buy multiple 10c bags to carry their groceries.
AFAIK, you still can get free plastic bags if they are part of necessary packaging, for example on farmer's markets.
EU Directive: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELE... says:
"Member States may choose to exempt plastic carrier bags with a wall thickness below 15 microns (‘very lightweight plastic carrier bags’) provided as primary packaging for loose food when required for hygiene purposes or when their use helps prevent food wastage."
I don't get it. How do these "reusable bag" look like?
This is a typical reusable bag we use where I live: http://imgur.com/a/GLT0t
I myself I've had these bags for probably more than 10 yrs (paid $1-piece at the time), and I still use them.
Conclusions
Proponents claim that banning plastic shopping bags will benefit the environment. Yet, as this study has shown, there is very little empirical support for such claims. Indeed, the evidence seems to point in the other direction for most environmental effects. Some of the alleged benefits are simply false, such as the claim that eliminating plastic bags will reduce oil consumption. An assessment of the San Francisco ban on plastic bags suggests that while there may have been a very small reduction in the amount of litter generated, some emissions—such those of greenhouse gases—may well have increased as a result of the ban.
At the same time, concern about the environment is only one of many issues affecting consumption choices. When it comes to shopping bags, the look, feel, and—likely most important for the majority of consumers—function are very important. HDPE plastic bags are strong, light and highly convenient (there is no need to remember to take them along when shopping, since they are supplied by the store). Also, they are typically reused for various purposes. These features have made them very attractive to consumers. By contrast, reusable NWPP bags are bulky (causing inconvenience when shopping), must be washed between shops if they may have come into contact with harmful bacteria, and must be remembered prior to going shopping (making them far less convenient); moreover, households using NWPP bags will typically purchase more garbage bin liners.
In spite of widespread media attention to the largely false claim that plastic bags are environmentally harmful, bans on the use of plastic bags are not popular: A recent Reason-Rupe poll showed that 60% of Americans oppose plastic bag bans, while only 37% are in favor. Opposition is non-partisan, though it is stronger among independents (64%) and Republicans (71%) than Democrats (52%).
Environmental groups that really care about the problem of litter, such as Keep America Beautiful, have generally promoted solutions that substantially reduce the amount of litter generated, such as public information campaigns focused on litter reduction, and facilitating clean-up operations. In other words, they target littering behavior, which is the actual cause of litter, rather than opposing the existence of certain types of product that might become litter. Meanwhile, environmental groups that really care about the protection of marine animals know that litter is not the prime culprit of diminished marine life and generally focus on other issues, such as policies that promote overfishing.
Unfortunately, policymakers have been cajoled into passing ordinances that ban plastic bags. That is bad news for consumers. It is also bad news for the environment, since the public has been misled into believing that by restricting the use of plastic bags, the problems for which those bags are allegedly responsible will be dramatically reduced. As a result, they are less likely to undertake activities—such as reducing littering and supporting policies that would lead to better protection for marine animals—that would actually benefit the environment.
We banned bags in Austin a few years ago... but now for the most part I just pay $0.25 every time I need a bag. And now I have to buy special purpose dog-shit bags instead of just reusing supermarket bags.
What I do like though is seeing less plastic bags on the side of the road. Helps keep the place from looking like an oil field construction zone.
Would a "see spot" diagram help?
The conclusions don't mention that banning plastic bags is meant to be one contribution towards fixing our throwaway culture, not the silver bullet that saves us all.
Pointing your finger at some report and rejoicing "see, we can keep throwing plastic bags by the millions onto landfill, the PDF says we can!" is not "caring about nature".
Opting for products with less packaging is a good thing to do for the environment. Maybe buy more things in bulk. Avoid those stupid little individual tubs of yoghurt. Avoid 600ml bottles of water. Avoid that 250ml latte cup... I'm sure you can think of others if you try.
I don't oppose efforts to lessen the damage. I oppose efforts that do not change the damage in any way, shape or form, or efforts that impose large costs at little or no benefit at all.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually.
There's your "way, shape and form".
If we don't use plastic shopping bags, we'll use something else that costs more to manufacture. Has more manufacturing impact on the environment. Paper, fabric etc. They can be reused, but it would take thousands of reuses to total less environmental damage than the extremely efficient plastic bag.
Its conceivable that plastic bags are the minimum impact to the environment, considering all the options.
The bill also required a 10 cent minimum
charge for recycled paper bags, reusable
plastic bags, and compostable bags ...