single-use plastic bags aren’t the worst environmental choice at the supermarket—they’re the best. High-density polyethylene bags are a marvel of economic, engineering and environmental efficiency. They’re cheap, convenient, waterproof, strong enough to hold groceries but thin and light enough to make and transport using scant energy, water or other resources. Though they’re called single-use, most people reuse them, typically as trash-can liners. When governments ban them, consumers buy thicker substitutes with a bigger carbon footprint.
These laws fit the narrative that unfettered capitalism is destroying the environment and only the valiant government can save us.
A better approach might be to look at those government actions and rules that hurt the environment and stop doing them. For example zoning laws that make it difficult or impossible to build high density housing cause higher energy use. This is both because the low density housing units themselves use more energy and because the commuting distances are longer.
I worked for the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation for several years. During that time we had a unit that went from business to business trying to convice them that telecommuting was a great option. When someone asked our commisioner if we could telecomute (my job was in large part reviewing documents submittied by various businesses something that could easily be done from home) the commissioner of course said no.
Telecommute story +1
Full article Plastic Bags Help the Environment: Banning them provides no benefit other than to let activists lord their preferences over others.
By John Tierney
“ The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible to a class of citizens to give to another.”
-Voltaire
Tierney is a national treasure. This piece seems to develop his earlier important article on the waste involved in government mandated recycling programs back in the era of the “we are running out of land fill space” hoax.
But we see the same triumph of cynical exploitation of blind enviro- enthusiasts over and over again. The worst of the lot now are the US government subsidies to the solar power and wind turbine industries that inevitably increase retail power costs, waste land, weaken the grid and produce blackouts (see Australia and Germany) while only ever being an unnecessary redundancy to the core traditional dependable energy generators (gas, coal, nuclear, hydro) that must be retained anyway because there is no way to store the wind and solar energy that comes and goes with the vicissitudes of weather. The new state-imposed solar tile requirements for new housing add much more to the cost of housing than local land use zoning.
Tierney also says:
This argument is flawed for two technical reasons: 1. Plastic bags are notorious for fouling machinery used at landfill sites, and 2. Modern landfill sites do a good job of collecting methane.
Like transportation systems, waste management is a non-trivial engineering problem. Tierney is very good at pointing out the false assumptions of progressive environmentalists but I’m not sure he is good at self-reflecting on his own.
Some problems are too hard to reason about individually. Maybe we need a shared “Datapedia” to capture the most modern snapshot of our accumulated wisdom regarding these complex issues.
Plastic bags foul recycling plant machinery, not landfill machinery. That is why, consistent with Tierney, recycling programs ask you to not put them in your recycling bin: https://stlcityrecycles.com/why-plastic-bags-are-bad-for-your-blue-bin-2/
All biodegradable products produce methane as they decompose. Landfills commonly collect the gas and burn it for energy: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-landfill-methane
Tierney’s earlier article on recycling: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html
The WSJ article was adapted from the Winter 2020 City Journal piece The Perverse Panic over Plastic:
The campaign against disposable bags and other products is harming the planet and the public.
By John Tierney
My favorite is the plastic straw ban. The paper straws taste terrible and ruin the drink before dissolving and becoming useless. But, at least we reap the alleged environmental benefit of putting paper straws into plastic garbage bags and burying those bags in the ground instead of putting plastic straws into plastic garbage bags and burying those bags in the ground.
Wind turbines are magical. People somehow don’t see what they’re made of. They can’t picture all the energy and resources that went into producing these things. But it takes 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of non-recyclable plastic to build each one.
Electric cars? Also magic. To produce one battery for an electric car means digging up and processing and moving 500,000 pounds of material. “The alternative? Use gasoline and extract one-tenth as much total tonnage to deliver the same number of vehicle-miles over the battery’s seven-year life.” Quoting Mark Mills.
But it’s all magically invisible. Technically you can’t build an electric car without mining for cobalt and lithium. Technically you can’t build a solar panel without mining for silver and indium. Magically none of this is noticed by politicians or journalists or activists who would otherwise want to divest from mining, or ban mining.
These mining and other resource extraction expenses are built into the price of the solar panel or windmill. These resources do not come free. These expenses are built into the depreciation of the panel or tower over the years. Your argument is built on an incorrect premise.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to make another frivolous attempt at explaining the key characteristics of “traditional” engineering. Math and science tend to focus on “The Solution” to a problem while engineering is focused on “The Solution Space”. There is no single solution to engineering problems, there is an unbound set of possible solutions with various tradeoffs and factors that change from critical to negligible in different scenarios. Engineering is about converging on the few solutions that, with time and experience, emerge as superior to the others.
Economists like to think of prices and occasionally transaction costs but have generally ignored the fact that “price” is a lever of marketing. Most product prices hide and bundle the underlying service costs; this is a historical artifact. When price is decoupled from the costs (upstream, downstream, or externalities), the invisible hand of allocation loses its touch.
Environmentalists point to the downstream cost plastic shopping bags on marine animals. I’m sympathetic, I like sea turtles; some of my favorite life moments occurred in their presence. I’m also really fond of cephalopods, and some of my favorite life moments with these incredible animals involved human garbage; the common name of the coconut octopus is a living testament to this phenomena. The Lembeh Strait in Indonesia is famous for its commercial shipping, the flood of humanity that rushes by in a dazzling “rush-hour” that occurs entirely by boat, the floating garbage produced by a dense urban population that lives check-to-check buying consumables packaged in low-volume plastic containers (bulk is an extravagance of the wealthy), and an unparalleled marine ecosystem. The first instinct of most visiting divers seeing the garbage scattered on the sandy bottom is one of anger and dismay but any attempt at cleanup will result in the destruction of what is a perfect habitat for some critter. But even with this special case, one must make a distinction between plastic bags and plastic containers, cans, bottles, and underwater mounds of split coconuts that locals have thrown into the water for generations.
Tierney takes the plastic shopping bag hating environmentalists “key factor” of marine animal well being and re-frames it within the environmental “key factor” of carbon emissions. In response to Edgar above, I point out that landfill emissions are not a “key factor” and that plastic bags create a disproportional maintenance cost on landfill machinery (plastic bags are not the friend of axels, wheels, and tracks). Edgar responds that landfill machinery is fine but that recycling machinery, a different engineering context, truly suffers as demonstrated by the St. Louis recycling policy. I’ve never heard of a municipality not attempting to divert the stream of plastic bags so I clicked through Edgar’s link only to find that plastic bag recycling has been pushed out to bins found outside St. Louis grocery stores. This is a fine equilibrium in the solution space; “a solution”, not “the solution”.
Bill T rightfully points out that one can re-frame the issue in terms of energy consumption and, indeed, most engineering cradle-to-grave models take this very approach. BC rightfully points out that focusing on the “key factor” of biodegradability produces a switch to alternative materials for straws that incur unacceptable tradeoffs. Engineers don’t look for “a material” they look at the full landscape of available materials and the tradeoffs each incurs when applied to their “solution space”.
These are engineering “solution space” problems. Transportation, electricity, fresh water, wastewater, air pollution, groundwater pollution, disease vectors (water-borne, mosquito-born), UV/ozone, all have the same characteristics. Journalists and writers don’t seem to grasp the nature of these “solution space” problems. I am forever frustrated by this style of reporting, perhaps I’m the only one. Re-framing the discussion in terms of the “key factor” being measured, or the “different scenario” under consideration, is myopic when confronted with the enormity of the “solution space”. These are not new problems and we have been solving equivalent problems for centuries, unfortunately, most of society is blind to the “solvers” and their well-honed “techniques”.
You are not the only one. One of the first “environmental” things I learned was that you don’t make air pollution cease to exist by building taller smokestacks. Similarly, economists know that you can’t get rid of costs by making somebody else pay for them.
Some of my best friends are sea turtles.