Well Done Greenpeace – Banning Plastic Bags Increases Use Of Plastic Bags

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• Hippies don't make laws/regulations. The open season should be on those that did without any critical thought of cfc the consequences.

  • Ignore the cfc word - something went wrong on phone keyboard.

    • a season on lawyers perhaps?

• It used to be that you got a free thin plastic bag from the supermarket with your purchases, which you then shoved in a drawer and had a plentiful supply of bin liners for household rubbish. Now you have to buy a plastic bag from the supermarket, which is inevitably thicker and bigger than the old ones, and they then get used as bin liners as before (or you buy new bin liners which are also bigger and thicker than the old one use bags). So its guaranteed that more plastic will be being used for an unchanged process (buying and transporting food from the supermarket, and lining your rubbish bin at home) than it was previously.

  • Yep. Research paper here.

    Simpler version here.

    Abstract:

    Leakage occurs when partial regulation of consumer products results in increased consumption of these products in unregulated domains. This article quantifies plastic leakage from the banning of plastic carryout bags. Using quasi-random policy variation in California, I find the elimination of 40 million pounds of plastic carryout bags is offset by a 12 million pound increase in trash bag purchases—with small, medium, and tall trash bag sales increasing by 120%, 64%, and 6%, respectively. The results further reveal 12–22% of plastic carryout bags were reused as trash bags pre-regulation and show bag bans shift consumers towards fewer but heavier bags. With a substantial proportion of carryout bags already reused in a way that avoided the manufacture and purchase of another plastic bag, policy evaluations that ignore leakage effects overstate the regulation's welfare gains.

• The real question is why, if you choose policies to make a statement about yourself, should anyone expect your policies to be effective?

  The invention of plastic sheeting that is easy to puncture but hard to rip out did indeed drastically reduce the amount of plastic used in single-use bags. Alas, I preferred the days when more bags permitted a second use after I emptied the groceries out.

• Many years ago in the centre of hippydom, Glastonbury, the "health" food shop supplier bio-degradable plastic bags. The bags did actually degrade over time. That was in the 1980s, where have these bags gone, perhaps the factory that made them has bio-degraded?

  • Must confess I found bio-degradable bags annoying. Indeed when my dear sister visited me, she threw out a huge number that had just decayed in the cupboard.

    Usually these days, I just use the plastic containers of a loaf of sliced bread to dump the garbage in.

• "54 bags per household."

  Mind-boggling!

• The problem is that it doesn't understand people.

  My wife might call me on the way home from work. Nip into a supermarket and get some more flour. Not a problem. But I don't have bags in my car because I don't want a couple of bags sitting there. So, I take a 10p hit? No big deal.

  A friend of mine suggested that the scheme would only work if you made bags £1-2 each. But then, you'd get some pretty weird effects. Like people would drive home, spewing out CO2 to collect a couple of bags, doing even more environmental damage.