Just heard an interesting interview on NPR. Their conclusion was that plastic bag bans were not great for the environment. Reasons:
When they were banned, sales of plastic bags went up. Small ones by 120%. Medium bags by 60%. And the bags that were sold were made of thicker plastic. In other words, people use the plastic bags for other things.
In terms of carbon footprint, paper bags are four times worse than a single plastic bag.
A person would have to reuse a cotton tote bag 7,100 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make it better for the overall environment. And organic tote bags are even worse.
So what would be better? From the interview:
*"The main thing I took away from this research is that the most environmentally friendly thing you can do - and everybody agrees here - you should reuse the same bag over and over again. Now, that bag should probably not be organic cotton. Use one that’s, like, polyester or a somewhat durable plastic. So that’s kind of what you can do in your personal life.
But then there’s kind of the broader policy question. Taylor thinks a fee is smarter than a ban. That’s because they’re both equally effective when it comes to the goal of encouraging reuse."*
People have always used the plastic bags for other things. But now we reuse them time and again and again, before using them for other things.
The problem has never been the carbon footprint, it’s the lack of reusability, recyclability and degradability. On one hand the flimsy plastic bags we used to get in supermarkets ripped between “Hail” and “Mary”, and on the other they stay around forever, unusable but there.
Not 7100 times more, just 7100 more time. See: the cotton tote actually lasts usable longer than a sneeze.
Usually there’s not a very comprehensive impact study done; you get some politician or activist with an ax to grind against plastic bags- usually due to the littering aspect, since a lot of people are just trashy jerks who discard them and they blow around into trees, lakes, rivers, etc… and don’t degrade like a paper bag would.
Or worse, you have people doing it on stuff “that everyone knows”, like the idea that because plastic bags are plastic, that they’re automatically and incontrovertibly worse for the environment than paper, because paper is renewable and biodegrades. They either don’t bother to do the research, are skeptical of the truth/believe in “alternative” science, or are just ignorant.
I’m pretty sure the one-time Dallas bag ban (since repealed) was the first- a city councilman got a bee in his bonnet about it, and a bunch of activists harangued the city council until they enacted it… spectacularly badly.
Austin’s bag ban is almost certainly rooted in the second set of reasons, since that place is a hotbed of virtue-signaling about environmentalism, etc… without actually being concerned about it, and not somewhere very well grounded in reason, science and clear-thinking.
I don’t think that the carbon footprint of a plastic bag was a major reason for advocating for their banning or taxes on them. Here in DC, the major issue was that plastic bags had been a pervasive form of litter, leading to the slogan, “Skip the bag, save the river.”
It seems to have been a smashing success here, as the number of bags cleaned up has dropped by four-fold after the bag tax went into effect.
Yeah, it’s the “found in the guts of dead whales” problem bag bans are directed at, not “carbon footprint.”
The most effective way – by far – to reduce carbon footprint is to end animal agriculture. That would be vastly more effective than carping about bag bans.
Litter was the main argument in the California bag ban. Chain link fences along the freeway rights of way were filled with shredded plastic bags.
When we are in SCal, our BIGGEST problem is remembering to bring bags with us into the store. That means buying more bags. The bags at home get stuffed into bags, and they breed. We got the damned things filling the pantry and stuffed into bare corners everywhere. You feel guilty for throwing them away!
The typical plastic grocery bag, pre ban, was perfect for so many things. They fit perfectly into small trash cans kept in bedrooms and bathrooms. And if you encountered something goopy and nasty, just grab a bag and throw the whole mess away.
Since the reusable plastic bags that you pay for are bigger and heavier, you can throw away bigger, goopier messes.
Once people are forced to move to another home because the breeding reusable bags have taken over the house, maybe the ban will be rescinded.
~VOW
I use heavier plastic totes, again and again and again. I also have cotton totes and burlap totes that I use over and over. I can tote books with them, I can use them as an overnight travel bag. They hold heavy groceries and the jars of tomatoes and jam that I make to give as gifts. I have two insulated totes that I got at Trader Joes; they keep cold stuff cold and warm stuff warm. When I think about all the flimsy plastic bags I haven’t used over the years because I switched, I know that my change has made a tiny contribution to a greener world. And that thought just made my day.
Are flimsy plastic bags better than heavier totes in the long run? I don’t think so. I much prefer the reusable tote, with the exception of one thing: cat litter. I still use plastic bags to line my garbage bin because of cat litter. I’ve tried to come up with other ways to get rid of the stuff but I haven’t found one that really works. :o Suggestions are welcome.
I have two heavy canvas bags that I bought from Trader Joe’s in 2005. They’re old enough that now the cashiers there comment on my “vintage” bags.
California’s bag ban, however, seems to have so many exemptions that I wonder if it makes much of a difference. They’re gone from grocery stores and big box stores, but if I get take-out from a restaurant it still usually comes in a plastic bag. When I go to the hardware store, including big warehouse style ones like Lowe’s, they still provide disposable plastic bags. I imagine grocery and big box stores constitute the majority of most people’s shopping, so it probably greatly reduced their use, but they’re far from gone.
I have had no trouble remembering to bring bags to the grocery store. I keep a few in my car, just in case. The conference I’m involved with gave them out, and I got extra being on the committee. I can guarantee they were very cheap, but they’ve lasted at least five years with no signs of wearing out.
Unless you work for a plastic bag company, I just don’t understand being against a ban.
My hardware store, an independent, doesn’t give out bags. I see the fast food case, since the bag is likely to get stained.
I suspect grocery stores generated most of the bags, and it is not as easy to remember bringing your own bags to the bookstore or Macy’s, but I can deal with it.
…*reducing your family size by one person does far more to reduce pollution and tackle climate change than every other measure put together, saving 58.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions each year…
.Giving up your car was the next most effective measure, …
Next on the list were aeroplane travel … investing in green energy …Going vegetarian *
That has it fifth. But even that’s wrong. Because normally animals do graze on plants. It’s the feedlots and overgrazing that’s the issue. reducing your meat consumption is a good idea.
And then we go on a big shopping trip, use up the bags (feeling oh so virtuous), and after we haul all the new crap into the house and put all the groceries away, we don’t make the extra step to put the bags back in the car.
Part of our personal problem, is that Mr VOW and I spend half our time in SCal, and half our time in AZ. AZ has no bag ban yet, and during our trips there, we get spoiled by receiving all those neat free bags!
I even bring bunches of them back to SCal to my daughter, to replenish her supply.
Meanwhile, in her pantry, in the open corners of her house, and in the little hidey places amongst the crap in her garage, the reusable plastic bags are congregating and breeding…
~VOW
I use plastic produce bags to make grafts of plants. Just cut a circle, and put it over the stock to be grafted…then pull it firmly down onto the rootstock and tie with nursery tape.
One bag gives me material for 8 grafts. I cut 8 individual circles out of a single bag. Works really well!
Actually, several other things rate higher than plant-based diets at reducing carbon footprints. #1 is having one less child, by an order of magnitude, but infanticide is kinda frowned on, so practically, the best thing one could do is live car-free. One could also avoid air travel (Skipping one trans-Atlantic flight/year is twice as good as an entire year living meat-free.) but living car-free is 4 times better at least.
If you weren’t planning on having kids or travelling trans-Atlantic anyway, how does one judge the impact? Surely, if we’re going down that route, refraining from pouring out huge quantities of oil into seabird colonies while cackling maniacally is even better for the environment.
It’s extremely hard to judge anyway, the direct impact of agriculture is one thing, but would the land be restored to a carbon sink if it wasn’t being used for farming, or would it be used for something else?
Anyway, I’m off to not set fire to an oilfield, to offset the impact of a long car journey this weekend.
I work for a grocery store chain that’s very popular in this part of the country.
A few years back, I visited the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. They have a permanent exhibit about Puget Sound. One of the displays they had was the stomach contents of a gray whale that had beached and died a few years prior. Gray whales don’t chew their food - they just swallow whatever happens to find its way into their mouths, which includes a lot of our litter, and it jams up their digestive tracts to the point where they can’t survive. There was all kinds of crap in there - blankets, aluminum cans, juice boxes, and other flotsam. But what really got me was that a lot of it, like a plurality of it, was plastic grocery bags.
And a lot of those bags had my store’s logo on them.
That’s why I support bag bans - because, as an employee and shareholder, I feel personally responsible for killing that whale, and any number of other creatures that have choked on the bags we’ve offered to people that have let them wind up in the sea.
The study, as I understand it, is on the effectiveness of measures to reduce one’s current carbon footprint, not how to avoid having a big one in the first place.
No, I’m afraid it has to be medical experiments for the lot of them.
The bans also often limit themselves to just grocery stores, so they don’t really cut down on the littering aspect of it. A plastic bag from an office supply or record store can become litter just as easily as one from a grocery store.
