Plastic bag bans are actually terrible for the environment and make us sicker

Montreal celebrated the start of 2018 by banning single-use plastic bags, with grocers and retailers facing thousands of dollars in fines if they refuse to comply after an initial grace period. A plastic bag ban, enthusiastically endorsed by federal environment minister Catherine McKenna, is also scheduled to take effect in Victoria later this year, and politicians in other cities and even in Manitoba’s Conservative government are now considering bag bans as well.

The ill-conceived ban is a policy that cannot possibly pass a cost-benefit analysis, not least because politicians have no way of measuring the cost of the regulation — that is, the amount of inconvenience that the ban forces consumers and businesses to suffer. Meanwhile, there is pretty strong evidence that the benefits of the regulation (supposedly a cleaner environment) are either zero or negative.

In the first place, one of the reasons plastic bags are so popular is because of all the ways they make the environment cleaner and less hazardous to humans. Dog walkers use plastic bags to clean the environment of pet waste. People use plastic bags to carry clothes and books and everything else from place to place in order to keep their belongings clean from the dirt on the ground.

Plastic grocery bags are also an excellent way to protect people from bacteria in the environment, because they are disposable. By contrast, reusable grocery bags can be “a serious threat to public health,” according to Charles Gerba, a University of Arizona microbiologist and co-author of a study on grocery bags. He noted that health risks of reusable bags came “especially from coliform bacteria including E. coli, which were detected in half of the bags sampled.”

Another study by professors at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University examined the connection between San Francisco’s plastic bag ban and bacteria-related illnesses. They concluded that “both deaths and ER visits spiked as soon as the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, deaths in San Francisco increase by almost 50 per cent, and ER visits increase by a comparable amount. Subsequent bans by other cities in California appear to be associated with similar effects.”

Far from causing environmental harm, the main use of plastic bags is to make the environment cleaner for humans, such as by keeping bacteria out of groceries. Nevertheless, bag ban advocates insist that the bags are indeed environmentally harmful, and must be outlawed to fight climate change.

But justifying bag bans on the grounds of saving the climate “(does) not withstand critical scrutiny,” writes economist E. Frank Stephenson in a book chapter published earlier this month by the Mercatus Center, a university think tank. Stephenson notes that if people switch to reusable plastic bags, carbon emissions might well increase since reusable bags are thicker.

Switching instead to paper bags could be worse. Stephenson cites evidence that “compared to paper grocery bags, plastic grocery bags consume 40 per cent less energy, generate 80 per cent less solid waste, produce 70 per cent fewer atmospheric emissions, and release up to 94 per cent fewer waterborne wastes.”

Another alternative, the reusable cloth bags favoured by environmentally-conscious shoppers, reports Stephenson, “need to be used about 130 times to be carbon equivalent with single-use plastic bags” and so sticking with plastic bags instead may result in lower emissions. And the plastic bags aren’t exactly filling up the landfills, either. Data from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests plastic bags account for only about 0.28 per cent, by weight, of municipal solid waste in America.

Given these facts, Stephenson concludes that the bans “appear to be victories of symbolism over sound policy” and that “predatory politics may often be found lurking beneath the green veneer of plastic bag bans.” Indeed, there is no better way to describe the politics of those who ban, without good reason, products shoppers want to use.