Should Plastic Bags Be Banned?

Countries like China and Ireland, cities like San Francisco and Mexico City and towns in states as conservative as Texas have all banned to taxed plastic bags. The European Union is considering action.

Opponents claim a ban will have little impact on litter, but communities that have done so report a decline in waste, though data are hard to come by. What is different about this issue is that the bans and taxes sprung up as a result of public frustration with the mess and unsightliness rather than as a result of a government-initiated mandate.

As a society and an economy we have ample evidence to support the notion that people will act in what they perceive to be their own interests when prompted by an emotional issue. US supermarkets have begun providing reusable bags (long common in other parts of the world) as a response to consumer demand. Given the paucity of data supporting either position, this may turn out to be, as is increasingly the case, a policy driven by perceptions of larger problems (energy, environmental impact, cost of remediation vs job creation...)so comprehensive as to defy resolution. Keeping it simple and local may not be a global solution but it may be the most productive start. JL

Kate Galbraith reports in the New York Times:

Will banning plastic shopping bags make the roadways and oceans cleaner? Or will it merely annoy shoppers and harm factories that use recycled bags to make things like fence posts?

Exchanges like this are increasingly common around the world, as communities wrestle with questions about regulating shopping bags distributed at checkout counters. Already countries including China and Ireland and cities including Mexico City have adopted bans or taxes in some form on plastic bags. On Tuesday, officials in San Francisco voted to expand a ban already in place on plastic bags and to require shoppers to pay 10 cents each for paper bags.
Those were among the questions being fiercely debated at a public meeting here in Texas’s capital city last week, as Austin considers whether to impose a wide-ranging ban on plastic bags.

Ronnie Volkening, president of the Texas Retailers Association, called the proposal for a ban draconian and warned that it would “cause chaos and confusion with our customers.”

But Robin Schneider, executive director of the Texas Campaign for the Environment, countered that bags had a habit of flying everywhere and getting eaten by animals, so banning them would help the environment.

The issue has caught the attention of the European Commission, which is expected to issue a preliminary paper on plastic waste this spring. A survey by the commission, published in November, found that about 78 percent of more than 15,000 respondents backed efforts at the level of the European Union to cut the use of plastic bags, and most supported banning them. Janez Potocnik, a Slovenian who serves as European commissioner for the environment, has voiced concerns about “plastic soup” in the oceans — the accumulation of enormous volumes of tiny plastic nodules.

Nonetheless, “it’s unclear whether there will be a proposal on plastic bags” in the forthcoming commission paper, according to Monica Westerén, a commission spokeswoman. If there is a proposal on plastic bags, she added, it will involve pricing measures like a fee for bags and a target for reducing them, rather than an outright ban.

A number of European countries already have bag taxes in some form, or other policies aimed at reducing the use of plastic bags. But there is substantial variation among countries and even types of stores. That can be confusing to travelers.

“We shouldn’t hang around and wait for national legislation to be imposed one state at a time, because it could take years before each country puts in place the right sort of disincentives,” argued Chris Carroll, a representative of Seas at Risk, an environmental group based in Brussels that is seeking action at the E.U. level. The average European still uses as many as 500 plastic bags each year, he said, many of them only once.

The plastics manufacturing industry opposes an E.U.-level tax or ban. Plastic bags are a sustainable, low-energy way to carry purchases, according to Thomas Bauwens, a spokesman for the trade group PlasticsEurope. The real problem, he said, is “irresponsible littering and a lack of awareness as to the value of plastic bags.”

A better solution than a tax, Mr. Bauwens said, would be to “establish a retail price for plastic bags, as already applied in several European countries,” or to grant customers bonus points on loyalty cards if they decline bags.

For places considering bans or taxes on plastic bags, an important question is what effect they have had on the environment, on consumer behavior and on groups that say they will be harmed if a policy is enacted.

Solid academic research is surprisingly hard to find. One widely cited study from 2007, however, found that imposition of a bag tax of €0.15, or $0.20, in 2002 had a drastic effect in Ireland. The study, published in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics, cited a reduction of about 94 percent in the use of plastic bags.

Retailers, the study found, generally took a “neutral or positive” view of the ban, because the implementation costs had been outweighed by the savings from having to purchase fewer bags for checkout. Shoppers, too, were generally happy with the policy, the researchers found from a telephone survey of Dublin residents.

But policies vary tremendously from place to place, and anecdotal evidence of success is correspondingly varied.

In 2008, shortly before the Beijing Olympics, China cracked down on plastic bags by banning ultrathin bags, according to Tom Wang, the communications director for the East Asia chapter of the environmental group Greenpeace. The country also barred supermarkets and open-air markets from handing out free plastic bags.

The policy has worked in that more people are taking their own bags to stores, especially in big cities, Mr. Wang said.

He added, however, that the inspections needed to enforce the policies were “weak and to some degree missing.” The result, he said, is that “in many local markets, especially wet markets” — places where fresh meat, fish and vegetables are sold — “ultrathin plastic bags are still being used and other bags are free.”

Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the bag bans is the diverse locations in which they have taken root. Bag-ban policies have gone well beyond green-minded places like California and Europe. In Texas, a state that takes pride in its large pickup trucks and oil drilling, three communities have established bag bans in some form in the past year.

One is South Padre Island, a beach community with heavy tourist traffic, which began enforcing a bag-reduction policy in January.

Near South Padre, another bag-ban policy is in place in the border city of Brownsville, one of the poorest large cities in Texas.

A third community that has enacted a bag ban, Fort Stockton, is in an oil and ranching area in remote West Texas. Plastic bags, blown by the wind, had been getting stuck on barbed wire, cactuses and mesquite trees, according to Darren Hodges, a City Council member who pushed for the ban.

Since the ban took effect last autumn, Mr. Hodges said, residents have been gradually growing accustomed to taking reusable bags into shops. And the litter problems seem to be improving, he said, with fewer plastic bags on the fences and cactuses.