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.
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."
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.
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.
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.