Save The Birds! Kill The Humans! Unintended Consequences Of The Plastic Bag Ban
Politicians fell all over themselves banning plastic bags in California and elsewhere -- not caring about the the livelihood of plastic bag makers and their employees, for one. They also paid no notice to the fact that, per Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward, California data behind the bag ban came from information "collected by volunteers on one day each year [that] is not a scientific assessment."
I've been annoyed about the bag ban since it went down. I was re-annoyed at this LA Times editorial on November 18: "It's been a year since California banned single-use plastic bags. The world didn't end."
Reality -- from an LA Times commenter:
Terminator80s
Stores still use plastic bags. The only difference is now that they charge you 10 to 15 cents per bag. How did this change anything besides making the cost of living in California even higher?
There's also another reality -- the unintended consequence reflected in this tweet:
Something I didn't know - reusable plastic bags often carry e coli and similar diseases, and the San Francisco plastic bag ban coincided with a 50% spike in deaths from related diseases. https://t.co/ETVFK6l7VT
— Sam Bowman 🌐 (@s8mb) November 21, 2017
Here's the paper from 2012 -- by two law profs, Jonathan Klick and Joshua D. Wright:
Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase.
More from Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward (the link on the CA data at the top):
A 2011 survey published in the journal Food Protection Trends found coliform bacteria in fully half of the reusable shopping bags tested in a random survey of shoppers in Arizona and California. The same 2014 Edelman Berland study that found consumers frequently forgot their bags also unearthed the fact that only 18 percent of shoppers reported cleaning their bags "once a week or more." An article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases traced a 2010 outbreak of norovirus to nine members of an Oregon soccer team who had touched or eaten food stored in a contaminated reusable bag.
Sure, people can wash the bags! And "can" and "do" are often two very different things.
Wave hello to your E. coli for me!
PS I like this guy commenting on the LA Times story, and I think that's what Gregg and I should do.
unclesmrgol
I immediately went out and bought 3,000 plastic bags at a half cent each. We don't have to worry about bacteria getting into our foods from reused bags -- and we don't have to use environmentally unfriendly soaps and scarce water to wash the reusable bags after they've been used for raw meat or have sat in the fecal matter that infests most shopping carts. I feel far more environmentally friendly than those who use reusable bags, because I'm defeating the spread of disease AND being environmentally responsible at the same time, for the used-once bags are then used again -- to hold cat droppings.
via @s8mb
The folks who ban plastic bags should be dragged out into the street and beaten. No, do not actually do that; it's just how I feel.
mpetrie98 at November 22, 2017 12:15 AM
This story was written without any acknowledgement of the existence
of paper bags. It's as if the store gives you plastic or nothing.
It's normally not a binary choice. Or don't California stores offer
paper bags at all?
Ron at November 22, 2017 5:54 AM
I love my plastic grocery bags. They hold my groceries. Then they line my small waste cans, used to have dirty diapers tied up in them when we used diapers, i use them for cat litter scooping, dog dropping pick-up, etc. Why should i buy reusable grocery bags, then buy assorted single-use plastic bags for all those other tasks? The bags arent the problem. Litter is the problem. The bags do hurt animals when irresponsibly dropped. They dont hurt animals in landfills. The dont mess with texas campaign was wildly successful in redusing litter in TX. Maybe Cali should have addressed litter.
Momof4 at November 22, 2017 6:16 AM
Sadly, paper bags seem to have dissapeared when cheaper (I assume) plastic bags took over, and now stores can charge for the plastic bag why would they go back to paper they give away for free?
Mark at November 22, 2017 6:54 AM
A lot of this nonsense seems to be fed by the myth, which I just saw repeated in an episode of Scorpion last night, that there is a vast floating island of plastic garbage in the Pacific. There is no such thing. There are "dead zones" in ocean currents where a higher-than-normal concentration of floating plastic garbage can be found, along with natural marine debris like seaweed and driftwood. But there is no garbage island. Here's a NOAA page about the subject.
It's ironic that a lot of this business about reusable grocery bags is based on a supposition, which leftists normally abhor, that there is a lady of the house who doesn't work and has time to go to the grocery store every day to pick up items for the evening meal. Here in the real world, my wife and I both work, and we go grocery shopping once a week, and the groceries that we buy don't come close to fitting in one or two reusable bags. On weekends when we're hosting dinner for relatives, we walk up to the checkout counter with a cart full. Plastic bags are one of the greatest inventions ever in grocery-toting; I can gather up a bunch of them on each arm and, with a bit of help from my wife, usually get them all in the house in one trip. (This is also what happened to paper bags, BTW. You can't safely carry a paper bag with one hand; you have to have a hand underneath the bottom. I grew up in the era of paper bags and I saw a lot of groceries ruined when the bottom ripped out of a bag.)
Another good use for plastic bags: When you're painting your house, when you've done enough for the day, instead of going to the trouble of washing your roller out, just put it in a plastic bag and tie the bag off around the handle to seal the roller in. That will prevent the roller from drying out overnight, and the next day you can use it again.
Cousin Dave at November 22, 2017 7:02 AM
By coincidence, Reynolds linked to this today: The bulk of the world's ocean plastic pollution comes from a handful of rivers in Asia and Africa.
Cousin Dave at November 22, 2017 8:00 AM
" Kill The Humans!" many on the left would consider that a bonus, they are convinced humans are a virus and overpopulation has run amok.
Joe J at November 22, 2017 8:39 AM
Im old enough to remember when we had to "save the trees" and proto SJWs were guilting everyone into doing the 'right' thing and save the tree by using plastic bags
lujlp at November 22, 2017 9:02 AM
Also under the Paris Climate agreement not one of the countries these ten rivers flow thru are expected to curb their polution
lujlp at November 22, 2017 9:04 AM
The full environmental cost of making a plastic bag is less than for a paper bag in terms of energy used and resources used. Plastic grocery bags at my house are also mostly used again for small trash cans. This is phobic behavior, banning something useful like this. I almost never see plastic bags blowing around my neighborhood. If some places do it is probably due to poor trash collection practices.
cc at November 22, 2017 12:54 PM
CA border state resident. I see both cultures on a daily basis. On Nevada side of the border I go buy a half gallon of milk and they double bag it. I have two hands. It is one item.
My question to the group: how do you go about changing the culture relating to grocery bags without the ban? What's the reasonable middle ground? Sometimes a trip to the grocery store is like a meal at In 'n Out: pound per pound it contains more disposable trash than it does beef.
Seems clear they should at least be able to bag your bacon in plastic before they slip it in the Chico with the kale.
smurfy at November 22, 2017 3:53 PM
I love plastic bags! I reuse them for my bathroom trash can. I'm totally with Momof4 on this one.
Daghain at November 22, 2017 5:20 PM
All I know is: I have not bought plastic bags of any kind in decades, I do not use the free ones in the produce section, the supermarkets no longer provide free shopping bags (I use my nylon knapsack), and yet I never seem to run out of the ones I need for food or garbage pails. I find that scary.
lenona at November 22, 2017 7:41 PM
A "spike" in the number of deaths from something that certainly caused very few deaths to begin with may very well be only one or two, in which case there's no reason to assume it's not coincidence. What is the actual number?
Which does not mean I support a ban in any case. This is nanny-statism.
jdgalt at November 22, 2017 8:35 PM
""Kill The Humans!" many on the left would consider that a bonus, they are convinced humans are a virus and overpopulation has run amok."
Hugo Weaving is a wonderful 'bot, isn't he? Such care in speaking...
And...
But it'll happen to other people, so it'll be OK.
Radwaste at November 23, 2017 7:24 AM
As they say where I come from, 'get over yourselves' !
Such a first world problem, and yet - how did our parents get by before he advent of the plastic carrier bag, how may people died with the use of reusable shopping bags before the 70's?
Yet again the baby boomers are ruining the world for the next generation. Do you realise that petrochemicals are used in the production of these things ? You want to line your bins? Use newspaper!
So the used plastic bags go into landfill ? Do you know how long for? They don't degrade, so probably for a few hundred years, but that's Ok, not your problem.
In Europe we get by, not having plastic carriers, I have a stock now of 'lifetime' bags, take one or three to the supermarket when I go, and yes, I am still alive. And now the vegetables come in biodegradable bags. We can use them for lining the bins.
Carol BT at November 23, 2017 12:28 PM
Not exactly a "first world problem"...
Here's what I posted in August.
Want to sell or import plastic bags in Kenya? Don't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/world/africa/kenya-plastic-bags-ban.html
Note what the United Nations said, near the end. The year they mentioned isn't that far away - compared to predictions made regarding, say, the year 2100.
Btw, I remember that in Spain, in the 1970s, grocery customers typically used big straw(?) bags. Hope they still do. I use my knapsack, and when it wears out for good, I expect to find a replacement at a yard sale or Craigslist.
lenona at November 24, 2017 7:58 AM
Oh, and here's something I find kind of alarming.
People say that global growth is "slowing down." Even Worldometers does. But the same site has some contradictory numbers.
Namely, since it took just about 12 years to go from 6 billion to 7 billion by Oct. 31, 2011, I would have assumed it would take 11 years to reach 8 billion. We reached 7.5 billion on April 25th, 2017 - that's almost exactly five and a half years. So far, that's what I thought.
BUT...today, we are well over 7.583 billion. That's an increase of 12 million per month - MUCH more than before. At that rate, we should reach 7.6 billion by early January - and if the rate stays the same, we'd reach 8 billion by maybe September of 2020. So we'd go from 7 billion to 8 billion in fewer than NINE years!
Does anyone believe we can afford to increase at that speed? Even if it means having a population that's 50% senior citizens?
Or, to use another formula, ever since the 1920s, the global population has doubled every 50 years or fewer (usually under 46 years) - even if you start counting AFTER the end of the baby boom. Again, does anyone really want to risk seeing that happen? (To divide our current population in half, simply go back to 1971 - 46 years ago.)
I just don't understand those who think we'll reach 8 billion much later than 2020 - or those who think we'll "only" be at 9.5 billion by 2050. Even if we suddenly go into reverse and increase at the same rate as before - 1 billion every 12 years - that would still mean we'd reach ten billion by 2047!
lenona at November 24, 2017 9:20 AM
Slip-up - I meant to type "Even if the alternative means having a population that's 50% senior citizens?
lenona at November 24, 2017 9:21 AM
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