Groceries have been on my mind a lot lately. Last week, I examined whether states should be exempting groceries from the sales tax. Earlier this week, I discussed the pending merger between two grocery stores: Kroger and Albertsons. Now I am here to look at an environmentally-related topic of grocery store shopping: plastic bags. Environmentalists believe that plastic bags are bad for the environment because of their adverse impact. Aside from the energy and carbon footprint creating the bags, there is also the fact that they contaminate soil and water once they begin to decompose.
This leads many to believe that the logical conclusion to this problem is to ban plastic bags. In 2014, California was the first state to ban single-use plastic bags. Since then, ten states have followed suit, including the state of New Jersey in 2022. I wrote on plastic bag bans in 2014, which was right around when California started its ban. I speculated about whether there would be unintended, adverse consequences as a result of the ban. It looks like I was correct to be concerned that the cure (i.e., the ban) would be worse than allowing for single-use plastic bag consumption.
International market research firm Freedonia Group released a research paper on New Jersey's plastic bag ban. This ban had mixed results. On the one hand, the number of plastic bags produced went down by 60 percent, to 894 million bags. On the other hand, the state's consumption of alternative bags increased plastic consumption for bags by nearly three-fold. Six times as much woven and non-woven plastic polypropylene was produced to make these alternatives. This increase in plastic polypropylene increased greenhouse gas emissions by 500 percent.
If that were not bad enough, market research firm Freedonia also showed that 90 percent of the reusable bags in New Jersey had been tossed into landfills after two to three uses. As University of Michigan professor Sheli Miller pointed out, you need to use these thicker polypropylene bags at least 10 times to break even with the additional energy and material required. According to a 2018 study from the Danish government, the break-even point is higher with cotton bags: 52 times to offset the climate change impact and 1,700 times to offset all environmental impacts.
Then there is the state of California. A report from PIRG earlier this year ironically called "Plastic Bag Bans Work" showed how the California case study did not work. Of course, the authors contend that a well-crafted ban works when they encourage reusable bags over single-use bags. The report shows that per capita disposal of plastic bags in California increased since the implementation of the ban. Why? Because the new "reusable" bags required four times the amount of plastic as the standard single-use plastic (p. 14). University of Sydney professor Rebecca Taylor found that Californians were replacing the single-use bags with thicker trash bags (Taylor, 2019), thereby reducing the environmental effectiveness. This ban has a similar result to the United Kingdom's mandatory five-pence fee on all plastic bags, as this Greenpeace report shows. Even the Left-leaning Los Angeles Times calls California's ban a failure.
These case studies get at two important points with regards to public policy. The first is that policies should be judged on their outcomes, not on their intentions. The second is that we should not base our assumptions of policy effectiveness on what people theoretically do. We should base it on how the policy plays out in practice. This was a mistake with the face masks during the COVID pandemic. Those who clung to their face masks thought that because mechanistic studies in a laboratory could produce positive outcomes, those same outcomes could be replicated in the real world. Assuming that people would consistently wear face masks in ideal conditions ignored human nature. The same goes here assuming that most people will reuse the heavier bags enough times to create a net-positive effect on the environment.
Going back to Professor Miller, she illustrates how reusable is not always best for the environment. Every item has their tradeoff. Take paper bags as an example. Per a United Nations report, "Paper bags contribute less to the impacts of littering but in most cases have a larger impact on the climate, eutrophication, and acidification, compared to single use plastic bags." As already pointed out, reusable cloth bags need to be used considerable amount of times before creating a net-positive, an amount that many bags likely will not experience. There is also the bacteria contamination issue that comes with reusable cotton bags, especially since most rarely, if ever, clean their cotton bags. None of this gets into getting at such issues as consumption patterns or how we need to improve recycling infrastructures and technology.
Without considering the environmental impact of substitutes, we end up with the ruinous results that we see in New Jersey and California. The plastic bag ban reveals itself as another example in a growing list of examples of what happens when governments apply broad economic bans on products it deems bad. Rather than assume that a plastic bag ban is good for the environment, the burden is on proponents to show that the alternative products used under a plastic bag ban is preferable to single-use plastic bans.
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