The Misguided Notion of Bag Bans
It's bad enough that bans hurt middle and working-class families. But Plastic Bag Bans Increase Plastic Waste
Anne Arundel County is the latest Maryland county looking to implement a plastic bag ban:
A bill being considered by the Anne Arundel County Council that would ban many retail establishments from providing customers with plastic bags received positive feedback Monday for the second consecutive hearing….
……“They get in our waterways. They get in the boat propellers of our watermen as they’re doing work,” Rodvien said at a council meeting earlier this month. “This is the first step in getting some of that big plastic out of our lives.”
Democrats don’t just want to ban plastic bags though. They also want to implement a regressive tax on paper bags, too:
The Anne Arundel bill, if passed, would fall under the hybrid model. Plastic bags would be banned and many establishments would be required to charge 10 cents for a paper bag to ensure the financial burden is on the customer, rather than the retailer.
“Paper bags have their own environmental issues,” Rodvien said. “Eventually, we’d like to get everybody using reusable bags.”
Never mind the fact that paper bags are 100% biodegradable. Democrats want to tax them because they want your money more than they want anything else.
There are, of course, many documented problems with plastic bag bans. The most discussed, of course, is the possibility of lead contamination through food stored in the bag.
But there are also several counterintuitive problems created by bag bans:
When communities ban plastic grocery bags or charge fees for their use, local stores sell more plastic garbage bags, according to a new study.
The reason for this is that people often reuse plastic grocery bags as trash can liners; when the free source of such bags goes away, people seek out purchased substitutes. The findings add to a growing body of research demonstrating that policies designed to reduce plastic waste can have unintended consequences that erode their effectiveness…..
….Huang and Richard Woodward, an economist at Texas A&M University in College Station, used retail store scanner data to track sales of plastic garbage bags at stores in four jurisdictions: Washington, D.C., and Montgomery County, Maryland, which charge $0.05 per paper or plastic bag, and San Luis Obispo County and Santa Clara County, both in California, which have banned plastic grocery bags. They researchers compared garbage bag sales in these counties to sales in a composite of counties without such policies.
Prior to the onset of plastic bag regulations, sales of small plastic garbage bags were broadly similar across all counties. But the regulations led to a 55-101% increase in sales of 4-gallon garbage bags and a 54-129% increase in sales of 8-gallon garbage bags in the selected counties, the researchers report in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics.
When “single-use” bags get banned, the sale of larger, also single-use bags goes up exponentially:
By banning “single-use” plastic bags, Anne Arundel County (and other jurisdictions) have increased, not decreased, the amount of plastic being consumed by their residents. All while forcing the residents to pay a regressive tax on paper bags and forcing them to buy additional products to meet their family’s needs.
Bag bans are a thing wealthy liberals love to support because they can afford them, the regressive costs on working people be damned because it makes them feel like they are doing something to help the environment. They may feel that way, but the actual impact on plastic pollution is negligible.