Policy Wonkery

California is in the midst of considering a ban on single-use plastic bags and adding a small mandatory fee for recyclable paper bags.  After passing the Senate Environmental committee on June 28th and winning an endorsement by the California Grocers Association it looks like Assembly Bill 1998 has legs.

My home turf, Washington DC, enacted a District-wide tax on plastic bags this past January.  I and other Beltwayers now pay a 5 cent tax on plastic bags. A portion of the fee goes to the store and the rest goes to a fund to clean up the Anacostia River.

While I instinctively jumped to the conclusion that Washington DC’s method was preferable to the Californian ban, I’m now more skeptical.  The economist in me immediately identifies the problem: clearly the cost of plastic bags (free) doesn’t reflect their public cost (for example, the $25 million California spends each year cleaning them up).  A tax could address that problem.  If bags are taxed sufficiently, then fewer people will use them and the cost of their clean-up will be part of the price.

However, the scale of this problem exceeds our measure of the cost.  Less then half of a percent of plastic bags are recycled, yet they take over a thousand years to biodegrade.  For those bags that aren’t thrown away and instead blow into the ocean, they contribute to the environmentalist nightmare known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  These problems are almost beyond redress because the exceed the human capacity for understanding.  These are costs that involve an ethic of planetary stewardship that exceeds our generational expectations, though the same may not be said of future generations.

For now, we can celebrate the surprising position of the California Grocers Association (CGA),  the industry association for grocery stores, which came out in support of the bag ban. Despite the potential impact on grocery store consumers unused to shopping with their own bags, the CGA prefers the ban as  “a unified statewide standard.” They believe the alternative, a collage of city-by-city legislation, would be more disruptive to business.

It comes as no surprise that the paper and plastic industries oppose the ban. Big Paper will have to adopt better practices and produce paper bags with 40% recyclable material, and  the plastic industry will be out of the business until they can develop biodegradable plastics.

I would encourage states to replicate either the District or Californian model as the first priority should be to address the profound environmental costs of a rather insidious object of convenience (read: “plastic bags”). Hopefully, academics will pursue comparative studies on this issue over the next couple of years.  I’m particularly interested in the findings of behavioral economists or sociologists.  I wonder if the environmental ethic of choosing to carry a bag leads to further environmental action or if it will be used as justification for buying an SUV.