Arguments shouldn't be disqualified based on their source alone, but at the same time they shouldn't be accepted just because they appear academically rigorous, have charts, etc. This comes from Reason which is a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers and Exxon Mobil, among others. So, definitely some close examination is needed before accepting any of their conclusions.
Have any of us taken a close look at the arguments contained within? I noticed that on page 44 where it finally gets into the meat of the argument in environmental impacts, it actually noted that given the projections of San Francisco's office of the comptroller, the ban actually has positive effects. Then it constructs its own "scenario 2" under which is would have negative effects. And then as far as I can see it never argues which scenario is valid! It just jumps to a conclusion later on (p56) that things are "uncertain" so a ban is therefore "irrational".
Many points are fishy. After reading the start of part 2 (which is supposed to present objective information about the impact)
- Quibbling over whether building them consumes oil or natural gas.
- Badly reporting other reports (5% of bags are littered vs bags make 5% of all litter). It looks like neither figures are correct, anyway, which is the point the paper wants to make, but basic proofreading should have caught it.
- They say that the fact they only make 1% of the matter clogging storm drains makes them unimportant, ignoring their mechanical properties (their robustness and large surface make them retain other debris)
This research is valuable, but the quality of this paper seems rather lacklustre. Do research well or don't do it at all. Don't publish an un-peer-reviewed paper with the phrase "is parroted by" in it.
The scope is too wide considering the research it draws from - pick a sub-topic like "plastic bag restrictions effect on tonnage of plastic recovered from street surfaces".
Drawing a chart of "number of bag bans"? Really? We could make that down to one if we just outlawed it nationwide. It isn't a sensible thing to measure.
I really want to see this research done well, but sadly this isn't it.
This paper is awful from a scientific standpoint. Rather than sticking to facts, it's full of opinionated judgements, logical fallacies, and poor use of statistics to back up claims.
A lot of it is devoted to caricaturing arguments for plastic bag bans and "debunking" them. For example,
> Are Plastic Bags Killing Millions of Marine Animals?
It's also full of logical fallacies. For instance,
> By any measure, plastic bags constitute a small proportion of all litter. So, it would be foolish to focus any strategy intended to reduce litter primarily on plastic bags.
Apparently this is meant to imply that no effort at all should be spent on reducing plastic bag litter.
For instance if you look at Section 2.3 and the bottom of page 18, it cites reports that Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags per year, then says "A look at the data, however, reveals a very different picture." It goes on to give data that in no way contradicts that figure, but instead focuses the argument on how small a fraction of the mass in landfills comes from plastic bags.
The abstract gives 6 claims, e.g. #1 is "The bans, fees and taxes on shopping bags have a minuscule impact on litter." But the paper is not organized so as to actually go through a demonstrate these claims. You cannot figure out from the introduction or Table of Contents where in the paper one of these claims will be demonstrated, if anywhere.
The support is disappointing due to goalpost-moving, e.g. the main supporting evidence for #1 is that plastic bags only make up a small percent of litter, therefore nothing we could possibly do involving plastic bags can have a large impact on litter.
I could go on, but it's not worth any more time. I'll just close by mentioning that the authors reveal themselves at the end of the abstract, when they write
> Those people who are genuinely concerned about reducing litter and other
environmental problems should focus their efforts on solutions that have been
proven to work.
Pretty clearly the authors are not including themselves in the list of people who are genuinely concerned about reducing litter or "other environmental problems".
The Reason Foundation is funded by the Koch Family Foundations and David Koch sits on its board of directors. Koch Industries includes plastics manufacturing.
From the Irish perspective [1], when the bag tax was introduced in 2002: it was promoted as an anti-litter measure. By that metric, it was successful: plastic bags went from 5% of litter to less than 1%.
This paper talks about the Irish experience but not from an anti-litter perspective, rather looking at how total plastic bag usage shifted. And it's definitely true with a bag tax in place, you need buy more bags, because they don't accumulate through grocery purchases. But that wasn't what the tax was for.
And of course it raises revenue in a way that is easy to avoid if you're motivated, so it is naturally progressive.
I veer in the direction of libertarianism but I can't refute the effectiveness of that tax. It works.
In place of plastic bags the supermarkets put their good used boxes at the head of the store and I can handily truck my shopping away in one of them. That then winds up at the recycling center later on, and in the worse case scenario of it being chucked outdoors by someone cardboard is biodegradable.
It is true that buying a 'bag4life' would emit more CO2 and extrude more plastic net but that wasn't the real issue since those effects are marginal. The amount of litter did reduce.
Now I would like to see us implement the German approach to bottles. They pay people money to collect them, I think it is 25c per bottle, and this has been very effective at keeping them off the streets as well as putting some money into the hands of those who could do with a bit of cash.
Does anyone have a link to the full study they cite about litter? They only citation they have is a memo brief, and that graph raises some serious questions about methodology. Namely, tobacco products accounting for 32% of all litter. It seems like they made a cigarette butt equivalent to one plastic bag, which is not a fair comparison environmentally or visually.
Go to Austin, go to SF, go to West LA. Plastic bans are already banned. Go to Orange County CA go to Mexico City go to Shanghai. Plastic bans are allowed. Compare. Latter cities have cleaner streets no bags on streets, in trees, hooked on fences, on the beach, in the water, etc. These bans work and it is evidence of how stricter environmental regulation or taxes are effective to prevent man from hurting man. Or man to hurt the nature he and his posterity depends on.
Here in Portland we use paper bags. I have a nice pile of them that I use for holding recycling. There's no cost per bag either. More cities should go this route.
Well, other places in the world deal with it slightly differently as well.
I currently live in St. Petersburg, Russia, and very few stores hand out plastic bags for free; most charge a small fee (5 ruble is the most I've seen) per bag. The net effect is that most people do end up getting a small collection of durable bags that get used for everything for as long as the bag lasts. (St. Petersburg has rather unpredictable precipitation, so it's not unusual to use plastic bags to protect whatever you're carrying with you either). Ultimately, the bags stay in use as long as they are fit for use.
Similarly, when I was still living in in the US in Washington State, the city I was in did a bring your own bag initiative, which has been taken further this year, apparently. [1] My experience at the time was that you'd get a small fee added to your grocery bill to account for the number of bags you used, but if you elected to bring your own bag, this was instead deducted. With the WA initiative, it was much more environmentally minded.
Ultimately both initiatives had the same effect - new bags were acquired by customers less frequently and reusable bags were more frequently used without much complaint. Once in a blue moon I see (saw) small breakdowns over charging for the bags, but most of the time people don't seem to care. WA cities weaned themselves onto the BYOB initiative. In St. Petersburg, I'm under the impression it was more of a "why wouldn't we charge for it?" sort of thing from the stores. Regardless of what direction cities decide to adopt, people will adjust pretty quickly and easily it seems - $.05 isn't much in USD, but 5 RUB here and there can add up to a transit pass pretty quickly in Russia right now. (30 RUB for surface transit, 35 for subway). Excess use of plastic bags is a habit of laziness.
Plastic grocery bags are a disaster, purely from a utility standpoint. I really miss the days of the brown paper bags; you could fit as much in one paper bag as in four or five plastic bags, they were rugged enough to actually hold up, and you could compost them or use them for kindling.
Only one comment here mentions visual pollution. I've never seen paper bags snagged on a barbed wire fence. You can see plastic bags on fences a mile away. Much worse than cigarette butts.
This comes from reason.org, which immediately should raise everyone's suspicions, but it's pretty well written and organized. We can evaluate it ourselves, and since I find my city's ban pretty annoying, I thought "Why not?".
Section 2.1 disagrees with the notion that plastic bags consume lots of natural resources by quoting someone who claims that they consume a lot of oil, and disagreeing with him, saying that they are made from mostly natural gas. This is just silly: technically they're not wrong, but their argument is only compelling if you for some reason believe that natural gas is a less valuable resource than oil.
Section 2.2 starts off well, citing a study saying that HDPE bags aren't actually that big a component of litter overall. Point in favor there. They also cited the same study to demonstrate that plastic bags aren't that big of a storm drain problem. It goes downhill from there: the section on the marine ecosystem basically consists of them disagreeing with more reliable sources without actually citing any evidence. Then, it for some reason goes into a discussion of the Pacific garbage island, which seems irrelevant.
That section turns around at the end, proposing a better way to reduce litter and citing a successful example of such a program.
Section 2.3, on whether or not restrictions on HDPE bags actually reduce waste. The first section establishes that plastic bags aren't that big a fraction of landfill waste: This is the beginning of a good argument, but to complete the argument they would need to show that bag restrictions have cost larger than that small benefit, and they did not do this.
Landfill decomposition: This is a good argument, +1 point here.
Section 2.4, Global Climate: The life cycle analysis in section 3 does a good job of supporting the argument that plastic bags don't significantly contribute to climate change.
Section 4 cites various anecdotes about the long term effectiveness of bag restrictions. There are only six such examples cited. That suggests cherry picking, since there were many more such examples even two years ago.
This section does also reiterate the previous good argument that an effective plastic bag ban wouldn't help that much if at all with greenhouse emissions.
Further on, in section 4.6, the document tries to make the argument that bag restrictions are expensive, but the numbers they describe seem similarly small to the damage described in section 2.3. While completing the argument, it doesn't actually make it compelling.
The health argument is one I've heard a lot, so I won't try to address it here: that argument is all over the place.
Overall the document makes some good points, some suspect ones, and some irrelevant ones.
This whitepaper is from 2014 and is still just as true. The great garbage patch is also a myth, perpetuated by a fake photo that usually runs with the story in the news.
They banned plastic bags in Chicago. The thin ones. All that happened was now every store gives you a free "reusable bag." These new bags are the same bags as before, but thicker. They are not reusable bags. So in this town it's very clear the regulation was a net negative on reducing plastic consumption.
I understood the "great garbage patch" is not an actual island, but more of a vast stew of what is essentially plastic plankton. Mostly invisible to the naked eye, certainly not solid, but probably more environmental toxic than a mythical plastic island.
Interesting. Here in Holland they banned the free thin plastic bags everywhere a while ago. To buy a plastic bag of any kind costs about 10 eurocents.
Judging from my own behavior as a rather lazy consumer and from observing the people around me, it seems to have been pretty effective. Most of the people around me bring a bag to the store and personally I buy many fewer 10c bags these days.
In L.A. we've had a ban for a long time. The thin bags are banned, so they are all thick bags now. And stores are also required to charge at least $0.10 per bag.
Everyone I know just pays for the new thicker bags. It's $0.30 for three bags on a $100 grocery bill.
The real annoyance comes from people not knowing exactly how many bags they need, and usually guessing too low (not wanting to be wasteful), so the baggers take longer trying to figure out how to squish everything in the bags... and sometimes the customer has to pay an extra $0.10 if they need another bag. Which gets them to dig around for a dime. This probably slows down checkout lines by a significant amount (10% or so?).
Interesting - do they at least give you less of the "reuseable bag"s?
On that note, whenever I've seen these bans I always assumed they worked similar to what Aldi's does around where I live (And I presume everywhere): They have no bags at all, and simply have things like discarded boxes that you can use to carry your food out with. You can purchase an actual reusable bag, but besides that there are no bags. That said, I can see how that might be tough for stores with more customers, and in places where you may be carrying your food a ways and not just to your car. Being from a suburb in Ohio I can't say I know tons about living in Chicago ;) But the setup does work well over here and absolutely decreases the number bags. Aldi's is the only one that does it though.
Proponents claim that banning plastic shopping bags will benefit the environment. Yet, as this study has shown, there is very little empirical support for such claims. Indeed, the evidence seems to point in the other direction for most environmental effects. Some of the alleged benefits are simply false, such as the claim that eliminating plastic bags will reduce oil consumption. An assessment of the San Francisco ban on plastic bags suggests that while there may have been a very small reduction in the amount of litter generated, some emissions—such those of greenhouse gases—may well have increased as a result of the ban.
At the same time, concern about the environment is only one of many issues affecting consumption choices. When it comes to shopping bags, the look, feel, and—likely most important for the majority of consumers—function are very important. HDPE plastic bags are strong, light and highly convenient (there is no need to remember to take them along when shopping, since they are supplied by the store). Also, they are typically reused for various purposes. These features have made them very attractive to consumers. By contrast, reusable NWPP bags are bulky (causing inconvenience when shopping), must be washed between shops if they may have come into contact with harmful bacteria, and must be remembered prior to going shopping (making them far less convenient); moreover, households using NWPP bags will typically purchase more garbage bin liners.
In spite of widespread media attention to the largely false claim that plastic bags are environmentally harmful, bans on the use of plastic bags are not popular: A recent Reason-Rupe poll showed that 60% of Americans oppose plastic bag bans, while only 37% are in favor. Opposition is non-partisan, though it is stronger among independents (64%) and Republicans (71%) than Democrats (52%).
Environmental groups that really care about the problem of litter, such as Keep America Beautiful, have generally promoted solutions that substantially reduce the amount of litter generated, such as public information campaigns focused on litter reduction, and facilitating clean-up operations. In other words, they target littering behavior, which is the actual cause of litter, rather than opposing the existence of certain types of product that might become litter. Meanwhile, environmental groups that really care about the protection of marine animals know that litter is not the prime culprit of diminished marine life and generally focus on other issues, such as policies that promote overfishing.
Unfortunately, policymakers have been cajoled into passing ordinances that ban plastic bags. That is bad news for consumers. It is also bad news for the environment, since the public has been misled into believing that by restricting the use of plastic bags, the problems for which those bags are allegedly responsible will be dramatically reduced. As a result, they are less likely to undertake activities—such as reducing littering and supporting policies that would lead to better protection for marine animals—that would actually benefit the environment.
This is an "ad hominem fallacy." The attributes or beliefs of the entity making an argument are entirely irrelevant to whether the argument is correct. The argument must be evaluated solely on its own merits.
It's a classic case of environmentalist authoritarianism backed up by emotional arguments from bored politicians. That's why I oppose green parties so harshly despite caring a lot about nature and environment.
Sorry, but I don't buy that you care "a lot about nature and the environment" if you oppose environmentalism in general. We do a lot as human beings to harm the environment, and climate scientists generally agree there is a point of no return that we're heading towards. I'd cite a source or two, but we all know there are plenty of sources and by now you're either going to believe the overwhelming evidence or you're going to live in denial. Even if that were not the case, pollution in general is and has been visibly harmful to a number of ecosystems - oil spills, smog, etc. have an obvious negative impact on humans and animals alike. If you cared about the environment as you claim you do you would not oppose efforts to lessen the damage we do to it.
Throwaway mentality on a global scale is not good for the environment. Re-use and recycle is good for the environment.
Would a "see spot" diagram help?
The conclusions don't mention that banning plastic bags is meant to be one contribution towards fixing our throwaway culture, not the silver bullet that saves us all.
Pointing your finger at some report and rejoicing "see, we can keep throwing plastic bags by the millions onto landfill, the PDF says we can!" is not "caring about nature".
Opting for products with less packaging is a good thing to do for the environment. Maybe buy more things in bulk. Avoid those stupid little individual tubs of yoghurt. Avoid 600ml bottles of water. Avoid that 250ml latte cup... I'm sure you can think of others if you try.
I have thus far failed to get an answer from anyone as to what the revenue of this tax, albeit tiny, is being used for. As it stands it just pads the grocer's bottom line. Whereas it should be used to fund research and protecting the environs. But everyone is mum. At least in California.
[+] [-] abalone|9 years ago|reply
Have any of us taken a close look at the arguments contained within? I noticed that on page 44 where it finally gets into the meat of the argument in environmental impacts, it actually noted that given the projections of San Francisco's office of the comptroller, the ban actually has positive effects. Then it constructs its own "scenario 2" under which is would have negative effects. And then as far as I can see it never argues which scenario is valid! It just jumps to a conclusion later on (p56) that things are "uncertain" so a ban is therefore "irrational".
That just smacks of propaganda draped in the clothes of academia. For some counter arguments see: http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/10/08/californias-plas...
[+] [-] pygy_|9 years ago|reply
- Quibbling over whether building them consumes oil or natural gas.
- Badly reporting other reports (5% of bags are littered vs bags make 5% of all litter). It looks like neither figures are correct, anyway, which is the point the paper wants to make, but basic proofreading should have caught it.
- They say that the fact they only make 1% of the matter clogging storm drains makes them unimportant, ignoring their mechanical properties (their robustness and large surface make them retain other debris)
I stopped reading at that point.
[+] [-] BobCat|9 years ago|reply
Personal experience - every single bag I get from the grocery store is used again to dispose of garbage. Doesn't everyone do that?
Making me buy garbage bags is much more wasteful.
[+] [-] londons_explore|9 years ago|reply
The scope is too wide considering the research it draws from - pick a sub-topic like "plastic bag restrictions effect on tonnage of plastic recovered from street surfaces".
Drawing a chart of "number of bag bans"? Really? We could make that down to one if we just outlawed it nationwide. It isn't a sensible thing to measure.
I really want to see this research done well, but sadly this isn't it.
[+] [-] bo1024|9 years ago|reply
A lot of it is devoted to caricaturing arguments for plastic bag bans and "debunking" them. For example,
> Are Plastic Bags Killing Millions of Marine Animals?
It's also full of logical fallacies. For instance,
> By any measure, plastic bags constitute a small proportion of all litter. So, it would be foolish to focus any strategy intended to reduce litter primarily on plastic bags.
Apparently this is meant to imply that no effort at all should be spent on reducing plastic bag litter.
For instance if you look at Section 2.3 and the bottom of page 18, it cites reports that Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags per year, then says "A look at the data, however, reveals a very different picture." It goes on to give data that in no way contradicts that figure, but instead focuses the argument on how small a fraction of the mass in landfills comes from plastic bags.
The abstract gives 6 claims, e.g. #1 is "The bans, fees and taxes on shopping bags have a minuscule impact on litter." But the paper is not organized so as to actually go through a demonstrate these claims. You cannot figure out from the introduction or Table of Contents where in the paper one of these claims will be demonstrated, if anywhere.
The support is disappointing due to goalpost-moving, e.g. the main supporting evidence for #1 is that plastic bags only make up a small percent of litter, therefore nothing we could possibly do involving plastic bags can have a large impact on litter.
I could go on, but it's not worth any more time. I'll just close by mentioning that the authors reveal themselves at the end of the abstract, when they write
> Those people who are genuinely concerned about reducing litter and other environmental problems should focus their efforts on solutions that have been proven to work.
Pretty clearly the authors are not including themselves in the list of people who are genuinely concerned about reducing litter or "other environmental problems".
[+] [-] CalChris|9 years ago|reply
http://reason.org/trustees_and_officers/ http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Family_Foundations
There is no disclosure of these facts in this report.
[+] [-] barrkel|9 years ago|reply
This paper talks about the Irish experience but not from an anti-litter perspective, rather looking at how total plastic bag usage shifted. And it's definitely true with a bag tax in place, you need buy more bags, because they don't accumulate through grocery purchases. But that wasn't what the tax was for.
And of course it raises revenue in a way that is easy to avoid if you're motivated, so it is naturally progressive.
[1] http://www.marlisco.eu/The_plastic_bag_levy.en.html?articles...
[+] [-] internaut|9 years ago|reply
In place of plastic bags the supermarkets put their good used boxes at the head of the store and I can handily truck my shopping away in one of them. That then winds up at the recycling center later on, and in the worse case scenario of it being chucked outdoors by someone cardboard is biodegradable.
It is true that buying a 'bag4life' would emit more CO2 and extrude more plastic net but that wasn't the real issue since those effects are marginal. The amount of litter did reduce.
Now I would like to see us implement the German approach to bottles. They pay people money to collect them, I think it is 25c per bottle, and this has been very effective at keeping them off the streets as well as putting some money into the hands of those who could do with a bit of cash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElYT8SMl-qI
I reckon on this being cheaper than hiring more street cleaners and cleaner machines so I view it as using a market mechanism.
[+] [-] swampthinker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blondie9x|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawnerd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csydas|9 years ago|reply
I currently live in St. Petersburg, Russia, and very few stores hand out plastic bags for free; most charge a small fee (5 ruble is the most I've seen) per bag. The net effect is that most people do end up getting a small collection of durable bags that get used for everything for as long as the bag lasts. (St. Petersburg has rather unpredictable precipitation, so it's not unusual to use plastic bags to protect whatever you're carrying with you either). Ultimately, the bags stay in use as long as they are fit for use.
Similarly, when I was still living in in the US in Washington State, the city I was in did a bring your own bag initiative, which has been taken further this year, apparently. [1] My experience at the time was that you'd get a small fee added to your grocery bill to account for the number of bags you used, but if you elected to bring your own bag, this was instead deducted. With the WA initiative, it was much more environmentally minded.
Ultimately both initiatives had the same effect - new bags were acquired by customers less frequently and reusable bags were more frequently used without much complaint. Once in a blue moon I see (saw) small breakdowns over charging for the bags, but most of the time people don't seem to care. WA cities weaned themselves onto the BYOB initiative. In St. Petersburg, I'm under the impression it was more of a "why wouldn't we charge for it?" sort of thing from the stores. Regardless of what direction cities decide to adopt, people will adjust pretty quickly and easily it seems - $.05 isn't much in USD, but 5 RUB here and there can add up to a transit pass pretty quickly in Russia right now. (30 RUB for surface transit, 35 for subway). Excess use of plastic bags is a habit of laziness.
[1] https://www.cityoftacoma.org/government/city_departments/env...
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hilop|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] douche|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 99_00|9 years ago|reply
All in all I still throw out fewer bags.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amalcon|9 years ago|reply
Section 2.1 disagrees with the notion that plastic bags consume lots of natural resources by quoting someone who claims that they consume a lot of oil, and disagreeing with him, saying that they are made from mostly natural gas. This is just silly: technically they're not wrong, but their argument is only compelling if you for some reason believe that natural gas is a less valuable resource than oil.
Section 2.2 starts off well, citing a study saying that HDPE bags aren't actually that big a component of litter overall. Point in favor there. They also cited the same study to demonstrate that plastic bags aren't that big of a storm drain problem. It goes downhill from there: the section on the marine ecosystem basically consists of them disagreeing with more reliable sources without actually citing any evidence. Then, it for some reason goes into a discussion of the Pacific garbage island, which seems irrelevant.
That section turns around at the end, proposing a better way to reduce litter and citing a successful example of such a program.
Section 2.3, on whether or not restrictions on HDPE bags actually reduce waste. The first section establishes that plastic bags aren't that big a fraction of landfill waste: This is the beginning of a good argument, but to complete the argument they would need to show that bag restrictions have cost larger than that small benefit, and they did not do this.
Landfill decomposition: This is a good argument, +1 point here.
Section 2.4, Global Climate: The life cycle analysis in section 3 does a good job of supporting the argument that plastic bags don't significantly contribute to climate change.
Section 4 cites various anecdotes about the long term effectiveness of bag restrictions. There are only six such examples cited. That suggests cherry picking, since there were many more such examples even two years ago.
This section does also reiterate the previous good argument that an effective plastic bag ban wouldn't help that much if at all with greenhouse emissions.
Further on, in section 4.6, the document tries to make the argument that bag restrictions are expensive, but the numbers they describe seem similarly small to the damage described in section 2.3. While completing the argument, it doesn't actually make it compelling.
The health argument is one I've heard a lot, so I won't try to address it here: that argument is all over the place.
Overall the document makes some good points, some suspect ones, and some irrelevant ones.
[+] [-] justcuz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|9 years ago|reply
They banned plastic bags in Chicago. The thin ones. All that happened was now every store gives you a free "reusable bag." These new bags are the same bags as before, but thicker. They are not reusable bags. So in this town it's very clear the regulation was a net negative on reducing plastic consumption.
[+] [-] abootstrapper|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
[+] [-] mercer|9 years ago|reply
Judging from my own behavior as a rather lazy consumer and from observing the people around me, it seems to have been pretty effective. Most of the people around me bring a bag to the store and personally I buy many fewer 10c bags these days.
[+] [-] fragsworth|9 years ago|reply
Everyone I know just pays for the new thicker bags. It's $0.30 for three bags on a $100 grocery bill.
The real annoyance comes from people not knowing exactly how many bags they need, and usually guessing too low (not wanting to be wasteful), so the baggers take longer trying to figure out how to squish everything in the bags... and sometimes the customer has to pay an extra $0.10 if they need another bag. Which gets them to dig around for a dime. This probably slows down checkout lines by a significant amount (10% or so?).
[+] [-] gorhill|9 years ago|reply
I don't get it. How do these "reusable bag" look like?
This is a typical reusable bag we use where I live: http://imgur.com/a/GLT0t
I myself I've had these bags for probably more than 10 yrs (paid $1-piece at the time), and I still use them.
[+] [-] DSMan195276|9 years ago|reply
On that note, whenever I've seen these bans I always assumed they worked similar to what Aldi's does around where I live (And I presume everywhere): They have no bags at all, and simply have things like discarded boxes that you can use to carry your food out with. You can purchase an actual reusable bag, but besides that there are no bags. That said, I can see how that might be tough for stores with more customers, and in places where you may be carrying your food a ways and not just to your car. Being from a suburb in Ohio I can't say I know tons about living in Chicago ;) But the setup does work well over here and absolutely decreases the number bags. Aldi's is the only one that does it though.
[+] [-] GFK_of_xmaspast|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajkjk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] officemonkey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hilop|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swehner|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dbg31415|9 years ago|reply
Conclusions
Proponents claim that banning plastic shopping bags will benefit the environment. Yet, as this study has shown, there is very little empirical support for such claims. Indeed, the evidence seems to point in the other direction for most environmental effects. Some of the alleged benefits are simply false, such as the claim that eliminating plastic bags will reduce oil consumption. An assessment of the San Francisco ban on plastic bags suggests that while there may have been a very small reduction in the amount of litter generated, some emissions—such those of greenhouse gases—may well have increased as a result of the ban.
At the same time, concern about the environment is only one of many issues affecting consumption choices. When it comes to shopping bags, the look, feel, and—likely most important for the majority of consumers—function are very important. HDPE plastic bags are strong, light and highly convenient (there is no need to remember to take them along when shopping, since they are supplied by the store). Also, they are typically reused for various purposes. These features have made them very attractive to consumers. By contrast, reusable NWPP bags are bulky (causing inconvenience when shopping), must be washed between shops if they may have come into contact with harmful bacteria, and must be remembered prior to going shopping (making them far less convenient); moreover, households using NWPP bags will typically purchase more garbage bin liners.
In spite of widespread media attention to the largely false claim that plastic bags are environmentally harmful, bans on the use of plastic bags are not popular: A recent Reason-Rupe poll showed that 60% of Americans oppose plastic bag bans, while only 37% are in favor. Opposition is non-partisan, though it is stronger among independents (64%) and Republicans (71%) than Democrats (52%).
Environmental groups that really care about the problem of litter, such as Keep America Beautiful, have generally promoted solutions that substantially reduce the amount of litter generated, such as public information campaigns focused on litter reduction, and facilitating clean-up operations. In other words, they target littering behavior, which is the actual cause of litter, rather than opposing the existence of certain types of product that might become litter. Meanwhile, environmental groups that really care about the protection of marine animals know that litter is not the prime culprit of diminished marine life and generally focus on other issues, such as policies that promote overfishing.
Unfortunately, policymakers have been cajoled into passing ordinances that ban plastic bags. That is bad news for consumers. It is also bad news for the environment, since the public has been misled into believing that by restricting the use of plastic bags, the problems for which those bags are allegedly responsible will be dramatically reduced. As a result, they are less likely to undertake activities—such as reducing littering and supporting policies that would lead to better protection for marine animals—that would actually benefit the environment.
[+] [-] mangeletti|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simaramis|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] GFK_of_xmaspast|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjlegato|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kenji|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callinyouin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exodust|9 years ago|reply
Would a "see spot" diagram help?
The conclusions don't mention that banning plastic bags is meant to be one contribution towards fixing our throwaway culture, not the silver bullet that saves us all.
Pointing your finger at some report and rejoicing "see, we can keep throwing plastic bags by the millions onto landfill, the PDF says we can!" is not "caring about nature".
Opting for products with less packaging is a good thing to do for the environment. Maybe buy more things in bulk. Avoid those stupid little individual tubs of yoghurt. Avoid 600ml bottles of water. Avoid that 250ml latte cup... I'm sure you can think of others if you try.
[+] [-] Simaramis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalChris|9 years ago|reply