Banning free plastic bags led to customers buying more plastic bags | Hacker News Reader

Banning free plastic bags led to customers buying more plastic bags

phys.org

I think now that some time has passed we have to start evaluating the effectiveness of some of these anti-pollution anti-carbon anti-plastic measures that society has been adopting

Personally I think this outcome should have been kind of obvious. Stores switched from having an incentive to give out as few plastic bags as possible to save money to having an incentive to give out as many as possible to make money

I also think changing single use bags out for re-usable bags has largely been fumbled as well. The re-usable bags take more energy to manufacture and when they inevitably end up in landfills they take much much longer to break down

The ratio of how many times you have to use a re-usable bag before it offsets the equivalent number of single use doesn't add up to me

There's probably more needed here to make this effective, like bag recycling/return programs or "need a bag take a bag, have a bag leave a bag" sorts of systems

I've been playing around with the idea of a network of "bag rental machines" you could put in grocery stores that people could get bags from for a single shopping trip, and return them to somehow

Somehow I don't think chains making money off selling bags would be very keen on the idea though

My dad is getting older and often forgets to bring reusable bags when he goes shopping. As a result, he ends up buying new ones every time, adding to a growing stockpile of unused bags at home. On the other hand, I’ve adapted by buying less and only purchasing what I can carry by hand to avoid needing a bag altogether.

This feels (but I cannot say if it "is" without proper data) like a lose-lose situation: individuals either end up purchasing more bags (which defeats the purpose of reusables) or, like me, change their shopping habits in ways that might not be ideal for businesses themselves who would wish I spend more. I’ve also noticed more people skipping supermarket trips entirely and ordering everything online from places like Walmart or Amazon, which often deliver in boxes or reusable bags anyway.

It seems there isn’t a big-picture solution beyond individuals like me reducing consumption as much as possible—not necessarily out of environmental consciousness, but because it’s now more of a hassle to consume unnecessarily.

> I’ve also noticed more people skipping supermarket trips entirely and ordering everything online from places like Walmart or Amazon, which often deliver in boxes or reusable bags anyway

Yes. My mother in law struggles to walk so she prefers to order groceries online now. Walmart always delivers them in reusable bags, so there's a stockpile there. The outcome is she's started to use them as bin liners just like we used to use single use bags from the grocery store

This is a big part of why I think some kind of bag return system needs to be in place. No one needs hundreds of reusable bags, but they will accumulate any time you're at a store without one so what do you do with them?

>> "Stores switched from having an incentive to give out as few plastic bags as possible to save money to having an incentive to give out as many as possible to make money"

The large stores around me (in a free plastic bag zone) have no trouble putting one or two items in every bag. I do not think there is any incentive to cut back use. I think there may be more incentive to use more of the super cheap plastic bags to cut back on time to bag and complaints about how things are packed.

>> "need a bag take a bag, have a bag leave a bag"

sounds good. I often forget to bring re-usable bags but do not want to buy more. I like to have a stock of disposable bags at home to use as trash bags (buying trash bags is to much like throwing money in the trash). I often have an over stock of them though.

I think you have misread the article and that the outcome you think "should have been kind of obvious" is not what actually happened and in fact, could not have happened in one of the two cases.

You seem to think that people used more single-use plastic grocery bags after they were either banned outright, which could not have happened, or were made available for a fee, which you seem to want to attribute to stores having an incentive to increase the number of them that people used.

But that's not what happened. After the grocery bags were banned or available for sale, people did not use more plastic grocery bags, but instead started buying more plastic trash bags. The supposition seems to be that people were previously re-using grocery bags for trash, but when they had fewer or no grocery bags available, they bought more plastic trash bags than they did before.

Whether this is an improvement in any sense is a different question. My point is that your conception of what happened here and why seems completely wrong.

I remember reading a thing that the reason why like day care late pickup fees are borderline extortionary, is that if they make the late pickup fees reasonable, then the average person will consider it a fee for service and not a punishment and use it more. Likewise, 5 cents for a plastic bag is like now you’re providing a service with expectations.

We would expect the number of sold plastic trash bag sales bags to increase, because as the summary points out, some people use the free bags as trash bags.

However, I believe that simple comparison is incomplete.

One of the environmental reasons for the ban was how the light-weight free bags get blown about and stuck in trees, clogs up the drains, etc., while the heavier-weight ones I could buy for 5 cents are more likely to be disposed of in an appropriate waste facility.

This summary and what I can read of the paper don't touch on those other effects, which https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/dallas-new-plastic-bag-fe... implies were part of the reason for the short-lived ban, with: "In Dallas, the bag charge was a result of plastic bags’ toll on the environment and the general build-up of litter."

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