Well, stap me vitals and colour me shocked! Virtue-signalling, heavy-handed watermelon brain-farts come with blowback even worse than the problem they’re supposed to fix. No!
I mean, it’s not like it’s happened before, again and again. Like the Scottish island that eradicated rats that were damaging its ecosystem – and lead directly to an explosion in the rabbit population. Vice-versa, Macquarie Island eliminated cats – causing the rat and rabbit population to explode. So, they tried baiting the rodents, but ended up killing kelp gulls, giant petrels and skuas.
Then there was the 50s scheme of eradicating elephants to protect grasslands (it didn’t), or the 70s effort to save coral reefs by dumping nearly a million used tyres off the coast of South Florida (it actually killed corals). More recently, Kiribati tried to curb over-fishing by paying incentives to pick coconuts – but, with the extra flush of income, locals had more spare time… to go fishing. Then there’s “green” ethanol fuels, which actually increased carbon emissions by 25 per cent. And as Michael Crichton outlined in State of Fear, the continual (mis)management of Yellowstone Park is a saga unto itself.
To this list of hare-brained eco-schemes that go horribly wrong, we can now add the elmination of single-use shopping bags.
But a new analysis by a University of Georgia researcher finds these policies, while created with good intentions, may cause more plastic bags to be purchased in the communities where they are in place. The study was published earlier this year in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics.
Which is exactly what so many of us predicted would happen. But, hey, what would we know: we’re just nay-sayers and denialists.
But, as Wilfred Reilly has pointed out, many of the most obviously ludicrous fetishes of the green-left seem perfectly plausible when they proceed from unquestioned, but very, very wrong premises. In this case, the premise of “single use plastics”.
That’s because while plastic grocery bags are viewed as a single-use item, they often find a second use as liners for small trash cans. When these shopping bags are taxed or taken away, people look for alternatives – which means they buy small plastic garbage bags.
In my house, we’ve always had a ‘bag’ bag: a home-made cloth sausage-like thing, into which we stuff all the old shopping bags. I even learned from my mother-in-law to wash out the flimsy bags supermarkets supply for packing fresh vegetables. Between use as freezer bags and picking up the dog crap in the backyard, the bags get at least one extra use, sometimes more (not the dog poo ones!).
Keeping in mind the second life that plastic grocery bags take on in many homes, Yu-Kai Huang and professor Richard Woodward of Texas A&M University measured plastic trash bag sales in counties with bans or fees in place, and compared them to other counties without such policies. The selected counties were far enough away from each other to account for shoppers who might cross into a neighboring county to avoid the policy.
The study found California communities with bag policies saw sales of four-gallon trash bags increase by 55 per cent to 75 per cent, and sales of eight-gallon trash bags increase 87 per cent to 110 per cent. These results echo earlier studies that also showed increases in sales of smaller plastic trash bags.
But while sales of small garbage bags jumped after policies were implemented, sales of larger 13-gallon trash bags – the size often found in kitchen trash cans – remained relatively unchanged. This further underscored the double life of plastic grocery bags, Huang said.
Science Daily
Of course, groceries still have to get home, somehow. There’s the woven heavy-duty replacements, of course – but Choice magazine found that these used so much more resources and energy that they needed to be used at least 23 times to break even with single-use plastics.
On the other hand, the reusable plastic bags that supermarkets now supply – for a price – don’t get many more uses than the old, “single-use” bags: but they are a much heavier-duty plastic. So, really, all that’s happening is that a much more durable plastic is ending up in landfill.
Oh, and supermarkets are raking in a nice little earner.