Ten years ago California banned lightweight single-use plastic bags in supermarkets. Since then, the gross tonnage of plastic bag waste has increased 47%.
Huh? Long story short, supermarkets switched to heavyweight plastic bags that are theoretically reusable but not really. These bags are about three times heavier than old school thin plastic bags, so even though fewer of them are used their total weight is higher than before.
The lesson is either (a) beware of unintended consequences or (b) never listen to industry lobbyists even when they seem to be sincere. Take your pick.
The flaw in the plan was thinking that a 10-cent fee for new bags would make shoppers reuse their own bags instead. The average bill for a trip to the supermarket is more than $100. A dime per bag is not going to change many shoppers' behavior.
My guess is that a better solution is disposable biodegradable bags. I don't know if biodegradable bags are strong enough yet, but with the right incentives I'd imagine someone could develop one.
Paper bags are biodegradable. Problems:
1. Almost nothing is biodegradable in a landfill
2. Pound for pound, paper is better than plastic, bit paper bags have to be so much heavier that they are actually worse
3. Plastic shopping bags were always reusable - I have always reused mine in my house. Without them I would buy more kitchen plastic bags and garbage bags. Paper
bags are minimally reusable. They fall apart when wet and stiffness makes then harder to store, use in refrigerator, etc.
The big mistake was trying to ban them.
To be fair paper bags are recyclable. Soft plastic is hard to do (no where in my country, Australia, does it) They can take the place of newspaper on the garden, or other places where disposable paper was handy. It won't be fit for every circumstance that plastic was used but it can cover for a great deal.
In theory... but what percentage actually get recycled?
I seem to remember when the heavy duty bags first came out, there was a bit of a "Whoa! I should reuse these 'expensive' bags" but over time, lack of dedication and (as you note) realization that it's a small amount of money compared to everything else*, caused people to lose interest in saving a small amount of money or plastic.
* costs me 30¢ a mile to drive to/from the store, which is something I don't even think about
I reuse the heavyweight bags - typically good for 40 times until weak or small holes appear. I rarely see people with them in the supermarket. I see the much heavier ($1?) canvas bags about ¼ of the time. Reuse means flattening the bag, folding it, and returning it to the car. That's something people don't get into the habit of doing. Also, shopping for one person can usually be satisfied with one bag. If it's a lot of stuff for a family, bag management is a hassle.
Bag management? I routinely use 4 reusable cloth bags. It takes, what, an extra 30 seconds to flatten them and put them in the car. If you can't spare a half a minute, you've got bigger problems than bag management.
I was referring to heavy duty plastic bag management. The larger, more robust, canvas bags are - as you note - not that much of a problem to deal with.
I moved from CA to Austin and they have similar laws here, though I'm not sure what the enforcement is. Some stores have those heavy-duty theoretically reusable bags, others till have the cheap thin plastic bags.
Regardless, bleah. I always knew those heavy-duty bags were a dodge and I've always hated them.
I know a lot of people like to do the "Waah, reusable bags are MORE wasteful if you don't use them for X amount of time" but I've had a bundle of fabric and canvas bags in my trunk that I've been using regularly for at least 20 years now. I have a Trader Joe's bag that make cashiers do a double-take because it's a design they haven't printed in decades. It's do-able.
Yah, I have fabric bags that I've been using for a decade. The hassle is minimal. I don't understand why more people won't do it.
I think a lot of people reuse them *sometimes* —even most of the time—but it's very difficult to *always* have a reusable bag. Plus it's not an option if you have groceries delivered or get restaurant takeout, which are both more and more popular.
I always do.
You have nylon ones that scrunch up tightly and toss in your purse; toss a couple bigger canvas ones in the car...
A decade? Very impressive! I have worn out several cloth bags.
As have I, but there's always a few survivors.
Some thoughts:
I get delivery from Safeway for maybe half my groceries. The rest, I hoof it down to the local Whole Foods. Every time, Safeway delivers in these reusable plastic bags. I dutifully fold 'em up and reuse 'em. A zillion times. But that doesn't really help, b/c those bags are multiplying faster than I reuse 'em. So I end up using 'em to accumulate recyclables, and throw the bag into the recycle bin with the recyclables. Stuff like that. It's waste, for sure.
If all grocery stores had to use the exact same shape and look of recyclable bags -- if they were literally interchangeable --- and if every grocery store had to accept those bags back and reuse them, it miight help. Sure, make the deposit $1. Or whatever. But there needs to be a demand for these bags, to induce people to recycle them. And just reusing them at home isn't enough.
I probably have 100 bags accumulated over the past few years, nicely folded in a little box, so I can grab 'em when I run low in my messenger bag that I wear around town.
Yep, definitely need to force them to reuse delivery bags.
Right before the pandemic there was a startup that was going to use a deposit and industrial washing for takeout containers.
Needless to say, no one did it and they folded in the early pandemic.
Basically the same story now going on in NJ.
Would a limit to only paper bags be any better?
Where I live in Maine, everyone uses heavy duty re-usable bags. If you forget them in the car, you use your pockets or pay something for a paper bag. Seems to work really well once people got used to bringing their own bags.
Have you ever had a good, persuasive lawyer try to sell you? When they turn on the sincerity is exactly when you bet the opposite.
However, last time I read an update the amount of waste in waterways is way down.
Yeah, that makes me all for continuing the ban. Fewer people tossing them on the street is a win. I frankly don't care about how many get processed through normal waste channels - we use ours for cat box waste.
There is a certain reality to the amount of inconvenience that first world societies are going to tolerate and grocery bags are one of them.
This, exactly.
So we have a 5-10 cent fee for bags here in metro DC (depending on the jurisdiction) and I’ve yet to see stores replace the thin bags with thicker ones. We have the same crappy thin ones that rip after a single use here. Something else is going on in CA (other regulations?) if the fees resulted in the bags getting thicker.
I don’t know that the fees work at reducing bag usage - although I’m suspicious that the the people who say “charging for bags doesn’t work” are the same people who also say ”5-10 cent increases in the price of [gas, food, etc] have huge effects on household finances.” And also somehow people make do when the bags are completely taken away, like at Costco. But anecdotally, here in NoVa, I definitely reuse more bags now that I did a decade ago even though I can afford to buy a hundred bags on every trip to the store, mainly because the tax provides a little mental miserly nudge to grab the reusable ones in my trunk before leaving my car. YMMV I guess.
Another anecdote from NoVa: enforcement of bag fees is very inconsistent here. It’s highly dependent on low paid cashiers standing up to increasingly belligerent customers who take extra bags, and a lot of people in self checkout lanes simply aren’t honest when the computer asks “how many bags did you use?” So *that’s* the reason I think bag fees are destined to not succeed in achieving their environmental goals, not because the actual fee when enforced doesn’t “work” at lowering demand for bags.
Why bugs are attracted to artificial lights,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzLe0Zk31_U
This is saying it's a reflexive action to turn their backs toward the brightest light source as a means of navigation and when that source is a bulb they end up going in circles, with implications for plant pollination.
Haven't we been hearing for years about biodegradable plastic bags that never seem to turn up anywhere?
It's much like "cheap unlimited fusion energy."
They tend to erode either before you're done or actually contain as much microplastics as a nondegrading bag. So so far, they're worse.
There are some starch bags, but there's no regulation on them so copy-cats do it with nondegrading polymers and you get the same problem.
We're talking about the bags your groceries get stuffed into the checkout? As opposed to the really lightweight produce bags? The city I often go to outlawed the first kind 15 or 20 years ago and everybody's gotten used to either taking their own or forking over a nickel a bag (new meaning for "nickel bag," eh?). Nobody reuses these plastic ones for groceries-- I've done it a few times but even the cashiers think it's weird. All stores have big rolls of the thin produce bags and nothing's been said about limiting them.
In the town where I live all the groceries still use the regular handled plastic bags and most customers expect that, and would stop going back to any store that charged them. Smaller-town habits die hard. But enough people take in their own bags that it isn't weird anymore (but it probably means they vote D). I couldn't tell you whether I've actually seen any of these heavier bags KD mentions. Maybe a CA thing?
My main observation is that both kinds of bags must multiply in the dark, there get to be so many of them so fast. And there's only so many ways to re-purpose them. So I end up taking back easily 4/5 of them to what the groceries assure me is a recycling box. But I don't have the foggiest idea what really happens with them.
Bulk goods bags - the produce ones - are clearly different than shopping bags. They tend to not be in litter.
Don't look up. It'll be too late when serious action takes place and THEN that serious action will severely curtail people's and busines's liberty and then people will wish for the good old days Democrats and their "tyranny."
The flaw, IMO, was a ban on paper bags. Those were so useful for secondary uses or went straight into the recycle bin. And even if you were lazy, tossing them into garbage did not affect the environment.
Yes, this. I fail to understand why governments would want to promote the use of more and more and more plastic. Bigger plastic! Less degradeable plastic!
California didn't ban paper bags.
obviously the bags are priced too low. but too make sense of the data, you need to adjust for population growth (which is only 5%) and for the difference in weight between the current heavy bags and the previous light bags. if it's 3 times as heavy, a 50% increase would mean they are used twice.
other factor to consider: what fractions of the bags end up in the trash. the light bags would fly away and get lost in nature.
finally, there is an issue with pricing of paper vs plastic. Is the fraction of paper bags the same? It seems to my intuition that for the same price, a reusable plastic bag is better value, so I wouldn't be surprised that the policy encouraged the use of plastic over paper.
Maybe I am dense, but I am not convinced that plastic bags are particularly that bad, especially compared to the alternatives. If you dispose of plastic in landfill as opposed to drop them in the ocean, really, do they do more ecological harm than paper or reusable cotton bags?
It strikes me that we need to put our eco efforts into stuff like reducing carbon and methane emissions and figuring out ways to sequester carbon than plastic bags.
“If you dispose of them in a landfill?”
False dichotomy. You can take the paper bags to the recycling center along with your newspapers and magazines. It’s an easy way to spend a dime’s worth of good citizenship and buy a dollar’s worth of help for our environment.
Yeah, lets drive in our cars to the recycling center!
The actual choice is paper or plastic or cloth bags and it's hard to say which is the best choice IRL.
"Since then, the gross tonnage of plastic bag wasted has increased 47%."
I'd make a snarky comment about adjusting for population, and the total number of shopping trips, in line with Kevin's comment in the "accidents in Africa' post later in the day.
But I won't.
How much has population in the USA increased in the past ten years? Over 47%, you figure?
I’d make a snarky comment about your arithmetic.
But of course I won’t.
Clearly you missed the point.
Have a nice day.
California's population hasn't changed over the time period,
Here in Southern California, biodegradable anything is Not allowed in the recycle bins, and neither are plastic bags (which tangle up in their machinery). During the two years of pandemic, canvas/fabric bags were not allowed to be used in grocery stores because they didn't want my germ laden bags in their carts or cash register areas. I will admit I got out of the habit of remembering my reusable bags during that time; I will reverse that asap.
Generally, I've witnessed the degradation of a plastic bag over time, it's not a pretty sight. It breaks up into thousands of little pieces that fly away in the wind, but those pieces do not disappear. That's one bag.
I didn't see any of these plastic bags littering the highway this afternoon while driving home. There was plenty of litter, but not those cheap plastic bags. If the heavy-duty plastic bags end up in the landfill, so be it. Even if the heavy-duty plastic bags were reused, they eventually end up in the landfill anyway. The fact that cheap plastic bags are no longer littering the roadsides is a good thing. And they're not clogging storm drains like they used to and being washed out into the ocean is an even better thing. It's too bad some environmental experts claimed paper bags were worse, but paper deteriorates rather quickly in the open environment. Less so in landfills, but I bet it deteriorates quicker than plastic bags do. But even plastic will eventually deteriorate in acidic environments, and landfills tend to have a slightly acidic pH due to the decomposition of organic matter, which produces acidic byproducts such as organic acids.
100% this. Here in NJ you just don't see the flimsy grocery bags in the sewer drains or on the side of the road or caught up in every other tree. Is that better or worse overall? I don't know, but it's certainly better visually.
But Kevin, we had to do something... So something was done. Hardly a surprise that it didn't work-out the way the proponents hoped...
Here in NM, there was a mercifully brief period when lightweight plastic grocery sacks were "outlawed" for some reason that I forget. Something about "polluting Earth's oceans" and getting eaten by whales, which given this is Albuquerque, would have been some trick. But the little produce bags, oddly enough, were still okay.
The ultra-heavy grocery sacks held less than the little flimsy ones, so you needed more of them. They weren't as convenient to fill or re-fill, or even carry. They didn't stand up on your counter at home very well. Then the mandate ended. Lesson learned? Or just heavy lobbying? It's a mystery.
Yes, using bags for bulk items is okay,
Using bags people throw on the roadside is not.
That's the difference.
Plastic waste include clamshells and other packaging, which is higher than it was, as well.
Here (New Zealand) they banned plastic bags - everybody uses heavy "canvas" bags - they actually make everything so much easier!!
They cost a couple of dollars but my local supermarket replaces worn out bags free!
Its so much easier to take your bags with you and to have your groceries in nice strong canvas bags with strong handles to take to your kitchen
My takeaway is maybe gross tonnage isn't the right metric. Tonnage has gone up by 50%, but bags weigh 3 times more, so there are half as many bags out there, so we doubled reuse.