I moved from CA to Pittsburgh, and people look at me like an alien when I take out reusable bags at the local grocery store. It’s pretty bizzare.
I haven’t noticed any difference. SF still has tons of litter. Less of it is plastic bags, but that wasn’t much of the volume of litter anyway.
If we’re going to tax things based on their negative externalities, how about starting with hypodermic needles? The SF DPW picks up over 13,000 used needles per month.[1] They’re often left in parks where dogs and children investigate them and risk contracting hepatitis or HIV.
If a plastic bag ban is worth it for the visual improvement, then restrictions or taxes on needles should be a slam dunk.
1. http://www.ktvu.com/news/discarded-dirty-needles-on-sf-sidew...
Sounds like you have noticed a difference?
Unless you are suggesting that there is some "conservation of litter" principle that ensure that the total amount of litter is fixed, so reducing one kind of litter causes other kinds to increase?
As for your needles argument, would a tax on needles really reduce the total externalities? Sure, it would result in less needles being bought, but that may result in move people sharing needles and transmitting diseases resulting in a much more significant cost. Something should be done about the needles, but it is not clear (a) that taxing them is a good idea, and (b) what this has to do with plastic bags.
By the way, does anyone know why a lot of shops on the east coast will bag single items? I went to a CVS to buy some sunscreen and they put it in a plastic bag without even asking if I needed one.
Anyway, something like 90% of people would ask where the little cardboard sleeves were in his shop or through the drive through, even if he explained he got good cups that don't require it. It just wasn't a concept for people - they needed their sleeves or they'd burn their fingers, of course!
As for their effect on plastic pollution in the biosphere, developed countries already contribute very little, simply because they have sanitation services that collect trash and use landfills. And plastic in a landfill isn't hurting anything. The major source of plastic pollution in the environment comes from rivers that pass through countries that have minimal to no garbage collection. That's the pressing issue to solve. Plastic bans in single-use bags in cities is, IMO, minimally to not effective in terms of plastic pollution per se, although the quality of the bags in use has now gone up, which is nice.
They get clogged in the conveyor belts, and China has stopped accepting them in single-stream recycling. There was a time, just a few years ago, when cities would gain money from the plastic bags that were recycled. That time has gone, it now costs cities money to separate plastic bags from recycling streams and put it into landfills instead.
Its basic economics: its no longer cost efficient to recycle, so it won't be recycled. And now its a net-negative to recycling programs.
CVS and 7/11 replaced their bags with "reusable" plastic bags that were thicker and sturdier than the usual bags. They made a huge stink in the press about how instead of providing single-use bags for the fee, they were getting rid of them entirely, but it was just a smokescreen.
This at least was a better solution than what everyone else did. Walmart brought their self-checkout lines to a screeching halt, because you had to go up to an attendant and tell them exactly how many plastic bags you wanted before you could bag anything. I came close to just getting rolls of quarters and saying "as many as this can buy". Other supermarkets, such as Tom Thumb (owned by Safeway and later Albertsons) would've been seamless if not for the cashiers insisting on overstuffing the bags to the point stuff falling out and the bags ripping because they "just want to save you money". I had to keep asking them "please split that into two bags, because it's going to rip open on the way home", and the cashier would shout at me "But I'm trying to save you money!". Again, I fantasized about handing them whole rolls of quarters and saying "this many bags, please", just to shut them up.
[0] Yeah, that was a disaster. It was massively unpopular, and less than a year later, we had city council elections, and the new council voted to repeal the fee. Not terribly long after that, there was a court ruling that determined that cities in Texas couldn't put any kind of restrictions on plastic bags because Texas has a really ambiguously-worded law about reserving waste-management decisions to the state government only (the legal challenge had actually begun before the Dallas bag fee even began, and there are still a lot of arguments over that ruling because that law is so poorly-written that it can be interpreted in so many ways).
Yet self-service works fine in the UK despite a ban on free bags. Shoppers are incentivised to bring their own by peer-pressure of people waiting for the checkout to clear.