9-Feb-2012 - Green Column: Should Plastic Bags Be Banned?

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Those were among the questions being fiercely debated at a public meeting here in Texas’s football jerseys capital city last week, as Austin considers whether to impose a wide-ranging ban on plastic bags. Ronnie Volkening, president of the Texas Retailers Association, called the proposal for a ban draconian and warned that it would “cause chaos and confusion with our customers.” But Robin Schneider, executive director of the Texas Campaign for the Environment, countered that bags had a habit of flying everywhere and getting eaten by animals, so banning them would help the environment. Exchanges like this are increasingly common around the world, as communities wrestle with questions about regulating shopping bags distributed at checkout counters. Already countries including China and Ireland and cities including Mexico City have adopted bans or taxes in some form on plastic bags. On Tuesday, officials in San Francisco voted to expand a ban already in place on plastic bags and to require shoppers to pay 10 cents each for paper bags. The issue has caught the attention of the European Commission, which is expected to issue a preliminary paper on plastic waste this spring. A survey by the commission, published in November, found that about 78 percent of more than 15,000 respondents backed efforts at the level of the European Union to cut the use of plastic bags, and most supported banning them. Janez Potocnik, a Slovenian who serves as European commissioner for the environment, has voiced concerns about “plastic soup” in the oceans — the accumulation of enormous volumes of tiny plastic nodules. Nonetheless, “it’s unclear whether there will be a proposal on plastic bags” in the forthcoming commission paper, according to Monica Westerén, a commission spokeswoman. If there is a proposal on plastic bags, she added, it will involve pricing measures like a fee for bags and a target for reducing them, rather than an outright ban. A number of European countries already have bag taxes in some form, or other policies aimed at reducing the use of plastic bags. But there is substantial variation among countries and even types of stores. That can be confusing to travelers. “We shouldn’t hang around and wait for national legislation to be imposed one state at a time, because it could take years before each country puts in place the right sort of disincentives,” argued Chris Carroll, a representative of Seas at Risk, an environmental group based in Brussels that is seeking action at the E.U. level. The average European still uses as many as 500 plastic bags each year, he said, many of them only once. The plastics manufacturing industry opposes an E.U.-level tax or ban. Plastic bags are a sustainable, low-energy way to carry purchases, NFL jerseys cheap according to Thomas Bauwens, a spokesman for the trade group PlasticsEurope. The real problem, he said, is “irresponsible littering and a lack of awareness as to the value of plastic bags.” A better solution than a tax, Mr. Bauwens said, would be to “establish a retail price for plastic bags, as already applied in several European countries,” or to grant customers bonus points on loyalty cards if they decline bags. For places considering bans or taxes on plastic bags, an important question is what effect NFL jersey supply they have had on the environment, on consumer behavior and on groups that say they will be harmed if a policy is enacted. Solid academic research is surprisingly hard to find. One widely cited study from 2007, however, found that imposition of a bag tax of €0.15, or 0.20, in 2002 had a drastic effect in Ireland. The study, published in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics, cited a reduction of about 94 percent in the use of plastic bags. Retailers, the study found, generally took a “neutral or positive” view of the ban, because the implementation costs had been outweighed by the savings from having to purchase fewer bags for checkout. Shoppers, too, were generally happy with the policy, the researchers found from a telephone survey of Dublin residents. But policies vary tremendously from place to place, and anecdotal evidence of success is correspondingly varied.

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