Banning Plastic Bags Is Great for the World, Right?
Not So Fast SIGN IN SUBSCRIBE
FAQS BEST FACE MASKS ESSENTIALS HOW TO DISINFECT EVERYTHING SYMPTOMS AND TESTING NEWSLETTER LATEST NEWS
BEN ADLER SCIENCE 06.10.2016 02:48 PM
Banning Plastic Bags Is Great for the World, Right? Not So
Fast
Advocates for plastic bag bans often neglect to ask what will replace plastic bags and what the environmental impact of that replacement will
be.
GETTY IMAGES
T H I S S TO RY originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk
collaboration.
Like cigarettes, plastic bags have recently gone from a tolerated nuisance to a
widely despised and discouraged vice.
Last month, the New York City Council passed a 5-cent-per-bag fee on single-use
NEW!
bags handed out by most retailers. Two weeks ago, the Massachusetts State
Senate passed a measure that would ban plastic bags from being dispensed by
many retail businesses and require a charge of 10 cents or more for a recycled
Most Popular
paper or reusable bag. The Massachusetts proposal may not become law this year,
but it’s the latest sign that the plastic bag industry is losing this war. Already in GEAR
Massachusetts, 32 towns and cities have passed bag bans or fees. So have at least The CDC Now Recommends
Double-Masking. Here's How
88 localities in California, including the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, to Do It
BOONE ASHWORTH
plus cities and towns in more than a dozen other states and more than a dozen
other countries. BUSINESS
ADVERTISEMENT
Microsoft’s Big Win in
Quantum Computing Was an
Ad
‘Error’
Cards Against Humanity
TOM SIMONITE
Cards Against Humanity
Open SCIENCE
Researchers Levitated a Small
Tray Using Nothing but Light
MAX G. LEVY
The adverse impacts of plastic bags are undeniable: When they’re not piling up in
landfills, they’re blocking storm drains, littering streets, getting stuck in trees, and GEAR
contaminating oceans, where fish, seabirds, and other marine animals eat them or The Best Mirrorless Cameras
to Level Up Your Photos
get tangled up in them. As longtime plastic bag adversary Ian Frazier recently SCOTT GILBERTSON
reported in The New Yorker, “In 2014, plastic grocery bags were the seventh most
SPONSORED CONTENT
common item collected during the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal
Ars online IT roundtable:
Cleanup, behind smaller debris such as cigarette butts, plastic straws, and bottle What’s the future of the
data center?
caps.” The New York City Sanitation Department collects more than 1,700 tons of
SPONSORED BY DELL
single-use carry-out bags every week, and has to spend $12.5 million a year to
dispose of them.
Bag bans cut this litter off at the source: In San Jose, California, a plastic bag ban
led to an 89 percent reduction in the number of plastic bags winding up in the
city’s storm drains. Fees have a smaller, but still significant, effect. Washington,
DC’s government estimates that its 5-cent bag tax has led to a 60 percent
reduction in the number of these bags being used, although that figure is
contested by other sources.
Is plastic really worse than paper?
But advocates of these laws and journalists who cover the issue often neglect to
ask what will replace plastic bags and what the environmental impact of that
replacement will be. People still need bags to bring home their groceries. And the
most common substitute, paper bags, may be just as bad or worse, depending on
the environmental problem you’re most concerned about.
That’s leading to a split in the anti-bag movement. Some bills, like in
Massachusetts, try to reduce the use of paper bags as well as plastic, but still favor
paper. Others, like in New York City, treat all single-use bags equally. Even then,
the question remains as to whether single-use bags are necessarily always worse
than reusable ones.
Studies of bags’ environmental impacts over their life cycle have reached widely
varying conclusions. Some are funded by plastic industry groups, like the
ironically named American Progressive Bag Alliance. Even studies conducted with
the purest of intentions depend on any number of assumptions. How many plastic
bags are replaced by one cotton tote bag? If a plastic bag is reused in the home as
the garbage bag in a bathroom waste bin, does that reduce its footprint by
eliminating the need for another small plastic garbage bag?
Throwing This Out Here: If your chief concern is climate change,
Plastic Bags Are Amazing
and You Should things get even muddier. One of the most
Appreciate Them More
comprehensive research papers on the
Trash Is Ugly, But environmental impact of bags, published in
Recycling Is Downright
Beautiful 2007 by an Australian state government
agency, found that paper bags have a
Listen Up America: You higher carbon footprint than plastic. That’s
Need to Learn How to
Recycle. Again. primarily because more energy is required
to produce and transport paper bags.
ADVERTISEMENT
“People look at [paper] and say it’s degradable, therefore it’s much better for the
environment, but it’s not in terms of climate change impact,” says David Tyler, a
professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon who has examined the research
on the environmental impact of bag use. The reasons for paper’s higher carbon
footprint are complex, but can mostly be understood as stemming from the fact
that paper bags are much thicker than plastic bags. “Very broadly, carbon
footprints are proportional to mass of an object,” says Tyler. For example, because
paper bags take up so much more space, more trucks are needed to ship paper
bags to a store than to ship plastic bags.
Looking beyond climate change
Still, many environmentalists argue that plastic is worse than paper. Climate
change, they say, isn’t the only form of environmental degradation to worry about.
“Paper does have its own environmental consequences in terms of how much
energy it takes to generate,” acknowledges Emily Norton, director of the
Massachusetts Sierra Club. “The big difference is that paper does biodegrade
eventually. Plastic is a toxin that stays in the environment, marine animals ingest
it, and it enters their bodies and then ours.”
TRENDING N O W
Meet Vinobot, the Rover on a Mission to Help Feed Humanity
Most Popular
GEAR
The CDC Now Recommends
Double-Masking. Here's How
to Do It
BOONE ASHWORTH
BUSINESS
Microsoft’s Big Win in
Quantum Computing Was an
‘Error’
TOM SIMONITE
SCIENCE
Researchers Levitated a Small
Tray Using Nothing but Light
MAX G. LEVY
GEAR
The Best Mirrorless Cameras
to Level Up Your Photos
Some social justice activists who work in low-income urban neighborhoods or SCOTT GILBERTSON
communities of color also argue that plastic bags are a particular scourge. “A lot of
SPONSORED CONTENT
the waste ends up in our communities,” says Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive
The Iconic Home
director of UPROSE, an environmental and social justice-oriented community
SPONSORED BY
organization in Brooklyn. “Plastic bags not only destroy the physical CB2 + CRATE AND BARREL
infrastructure,” she says, referring to the way they clog up storm drains and other
systems, “they contribute to emissions.” And she points out that marine plastic
pollution is a threat to low-income people who fish for their dinner: “So many
frontline communities depend on food coming from the ocean.” That’s why her
group supported New York City’s bag fee even though it’s more of a burden on
lower-income citizens. A single mom, or someone working two jobs, is more likely
to have to do her shopping in a rush on the way home from work than to go out
specifically with a tote bag in hand. But for UPROSE, that concern is outweighed
by the negative impacts of plastic bags on disadvantaged communities.
Increasingly, environmentalists are pushing for laws that include fees for all
single-use bags, and that require paper bags to be made with recycled content,
which could lower their carbon footprint. The measure now under consideration
in Massachusetts, for example, would mandate that single-use paper bags contain
at least 40 percent recycled fiber. That’s the percentage the Massachusetts Sierra
Club has advocated for at the state level and when lobbying for municipal bag
rules.
It’s complicated
But what if reusable bags aren’t good either? As the Australian study noted, a
cotton bag has major environmental impacts of its own. Only 2.4 percent of the
world’s cropland is planted with cotton, yet it accounts for 24 percent of the global
market for insecticides and 11 percent for pesticides, the World Wildlife Fund
reports. A pound of cotton requires more than 5,000 gallons of water on average,
a thirst far greater than that of any vegetable and even most meats. And cotton,
unlike paper, is not currently recycled in most places.
The Australian study concluded that the best option appears to be a reusable bag,
but one made from recycled plastic, not cotton. “A substantial shift to more
durable bags would deliver environmental gains through reductions in
greenhouse gases, energy and water use, resource depletion and litter,” the study
concluded. “The shift from one single-use bag to another single-use bag may
improve one environmental outcome, but be offset by another environmental
impact.”
ADVERTISEMENT
But studies conducted in Australia or Europe have limited applicability in the US,
particularly when you’re considering climate impact, because every country has a
different energy mix. In fact, every region of the US has a different energy mix.
“There’s no easy answer,” says Eric Goldstein, New York City environment director
for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which backed NYC’s bag fee. “There
are so very many variables. Here’s just one tiny example: Does the paper for paper
bags come from a recycled paper mill on Staten Island or a virgin forest in
northern Canada? As far as I know, nobody has done the definitive analysis, which
would necessarily need to have a large number of caveats and qualifications. Also,
this question is something like asking, ‘Would you prefer to get a parking ticket or
a tax assessment?’ It depends on the specifics, but it’s better to avoid both
wherever possible.” Goldstein is confident that if people switch to reusable bags,
even cotton ones, and use them consistently, that will ultimately be better for the
environment.
The ideal city bag policy would probably involve charging for paper and plastic
single-use bags, as New York City has decided to do, while giving out reusable
recycled-plastic bags to those who need them, especially to low-income
communities and seniors. (The crunchy rich should already have more than
enough tote bags from PBS and Whole Foods.)
The larger takeaway is that no bag is free of environmental impact, whether that’s
contributing to climate change, ocean pollution, water scarcity, or pesticide use.
The instinct to favor reusable bags springs from an understandable urge to reduce
our chronic overconsumption, but the bags we use are not the big problem.
“Eat one less meat dish a week—that’s what will have a real impact on the
environment,” says Tyler. “It’s what we put in the bag at the grocery store that
really matters.”
TOPICS CLIMATE CHANGE CLIMATE DESK
EXCLUSIVE OFFER. SUBSCRIBE
1 Year for $5
MORE FROM WIRED CONTACT
Subscribe Advertise
WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. It is the essential source of information Newsletters Contact Us
and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. The WIRED FAQ Customer Care
conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives Wired Staff Send a tip securely to WIRED
—from culture to business, science to design. The breakthroughs and Press Center Jobs
innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections,
and new industries.
Exclusive Offer: Get 1 year for $10 $5.
Get unlimited access to WIRED.com
and the print edition of the magazine.
RSS | Site Map | Accessibility Help | Condé Nast Store | Condé Nast Spotlight COOKIES SETTINGS
SUBSCRIBE
© 2021 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. Wired may earn a portion of sales from products
that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
