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Will the production of plastic waste reduce when the outlawing of thin plastics is replaced by thicker plastics? Your politician who benefits from passing feel

Will the production of plastic waste reduce when the outlawing of thin plastics is replaced by thicker plastics? Your politician who benefits from passing feel-good legislation says yes. Reality might surprise you: "In particular, my results showed that bag bans caused sales of small (4 gallon), medium (8 gallon) and large (13 gallon) trash bags to increase by 120 percent, 64 percent and 6 percent respectively." https://theconversation.com/plastic-bag-bans-can-backfire-if-consumers-just-use-other-plastics-instead-110571 https://theconversation.com/plastic-bag-bans-can-backfire-if...

lozenge 7y ago
And the bottom line - "30 percent of the plastic eliminated by the ban was coming back in the form of trash bags". So, the policy was 70 percent successful. Why then all the hand-wringing?
- DINKDINK 7y ago
  30% by mass not by pollution. The speculative aim of the legislation is to decrease pollution. It's a bit like saying alcohol abuse will go down if we ban alcohol (when the opposite happened, hardcore liquor prevalence and potency increased which increased alcohol abuse). Coase theorem shows that increasing transaction costs increases externality costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem If you ban the giving out of thin-plastic bags because they feel bad, and then the market moves towards giving everyone a thick (more environmentally taxing and ecologically costly) 'reusable' bag, you've made the environment worse not better (despite it feeling better). Case in point: the number of times a bag needs to be reused before it was less ecologically costly far exceeds the life of the bag.
Meai 7y ago
I think this really needs to be solved on a human psyche level. Print a QR code on durable plastic/cloth bags that you can buy from stores and then you can check your green score after each visit to the store where you reused your bag. Make bags a fashion statement with customized prints, at that point you can even let people move over their green points to a new bag if they want a new one or it fails on them.
- camjohnson26 7y ago
  It would be even better to rethink the entire grocery store model with a more heavy focus on delivery than to try to change human behavior with incentives. Plastic bags are what the market has currently chosen as the lowest cost, highest value method of getting goods from the store to your home. Trying to force people to use a different bag will not work. Where I live the city banned single use plastic bags, now they just use the thicker ones instead and give out just as many, which are honestly worse for the environment. If single use bags are the current easiest solution to the problem then we need to find an even easier, more environmentally friendly way to help people transfer their goods. Delivery services might be the best.

lozenge 7y ago

And the bottom line - "30 percent of the plastic eliminated by the ban was coming back in the form of trash bags". So, the policy was 70 percent successful. Why then all the hand-wringing?

DINKDINK 7y ago
30% by mass not by pollution. The speculative aim of the legislation is to decrease pollution. It's a bit like saying alcohol abuse will go down if we ban alcohol (when the opposite happened, hardcore liquor prevalence and potency increased which increased alcohol abuse). Coase theorem shows that increasing transaction costs increases externality costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem If you ban the giving out of thin-plastic bags because they feel bad, and then the market moves towards giving everyone a thick (more environmentally taxing and ecologically costly) 'reusable' bag, you've made the environment worse not better (despite it feeling better). Case in point: the number of times a bag needs to be reused before it was less ecologically costly far exceeds the life of the bag.

Meai 7y ago

I think this really needs to be solved on a human psyche level. Print a QR code on durable plastic/cloth bags that you can buy from stores and then you can check your green score after each visit to the store where you reused your bag. Make bags a fashion statement with customized prints, at that point you can even let people move over their green points to a new bag if they want a new one or it fails on them.

camjohnson26 7y ago
It would be even better to rethink the entire grocery store model with a more heavy focus on delivery than to try to change human behavior with incentives. Plastic bags are what the market has currently chosen as the lowest cost, highest value method of getting goods from the store to your home. Trying to force people to use a different bag will not work. Where I live the city banned single use plastic bags, now they just use the thicker ones instead and give out just as many, which are honestly worse for the environment. If single use bags are the current easiest solution to the problem then we need to find an even easier, more environmentally friendly way to help people transfer their goods. Delivery services might be the best.