Learn the facts about plastic versus paper bags – and bag the bans, instead
Hal Shurtlef
Like dozen towns and cities in Massachusetts and other states, Boston recently enacted a ban on plastic shopping bags. It went into effect December 14, 2018. It was a relatively easy vote, because “evil” plastic bags have received extensive bad press that generally ignores important facts.
The same holds true in other jurisdictions, especially those controlled by Democrats who a generation ago cared about American workers, but today too often subjugate the needs of blue collar families to demands by college educated and environmentalist elites, and even noisy grade school kids.
For example, when Los Angeles was talking about banning plastic bags, employees from a business that manufactured plastic bags spoke in person to the city council, begging it not to ban their products. The company employed hundreds of low-skilled people, paid them well and gave them excellent benefits. Many of the employees had worked there for years because they were treated so well.
They presented rational, factual information about their plastic bags. But the city council enacted the ban anyway, put the company out of business, and left the employees jobless, some of them likely homeless.
And of course it’s not just plastic bags. Los Angeles just banned plastic straws, and the state legislature is preparing to ban the straws statewide. Santa Barbara, CA banned all single use plastics: no more plastic forks, spoons, knives, Styrofoam cups and take-out boxes. Paper and cardboard only, from now on.
It is all social engineering and fake environmental protection by decree.
Here are some essential facts that you and government officials need to consider carefully in the future.
Plastic shopping bags made in the United States are made from natural gas, not oil – and America has at least another century of natural gas right under our feet. Moreover, plastic grocery bags require 70% less energy to manufacture than paper bags. In fact, it takes far more raw materials and fossil fuel energy to grow and harvest trees, make pulp and turn it into paper bags, than to make plastic bags.
Manufacturing plastic bags also consumes less than 4% of the water needed to make paper bags. In the process, plastic bags produce fewer greenhouse gases per use than paper or cotton bags.
It then takes seven trucks to deliver the same number of paper bags that a single truck can haul if the bags are made from plastic. That means it also takes far more (mostly fossil fuel) energy to transport reusable and paper bags than it does to transport plastic bags.
EPA data show that plastic bags make up only 0.5 % of the U.S. municipal waste stream. Plastic bags are 100% reusable and recyclable, and many stores make that process simple.
Reusable and paper bags take up far more space than plastic bags in landfills, and the airless environment of landfills means paper bags do not decompose for years, or even decades.
Most reusable bags are made in China and Vietnam, then shipped to the USA in fossil fuel burning cargo ships. Reusable bags are made from heavier and thicker plastic or cotton, which takes more energy to produce, even if it’s recycled fabric or plastic. A reusable bag must be used no less than 132 times before having a “greener” environmental impact that a plastic grocery bag.
Reusable bags aren’t recyclable, and reusable bag giveaways are environmentally costly when unwanted bags end up in the dumpster, often after one or even no use.
Research from Arizona has determined that few people wash their reusable grocery shopping bags, 8% of reusable bags harbor E. coli bacteria, and nearly all unwashed bags harbor other pathogenic bacteria.
Some stores have seen declines in business. One Solana Beach, CA business saw a 25% decline in business following the implementation of a plastic bag ban. A Grocery Outlet Store told a Portland, Oregon newspaper that it lost over $10,000 to shoplifters walking in with and using their own reusable bag to exit with merchandise without going through checkout lines.
Other stores reported losses of hand-carried plastic and metal grocery baskets due to bans.
Following Seattle’s ban, store owners surveyed post-ban reported seeing their costs for carryout bags increase between 40 and 200 %
The City of Boston implemented its ban in defiance of the U.S. Constitution Article 1, Section, 8, Clause 3, the Commerce Clause, and the Massachusetts Constitution, amended Article 2, which prohibits municipalities from enacting private or civil laws governing civil relationships. Other governments have no doubt ignored U.S. and state laws and constitutions in enacting their bans.
They are often enabled by entities like the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), a United Nations subdivision founded in 1990 to implement the goals of Agenda 21, now called Agenda 2030. Massachusetts Green Communities, and Vision Boston 2030 have all labeled plastic bags a “public enemy,” despite the above-mentioned facts.
Bad science and emotionalism lead to bad laws. But you can take steps to stop the madness.
Read and use the “Bag the Ban” flyers that our Camp Constitution organization developed. Watch our video on plastic versus paper bags. Write to me at CampConstitution1@gmail.com
Contact your elected officials, and demand that the bans be lifted.
Refuse to pay the 5 to 10 cents per bag that your city forces store owners to charge.
Encourage store owners to fight the ban. If enough of them worked together, bans could be overturned. The Texas Supreme Court has overturned bans on plastic bags. Other courts could do likewise.
We all care about our environment and planet. But we should be protecting those values from real dangers, employing actions that actually work.
__________
Hal Shurtlef is a life-long Boston resident, US. Army Veteran, Member of the Sons of the American Revolution, father of five homeschooled children, director and co-founder of Camp Constitution.
What is this Constitutional argument? Please explain, WUWT readers are not sheep. I do think banning plastic bags is stupid, but making up Constitutional arguments is also stupid!
The areas where plastic bags are a menace is on the coast, were they get into the ocean and are eaten by marine mammals, as they look a lot like other marine life that are food.
Wex Pyke
Do you imagine that sight is the only sense marine animals use to detect and assess food?
Do a google news search and look at the whales who have died from plastic waste. Facts are facts, even if you call them “fake news”
Wexxy,
How ’bout you start researching before you start writing. The reference earlier in the comments was to a whale that died and 65 pounds of plastic was found in its stomach. It did not state that the whale died from eating plastic. It was also not stated what kind of whale it was. Were it a blue whale, with a stomach that can hold over 2,000 pounds, the plastic wouldn’t even cause an errant burp at the whale pub under the ocean.
PBH
Whether we are using plastic or paper bags, we appear to garbage more than we did before the mid sixties.
I have periodically lived on a tiny island in Denmark, 1.5 x 1.0 km. In the early 1960’s I would regularly walk around the island to collect useful driftwood, glass bottles, wooden boxes, etc. The beach around the island appeared natural and beautiful at all times. However, after the mid sixties plastic landed on the shores to an extend where the former beauty fainted a bit.
Before the mid sixties, we used to buy a whole wooden box of bananas, another with tomatoes, a wooden returnable box with 50 beers in returnable glass bottles. We had very little plastic or paper waste pro persona and a compost heap for food waste. We naturally cared about the nature around us, without being ecological freaks in any way, and it never seemed to be a burden for us.
Our home on the main land was, since 1949, heated with heating oil. The oil company, back then, installed the furnace for free, in order to sell the oil. The fuel tank was 10,000 liter or a little under 3,000 US gallon. The house, which is now class A protected, is still to this date heated with heating oil, although now owned by the Forest Commission.
So many changes have occurred in my lifetime, and I see most of them as fascinating and beneficial. Yes, some development like plastic, involves issues, but largely benefits. Lets deal practically with the issues and focus/advertise the benefits. We need to proclaim the love to people, the benefits of great inventions like plastic and green side of our carbon dioxide contribution, the significant reduction of particulate and be happy.
Plastic bags’ bad side is an issue and has to be dealt with, just as any other waste, and banning them is a strange way of solving a mainly logistic issue. Does anybody have some positive slogans like: “Plastic bags saves resources” “Plastic bags are practical” “Plastic bags use less energy than Paper bags” “Plastic bags use less Water than Paper bags” or something that, that sounds a lot better than my futile examples. I do not think it is important if it is true or not, as the green blob virtually never come up with scientifically correct phrases.
+10
Thank you.
Excellent ideas.
Carl Friis-Hansen
I fully agree with your comments about the fact that this is an issue of waste management only and banning plastics is certainly NOT the answer and has no scientific basis.
Interestingly enough, your own Danish Government has already studied the problem and found that “lightweight LDPE carrier bags provide the overall lowest environmental impact according to most environmental indicators” See the link below for the full report!
https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf
The natural reaction of many environmentalists, I suspect, if they were to read this article, would be to demand the ban of plastic AND paper bags. Let’s not make this comparison between the two.
Oh, that ghostly laugh you hear is George Carlin. He had a great monologue in which he recited all the disasters the Earth has endured – ice ages, volcanoes, asteroids, meteors, hurricanes, solar flares, tsunamis – but what’s going to destroy the planet? plastic bags. I suspect you could find it on YouTube. Great humorist. Miss the man.
UK wise, the plastic bag (ban) was based on London-centric folks endlessly bleating about wind blown junk littering the country side.
As a ‘countryside dweller’ and ardent explorer of everyone else’s countryside (it what farmers do = keep an eye on the neighbours) I was left wondering what planet these plastic panic people were from.
I simply didn’t see it.
As a large consumer of plastic, esp the black sheeting needed to make silage – I was in the forefront of the recycling effort – us peasants had to obey the rules of and apply for ‘exemptions’ – all to do with ‘waste’
Especially the plastic – we weren’t allowed/supposed to store it On Farm for more than 12 months at a time.
Certainly no burning of course.
But then, The Cronies moved in.
They charged farmers for removing the stuff (£10 per ton last time I saw 5 years ago) AND/BUT, it had to be spotlessly clean AND the farmer had to deliver it him/herself at appointed times to appointed places.
What cost in time, fuel, wages etc etc?
Who pays. The farmer of course and they can pay it via all the ‘free money’ they regularly get from Brussels.
Then it is recycled and the only significant ‘product’ I was ever aware of was plastic fencing materials.
The plastic rails (4″ by 2″ by 12 feet long) were easily Ten Times more expensive than the genuine wooden ones they replaced *and* were impossible to hammer nails into.
The plastic fencing posts (stakes – maybe 5 feet long and 3 or 4 inch diameter) were in fact murderously dangerous to use with a mechanised hammer or post-knocker. They bent & twanged and were entirely capable of breaking your arm or smashing all the teeth out of your face. Again at 10 times the price of the wooden equivalent.
Nice little earner there wasn’t it – and The Farmer was breaking the legal law if he didn’t play along & comply.
Problem was/is, Recycled Plastic is just as big a load of crap as is Chinese recycled Steel.
It looks like the real thing but that is all you can say about it.
Too many different types and grades and the resultant mixture is everything and nothing.
Look closely at the recycled stuff (I bought a few stakes to try it) and you’ll see it is chock full of tiny metal fragments – what’s that about – where the F did *they* come from?
Some of that junk is now appearing as park benches dotted around the place but otherwise… what where???
The Los Anglian workers surely missed a trick there – onethat would.should have worked beautifully.
Wicker Shopping Baskets.
Did/does Mary Poppins use one?
My mother certainly did as did her 4 sisters and their mother = my grandmother.
And *she* was was of a family of 13. The Victorians knew a thing or two about ‘romance’ obviously
In fact, visit almost any UK supermarket now and you’ll see that the Hand Baskets for use in-store for small quantity purchases are all fitted with anti-theft devices. You cannot even get out of the door with one.
The Human Animal cannot pass off untruth. It tries often enough but *always* gives itself away.
Gotta laugh
Do you actually live in the UK?
As your experience is different to mine.
5 Years ago just about every major supermarket had every local bush & tree adorned with torn plastic bags.
But the only “recycling” that they should do is to burn them to recycle the enrgy they contain.
That reminds me. On my first trip to the UK, I had the occasion to walk about the village nearest the airport and I was amazed at all the discarded umbrellas in the vacant areas thereabout, some even in trees. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it anywhere else.
There’s a more important reason to let people make their own decisions.
“James Quintero says salmonella and other illnesses spiked after San Francisco banned plastic bags
https://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/nov/23/james-quintero/james-quintero-says-salmonella-and-other-illnesses/
The San Francisco bag ban is “associated with a statistically significant and particularly large increase in ER visits for E. Coli infections. We find increases between one fourth and two thirds, suggesting an increase in visits between 72 and 191 annually,”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2196481
I wonder how many people actually place Unwrapped & Unwashed goods with Salmonella and E Coli on them in to Shopping bags.
Practically everything is already wrapped in the UK, is it not in the US?
It is one of the complaints about excessive modern packaging.
It is typical in NJ that the checkers will automatically place meat and ice cream in separate bags within the overall grocery bag. An amazing outbreak of common sense, now that I think about it.
Produce is open. Iceberg lettuce is wrapped in plastic, but more succulent varieties of lettuce are open, along with most other fruits and vegetables. There are individual plastic produce bags where I live, but I don’t know about California.
All our local shops provide small plastic bags to place loose veg into as it is easier for the checkout to handle them.
If they wouldn’t complain about excessive modern packaging, they would complain how poorly packaged everything is. It’s always something isn’t it?
Is there anything modern big green does right?
Just wondering how much comes from trash dumping by ships at sea.
Plastic shopping bags are made from polyethylene. Polyethylene is manufactured by polymerization of ethylene, which is commercially derived by cracking petroleum. Polyethylene is not commercially prepared from natural gas.
If the poster can make such an obvious mistake about the raw material source of plastic bags, is there any reason to believe anything else he says?
eth·yl·ene
[ˈeTHəˌlēn]
NOUN
chemistry
a flammable hydrocarbon gas of the alkene series, occurring in natural gas, coal gas, and crude oil and given off by ripening fruit. It is used in chemical synthesis, especially in the manufacture of polyethylene.
From the EIA website:
Think before you post.
The situation is fluid. I believe that most ethylene, and propylene for that matter, at least in the U.S. and Canada, is produced from ethane and propane cracking, which are both derived from natural gas production.
Shell is constructing a world-scale facility as an example that will increase the quantity of these materials derived from natural gas. https://marcellusdrilling.com/2018/09/cracker-effect-shell-plant-will-create-7400-permanent-jobs/
Bsl, you are incorrect…near me at Joffre Alberta is one of the largest polyethylene plants in the world….natural gas is the feedstock.
Single use plastic bags, throw them away don’t recycle, too many people have bought into the mantra that landfills are bad.
What a ridiculous thing to say.
Why would you want to throw away an Energy Intensive item like a plastic bag.
Burn it and get some of the Energy back.
Only if the energy gotten from burning the bag exceeds the energy needed to collect the bag from the home to the place of burning.
Given how little oil is in each of these bags, you are going to have to collect a lot of bags, from a lot of homes, in order to fire up your boilers.
No different to the collection of rubbish now, especially as all our rubbish is sorted prior to pick up.
So you are wasting the time and energy of individuals instead.
>> 132 times before having a “greener” environmental impact that a plastic grocery bag.
**than** a plastic bag
Didn’t I read on another post on WUWT that plastic biodegrades? I tried to find the link w/o success. That would seem to be another point against these virtue signaling bans.
Sam, there are several WUWT posts over the last few years covering the idea you described. Perhaps try “wattsupwiththat.com plastic sunlight methane” in your search.
Hope this helps!
RM
Reusable and paper bags take up far more space than plastic bags in landfills, and the airless environment of landfills means paper bags do not decompose for years, or even decades.
I spent everyday for 4 months opening up an active landfill for a Wash. DC suburb. We buried asbestos in the open area. What I discovered was that the paper did NOT decompose, but the plastic bags were decomposing in the oxygen-less environment. Besides, the plastic bags did not bring home insect eggs like some paper bags did from the grocery store. Every grocery store has a roach problem that is addressed one way or another.
There are many materials and processes used to make the plastic bags. They can be made to be biodegradable. So with my experience, I like the plastic and not the paper. BTW I use the re-useable bags because I like the handles in carrying the bags.
It makes far more sense to require that plastic bags be made from slightly more expensive readily degradable plastic — degradable by sunlight and/or exposure to moisture. A properly engineered mixture of additives would accomplish this.
I am old enough to remember the campaigns to require plastic bags in the place of paper bags — again for environmental reasons.
The real problem with plastic bags is that we humans are not as careful with our trash as we should be. No trash or garbage should be allowed to escape into the environment — it should remain within the organized waste stream either to landfills or to waste-burning power plants.
As with many things, the solution is the application of a Kindergarten Rule — pick up after yourself and put your trash in the trash bin.
The freebie plastic bags from the grocery store, office supplies stores – whatever – are completely recyclable. I don’t know why anyone thinks they aren’t. They are not a one-shot, single use object.
I have a bucket that I put them into in my laundry room, and when I need to put organic garbage in the trash bin (e.g., peach pits, apple cores, radish tails) they go into those freebie bags. I also use them for disposing of cat litter when I’m cleaning the cat boxes, and for disposing of used paper towels when I’m cleaning stuff. I use them to take shredding stuff to an office supply store for bulk shredding so that I don’t have to waste hours getting rid of it, and having all that shredded paper left over.
Reusing the freebie bags will kill many birds with one stone. Anyone who thinks they can’t be reused is short-sighted about that.
This is the standard left wing mindset.
A small group of people mis-use something, therefore that something must be banned for everyone.
When a conservative doesn’t like something, they don’t buy it.
When a liberal doesn’t like something, they tell you not to buy it.
I wish the writers here would stop proclaiming that one solution or another will create less CO2. You’re just falling into the trap the Alarmists have created, that more CO2 is bad. It isn’t.
The solution to excess plastic waste (whether bags or straws or anything else) is trash-to-energy incineration. You use it to make electricity, so you can make more plastic bags, or whatever. And you generate some CO2, which the plants love. /LEJ
I wish the writers here would stop proclaiming that one solution or another will create less CO2. You’re just falling into the trap the Alarmists have created, that more CO2 is bad. It isn’t.
The solution to excess plastic waste (whether bags or straws or anything else) is trash-to-energy incineration. You use it to make electricity, so you can make more plastic bags, or whatever. And you generate some CO2, which the plants love. /LEJ
I bought a huge box of plastic straws at a wholesale club after moves by Starbucks and California cities. Want to buy a straw?
Technocrats strike again. Read Patrick Woods books on Technocracy
When our city went plastic bagless, one of the grocery stores gave my wife an unopened box of 1000. We’re good.
The only way re-useable bags trump plastic bags is if you make them yourself. My wife made her bags nearly 20years ago and is still using them (an occasional trip through the washer to keep them clean). The city of Portland banned plastic bags so I no longer shop in the city, I like my plastic bags; I usually get three or more uses out of them, and they take up much less space in the garbage. BTW it is a dirty secret that in many cities, such as Eugene Oregon, what is put out in the recycle is just dumped in with the regular trash because no one will buy it-especially paper. The only economically recyclable paper is paper only recyclables, like out of office environments.
Go buy a box of these, 900 for less than $15.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004MDM6LC/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_rawqCbRTVWMNC
Oh, and they’re the #3 selling business item in all of Amazon’s sales.
No problem with the bag ban for me. I have some good canvas bags that only cost a few bucks, and they’ve been going strong for years. There was a stir when it first came in here, but a few years later no one really thinks about it any more. Doesn’t take long to get accustomed to leaving some shopping bags in the car.
Humanity managed just fine without single use plastic or paper bags for heck of a long time. I’m sure we can deal with this.
Everything burns in a plasma furnace at 30,000 degrees.
You are wasting your time if you think rational argument will have any effect on these maniacs (maniacs in the sense of exhibiting a mania).