Ban plastic bags?

Can anyone make a case that we ought to ban plastic bags?  I mean a serious case -- one that totes up their benefits as well as their costs?

I know that this isn't it:

Many city officials and environmental groups want to eliminate plastic bags altogether since they take up valuable landfill space, are harmful to creeks and litter public areas. City leaders estimate 1,000 tons of plastic bags are placed into our landfills just from Austin.

. . .

One local environmental group, Bag the Bags, estimates Austinites use more than 100 million plastic bags every single year.

They take up valuable landfill space?  I'm not so sure landfill space is all that valuable.  But let's suppose that it is.  Why would you start with plastic bags?  1,000 tons sounds like a lot (assuming it's not an exaggeration), but Austin collected 135,000 tons of garbage in FY 2007.  Plastic bags comprised just 0.74% of our garbage by weight, and probably less by bulk, since you can compact them down to nothing.  And why would paper bags -- the obvious substitute -- take up any less space?  We'd probably need more space, since paper bags tend to be bigger than necessary, meaning extra wasted material.

Harmful to creeks?  Yes, they are.  Just off the top of my head, here are some other things that we don't want in creeks:  paint, batteries, ammonia, deodorant, plastic bottles, plastic straws, plastic forks, soda cans, tin foil, tin hats, granola bar wrappers, the little plastic cups that Jello pudding comes in . . . . and a gazillion other things.  All end up in creeks sometimes.  We wouldn't even think about banning them just for that, though.  We'd only think about a ban if too many of them were ending up in creeks, and the problem couldn't be controlled more cheaply (say, through periodic community clean ups), and they weren't too useful.  In other words, we'd insist on a cost-benefit analysis.  Where's the one for plastic bags?  Maybe bags end up in creeks more often then other stuff (what about bottles and cans?), but that is because they are ubiquitous.  They are ubiquitous because they are so useful. 

Litter public areas?  So does all the other litter that litterers litter with.  See previous point.  (Some people actually use plastic bags to carry away their litter, something you can't say about the more respectable trash.)

I've heard the petroleum argument, too.  It supposedly takes 430,000 gallons of oil to make 100 million plastic bags.  Let's see, roughly 700,000 Austinites using roughly 100 million pb's per year, indirectly consuming 430,000 gallons of oil per year . . . that works out to an average of about 0.6 gallons per year per Austinite.  For my car, that's the equivalent of 15 miles per year (city driving).  I hereby pledge to drive 1.25 fewer miles per month if I can keep the bags.  (Maybe I'll stay home from work tomorrow as a sign of good faith.)

Now I could see how paper bags might be better for fighting global warming.  Using lots of paper bags would increase the demand for trees, which would cause more trees to be planted, which would absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  But environmental groups say paper bags take a lot more energy to make (which actually seems plausible).    

Whatever the costs, we also have to consider the utility of pb's.  You can carry things with them.  Even wet things.  They're stronger than paper bags, you can get them in the right size, they are more elastic than paper and resist punctures better.  You can wad them up in a plastic-bag holder until you need them again, which makes it easy to use them multiple times.  And you can put stinky diapers in them, perhaps their best and highest use.  (No, we don't use cloth diapers.  I can assure you that the disutility to me of using cloth diapers wildly exceeds the externalities I cause by using disposable diapers.)  One creative soul even makes dresses out of them (but wants to ban them). 

If there is a good case for banning the bag -- one that balances real costs against real benefits -- I'd be interested in hearing it.

Comments

[Karl-T]

Just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading this post (as well as the one further down the page on the CWS variance) and have to say that I agree with the thoughts expressed in them. I hope you don't mind that I've added your site as a link in the sidebar of Burnt Orange Report in the "Around Austin" section.

[M1EK]

I think you're looking at this a bit disingenuously - it's obvious today that plastic bags are the primary debris in the greenbelts from just looking (horrible in Shoal Creek particularly), and that's NOT evidence of 'good' - it means a lot of them are being bought and then not reused and not thrown away. That would point to them being significantly LESS useful than your hypothesis AND would point to an obvious unallocated externality.

Their private utility to guys like you and me is absolutely irrelevant in the public policy case - unless you're willing to go out and collect a bunch from creekbeds to use (I'm not). We're not supposed to measure private benefit against public cost when talking about public policy - the whole point is to make the people getting the private benefit pay that cost.

Finally, the argument versus paper also stems on the fact that paper bags are as likely to be reused, more likely to be recycled, and more likely to biodegrade. Granted, if buried in a typical landfill, that's cold comfort - the paper bag will be around for a century or more too, but it'll still be gone long before the plastic bag will. And yes, you can use a paper bag for stinky trash - but better double-bag. Yes, I prefer plastic for that case too, but the utility of paper is still much greater than zero.

Since the ban we're talking about is essentially a ban on grocery stores giving them away for free, and since a deposit mechanism would be unwieldy at best, I'm ready to support the ban, even though I use plastic bags as much as you do (older kid with fewer diapers counterbalanced by ferocious beast). You will still be able to buy plastic bags in the store, after all.

[April]

Just because they aren't the only thing polluting the creeks or the landfill, doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can to lower their impact.

Yes, while a lot of people do recycle them privately for dog/diaper duty, car garbage, etc...there are plenty of people who do not recycle them.

[heyzeus]

I know this isn't the only reason the bags end up as litter or in the landfill, but before the city bans them altogether it would be nice if they'd consider adding them to their curbside recycling pickup.

Right now, I honestly end up throwing a lot of them away, because I can't recycle them with my other stuff and the grocery store I go to doesn't have plastic bag recycling.

I think it would be fair to require grocery stores that use plastic bags to have a recycling program for them; I believe this would cut down on the litter/landfill situation.

[M1EK]

heyzeus,

It might cut down a smidgen - but a lot of stores already claim to recycle them, and a lot of them still get thrown away. Relying on the kindness of customers is only going to get you so far - that's why states that are serious about litter have deposits on bottles and cans, for instance.

[Tim]

I think this is a horrible idea, but not for the reasons you listed. I think this will backfire and will be used as an example of environmentalism run amuck. People will use it as an excuse to do nothing. "Banning plastic bags was a bad idea so not littering must be a bad idea too." Giving people an easy out is always a bad idea.

If we're going to impose new rules on merchants I think the best one would be to require that merchants have reusable cloth bags for purchase at every checkout. That might actually make a difference. I think the carrot will work much better than the stick for helping the environment.

[M1EK]

Carrot would be requiring a deposit on the plastic bags. What you're talking about is basically relying on voluntary charity - which doesn't work, since the people who would pay for the canvas bags are precisely the ones least likely to litter the plastic ones.

[Sammer]

I would much rather see a tax on the bags than to see them banned completely. It is estimated that each bag costs $0.17 for the city to deal with in terms of landfill space and litter removal, so this cost should be passed onto the direct user instead of the general taxpayer. Ireland implemented a similar policy and plastic bag use decreased 90%.

A tax would reduce plastic bag use significantly but in a less authoritarian way that I think all sides could agree on. You get to keep your bags but I don't have to subsidize it.

[M1EK]

Sammer,

Yes, that's the ideal, but I'd go with roughly double the disposal cost given that our litter removal costs for these things are likely higher than average (picking them out of the trees in the hike&bike trails, for instance). Plus, I'm not sure 0.17 is enough to convince anybody to turn them down.

[AC]

"We're not supposed to measure private benefit against public cost when talking about public policy"

M1EK, I don't agree with that statement when the policy under consideration is a _ban_. Let me walk through the economic analysis as I understand it:

Whenever someone gets a plastic bag, there is a risk that bag will end up in a creek. That is bad. It is an externality because that cost is not reflected in the price.

We could just add a tax that reflects that risk. But that creates a moral hazard, because the risk of the bag becoming litter depends on the user's care. If everyone is being charged a tax based on the average amount of care, then everyone will have an incentive to use less than average care, requiring a higher tax, etc. (A flat tax up front could lead to more bags ending up in streams.)

In a world without transaction costs, the ideal policy would be to charge a deposit. Then everyone has an incentive to take care of the bag and get it back to a recycling bin.

But the deposit mechanism may be impractical here. (Is that necessarily true, though?)

Alright. So what's our second-best policy? We'd like "to make the people getting the private benefit pay that cost [of the externality]." But there is no such policy on the table. The only other option we've been presented is a ban.

This is where I disagree with you: If you intend to use a ban to manage externalities, you absolutely have to weigh "private" utility against social cost. Otherwise, you don't know whether you're maximizing net welfare. The stuff you're banning might be really, really useful but impose only really, really small external costs. A ban could produce small savings at a huge cost. (You don't have to weigh total cost against total benefit when you force the price to incorporate the external costs; it will happen naturally as people alter their behavior in response to the price.)

We're not very good at weighing the costs and benefits in the aggregate like this. We just don't have enough information. That is why bans should generally be a last resort.

Which brings me back to the point in my post. Does the aggregate cost of plastic bags exceed their aggregate utility? Frankly, I'm not even sure how you would measure that. Pollution is bad. It spoils our streams. But not having plastic bags is bad, too.

I also disagree, by the way, that the fact that bags are thrown away so readily is evidence that they are not so useful. The utility of any consumable will slope downward over time. When I give an old TV to Goodwill, I'm demonstrating that it has _negative_ utility, since I'm actually taking the effort to get rid of it. That doesn't mean that it always had negative utility, of course. When I bought it, it was really useful.

The implicit argument in the bag-the-bag campaign is that plastic bags aren't really much more useful than paper bags. I just don't know that I agree with that. Sometimes one is more useful; sometimes the other. (I wonder -- how long does the average person pause before answering the "Paper or plastic?" question out the check out lines.) Perhaps paper bags are such a good substitute, though, that there's not much loss from banning plastics. I don't think advocates have shown that.

I think our time would be better spent thinking of alternative policies. One of the great things about the deposit program is that it creates an incentive to scavenge. Perhaps the City could just offer a bounty of a few cents per bag, financed with a tax on grocery stores? I suspect something along this line will be a lot better than an outright ban.

[jerry B]

I have a question. There was a statement in one of the comments that PBs are by far the most prolific litter item in public spaces (greenbelts). Having personally spent time cleaning up a mile stretch of public road leading to a public park many times, I would disagree from experience. Yes, I picked up a number of PBs. Yes, they are absolutely the most noticeable items discarded because they stay on top of the grass and flap in the breeze. But BY FAR, the number one litter item on my stretch of self-maintained road was beer bottles and beer cans. Period. 50-1 ratio at the very least. So, what say we ban beer :) Even if I stipulate that PBs are more prolific litter in the Barton Creek Greenbelt, that is one very small portion of the litter in the greater metro area. In one Saturday I picked up four large garbage bags (yes, plastic) of primarily beer cans and bottles with maybe three PBs, though I must admit the PBs flapping in the breeze was what got me off my tush to do the work.

[M1EK]

"This is where I disagree with you: If you intend to use a ban to manage externalities, you absolutely have to weigh "private" utility against social cost."

Agreed. I'm obviously leaning towards a large tax at that particular argumentative juncture.

I don't buy the theory that there's no substitute for free plastic bags, though. I've used paper bags for dog poop and diaper disposal before; and I've bought plastic bags at the store for use as garbage bags (haven't you?).

And as for the problem with a large tax and moral hazard - I'm really having trouble understanding that logic. Your theory is that if disposal cost for "average care" is 5 cents, that if I'm charged 10 cents for it, I'm still going to get more than I need and just throw them all over the place? Seems to me that the effect of me getting only as many as I really need is far greater than what I do with them after that.

The reason I think deposits are unworkable is that the bags rip and tear too easily; and there's far too many sources for them. If one or the other changed, there might be some hope.

jerry b, I was referring to the more urban settings like Shoal Creek - where floods rise proportionally higher and catch a lot of plastic bags used by bums and the like.

[M1EK]

I should state that there's three or more possible positions on the continuum between "free" and "ban":

1) business as usual; i.e. stores give away free bags at will

2) stores have to charge for bags

3) stores not allowed to give out plastic bags at all (can still buy them in the store)

4) complete ban

I think #4 is impossible (no more garbage bags sold in stores? Yeah, right); and a lot of the time people are representing #3 as if it were #4. Under #3, you'd have to go buy bags for your diaper needs if paper bags really didn't cut it, sure, but let's be real: #4 is not under consideration and never will be.

[GlennM]

A good compromise to me would be a combination of charging for the bags + curbside recycling.

I've had cloth shopping bags for a while, and still sometimes forget to get them into the car before going to the store.

The $0.05 discount I get for bringing my own bags isn't enough of an incentive for me to always remember them. From the comments above, I doubt that many folks know that some stores will give you a discount for bringing your own bags. Charging for the bags would make more people think about alternatives. Maybe $0.20, to make the math easy.

Many grocery stores (HEB, Randalls) also have bins for bag recycling out front. But my bag-pile in the garage would often get out of control before I'd remember to try to drop some off on my next trip. Curbside recycling would definitely help.

But, just as I choose paper bags at the checkout when I need paper recycling containers, it's nice to be able to get some plastic dog-waste containers at the checkout line. I agree with AC, a ban would be overkill.

[AC]

I was obviously confusing about my moral hazard point. I don't dispute that a large tax could decrease PB consumption or litter. It is just not as efficient as a deposit-return scheme. A flat tax does not encourage consumers to be careful with their bags once they buy them. Once I've paid the $0.10 bag tax, I've got no more incentive not to litter than I had before. In fact, I might have been conscientious about not littering before but, hey, if I'm going to be charged for the littering that others do anyway, then maybe I'll be less conscientious, too.

[M1EK]

"In fact, I might have been conscientious about not littering before but, hey, if I'm going to be charged for the littering that others do anyway, then maybe I'll be less conscientious, too."

That's vanishingly unlikely. The effect of less bags to begin with would overwhelm this effect even if it exists.

Curbside recycling for these things would be a disaster, by the way - they're big money-losers and they'd blow all over the place. I have a hard time believing the ones at the grocery stores are even recycled (but at least they're being collected for disposal, if only that).

[AC]

My continuum:

1. The City pays a bounty of X cents for each bag, and finances that by taxing the plastic bags bought by retailers.

2. The City just charges a flat tax of X cents per bag, and dedicates the money to litter removal.

3. Business as usual.

4. Ban the bags (i.e., prohibit retailers from bagging your merchandise with plastic.)

Benefits of #1: It will discourage littering. It will encourage people to scavenge for litter, probably the most efficient kind of litter removal. It won't over-deter the use of PBs. It gives retailers the flexibility to ration bags as they see fit.

I don't care if people turn in ripped or torn bags. These bags can't be recycled. But I'm not trying to cut the number of bags that end up in landfills. I'm trying to cut the number of bags that don't end up in landfills.

Disadvantages: Arbitrage. We'll end up with a lot of out-of-town bags. People will pilfer bags. But note that the risk of arbitrage means that retailers will charge consumers at least the amount of the bounty, otherwise consumers will come in just to clean them out of bags.

Benefits of #2: Probably more practical than #1. even if second-best theoretically. Probably not onerous if limited to the amount needed to clean up litter. (A $0.05/PB tax would yield $5 million in litter control money per year at 100 MM bags per year.)

Note that #2 = #4 if the tax is set high enough. My goal, again, is to cut down on litter, not plastic bag use, so I would not set #2 above the cost of abating litter.

Also, M1EK, note that consumers will invariably pay per bag under either #1 or #2.

I think #3 is better than #4 for the reasons I've stated.

GlennM, thanks for the tip about the discount for bringing your own bag. I didn't know about that (which makes your point). I don't know what effect curbside recycling would have on litter. Sometimes stuff in those recycyling bins gets blown around a lot on a windy day. We might see more litter. (It would definitely encourage more recycling, of course.)

[M1EK]

My continuum wasn't ordered by preference, BTW, it was ordered by degree of intervention.

I still think the bounty/deposit is unworkable. What's to stop me from ripping each bag I pick up into three pieces? Ten? What's to stop me from bringing in a hundred bags from my friend's house in Round Rock? Etc.

[AC]

Yeah, that's what I meant by "arbitrage" and why I said #2 was probably more practical.

Do you see any reason to favor #4 (outright ban) over #2?

[M1EK]

No, I prefer #2 on your list, but up until now it seemed like you didn't. But I don't think a ban on them being given out at the counter is much different, to tell you the truth. You could still buy them by the box (as you can today).

[hoopla]

I agree with M1EK. First of all I think the story slams the ban idea without adding constructive ideas how to address the problem of PBs. And yes...they are a problem. If anyone has ever gotten away from their computer for awhile and stepped out for a walk beside one of austin's many creeks they would see the need to regulate PBs. I think one of the better solutions would be to charge for bags (paper or plastic) in general, but at the same time push reusable bags like canvas. The fact is that to assume that we can't make a difference by stepping in and regulating PBs is very self-defeating, we need to do something and PBs are one of the more easily regulated items (of those listed in the original story).