Early this year, our town exceeded an ordinance banning unmarried-use plastic baggage. The bags are being phased out in stages: In Phase 1, which started out this May, shops will want to price clients 10 cents for every plastic bag they use (despite the fact that they have the option of providing recyclable paper bags at no fee). In Phase 2, starting in November, stores will no longer be allowed to offer single-use plastic baggage the least bit, however they may hold to provide paper bags for 10 cents every. These policies exercise simplest to the luggage used at the register; plastic luggage used for wrapping up meat, fish, produce, and baked items are nevertheless allowed, as are the plastic baggage your newspaper is available in and the one the dry cleaner sticks over your clothes.
If all this sounds excessively complicated, there may be a reason for it. The city went to hundreds of hassle while crafting the law to ensure it'd now not come to be doing greater damage to the environment than wonderful.
You see, it appears that evidently the complete trouble of plastic bag use is a lot more complex than it looks. As I noted back in my last Thrift Week access, maximum of the alternatives to plastic luggage reason environmental issues that can be even worse. A single-use paper bag, according to a 2011 assessment by the usage of the United Kingdom EPA, has a life-cycle carbon footprint 4 instances as big as a plastic bag's. In different phrases, you would should reuse a paper bag 3 instances to make it as inexperienced as a plastic bag used just as soon as. And that darling of environmentalists, the cotton tote bag, might want to be reused 131 times.
In a Danish study from 2018, which checked out factors aside from climate alternate?Water use, ozone depletion, toxicity, and so on?These alternatives fared even worse. Assuming that a plastic bag receives reused as soon as as a trash can liner earlier than it is finally discarded, the authors concluded that a paper bag might want to be reused 43 instances to be similarly green, and a bag manufactured from conventionally grown cotton may need to be reused 7,a hundred times. And if you're questioning natural cotton could do higher, the Danish scientists placed simply the other; an organic cotton bag could need to be reused 20,000 instances?I repeat, TWENTY THOUSAND TIMES?To be as green because the a good buy-maligned LDPE plastic bag.
And plastic bag bans can have additional, unintended consequences as well. NPR's Planet Money did a story on this in April, based largely on the work of Rebecca Taylor, an economist at the University of Sydney in Australia. She did a study comparing towns in California that had plastic bag bans to similar towns that didn't, and she found that in the towns with bag bans, people were buying more than twice as many small plastic bags, because they no longer had plastic shopping bags to line their trash cans or pick up their dogs' poop. And since these commercially available bags are thicker than the ones used at the supermarket checkout, this undid about 30% of the reduction in plastic use caused by the ban.
So does that suggest banning plastic luggage is only a right away-up awful idea? Well, no longer constantly. Although plastic luggage are in reality much less dangerous to the environment as a whole than most different types, they could do plenty of concentrated damage internal a town. When people do not put off them well?And now and again although they do, due to the reality an empty bag can without difficulty get blown proper out of a trash can?They wash into waterways in which they damage flora and fauna, or clog storm drains and purpose flooding. And considering the perfect manner to reduce plastic bag clutter is to reduce plastic bag use, a ban could make enjoy.
The trick, then is to design a ban on this form of way that it reduces the use of plastic bags, however does not inspire the usage of alternatives which might be even worse. Our legislators in Highland Park have been seemingly aware of this, that is why they went to so much problem to ensure our ban might no longer simply update plastic luggage with paper ones. They additionally particularly addressed the canine poop/trash can liner trouble with the aid of persevering with to allow plastic produce baggage and newspaper baggage. These bags are possibly a whole lot less possibly to come to be muddle than plastic buying baggage, because of the reality human beings usually don't unpack them until they get domestic, in which they can throw them instantly within the trash?Or preserve them to reuse whilst on foot the dog.
All this changed into in my thoughts once I examine on Nextdoor Woodbridge, a bulletin-board organisation for my neighborhood, approximately a proposed plastic bag ban in East Brunswick. I without delay chimed in to talk about the importance of ensuring the ban would not sincerely trade plastic baggage for paper ones, and to factor out that in step with Taylor's research, charging a rate for unmarried-use luggage does simply as pinnacle a pastime of reducing their use as banning them, with fewer terrible aspect outcomes.
Unfortunately, this concept failed to bypass over very well. Most of the individuals who commented regarded to be drawing near the issue from the knee-jerk
These comments were kind of discouraging to me, because they directly contradict the best available science on plastic and the environment. "If the real concern is cleaning up the environment," then it makes perfect "common sense" to care about what people are replacing their plastic bags with, and whether it's more destructive to the environment than plastic. And it definitely does not make sense to encourage people to buy paper bags, with their much larger ecological footprint, as a "green" alternative to plastic.
But it seems that once people have it in their heads that plastic is Public Enemy Number One, nothing you can say will convince them otherwise. They already know what they believe in, so don't confuse them with your facts. I've encountered this same problem on the Plastic Free July site, where they recommend reusable bags "made from natural fibres such as such ethically-produced cotton" (which are much more destructive to the environment than single-use plastic) as "a fantastic alternative to single-use plastic bags," and suggest replacing your plastic trash can liners with "a few sheets of newspaper" (which has a higher carbon footprint than plastic") or "certified compostable bin liner bags" (which won't actually turn into compost in a landfill, but will break down faster than plastic, thereby producing more planet-warming methane).
So I guess the real point of this post is simply a plea to all my fellow environmentalists: Let's try to use our heads, as well as our hearts. I know the video of the turtle with the straw up its nose is incredibly upsetting. It makes you want to do whatever you can to stop things like this from happening. And on the face of it, banning these single-use plastics seems like an easy fix. But if we really want to help the ocean and the creatures that live in it, we need to do more than just grasp at the obvious solution. We need to actually consider all the impacts of our choices—such as whether the carbon emissions caused by paper bag production are more harmful than a bunch of plastic bags sitting unchanged in a sanitary landfill. If we ignore inconvenient facts and just rush toward the option we've already decided on, we're no better than the folks who deny climate change exists because they don't want to have to give up their steak and their SUVs.
