If New Jersey’s experience is any indication, Californians can look forward to a costly new inconvenience.
If New Jersey’s experience is any indication, Californians can look forward to a costly new inconvenience.
F or the last two years, New Jersey has had the dubious honor of being home to the dumbest new policy fad in America. It has spent that time clinging to a progressive reform so rigid, imperious, and counterproductive that you’d think no state would be pig-headed enough to pursue it. But apparently, California just couldn’t abide this challenge to its primacy as the most witless state in the union.
“California is banning all plastic shopping bags at grocery store checkouts under legislation that [Governor] Gavin Newsom signed on Sunday,” Axios reported. Newsom’s signature “honors the intent of a ban on single-use bags” the state passed into law ten years ago, but that included what one bag-banning lawmaker denounced as a “loophole” that “allowed stores to provide consumers with thicker plastic bags at checkout.”
If New Jersey’s experience is any indication, Californians can look forward to a costly new inconvenience that doesn’t provide the environmental benefits it promises.
The first of many unanticipated consequences associated with the Garden State’s prohibition on the distribution of shopping bags was the sudden disappearance of shopping carts and baskets from grocery stores. “They are just disappearing,” the CEO of Food Circus Super Markets complained. “I may actually have to just do away with them soon, can’t afford to keep replacing them.” Of course, the additional costs borne by grocers are passed on to consumers.
But that isn’t the only pricy imposition on New Jerseyans who prepare and consume food. Alternative shopping-bag sales skyrocketed in the state, as one might expect. “An in-depth cost analysis found a typical store can profit $200,000 per store location from alternative bag sales,” the Institute for Energy Research revealed. “For one major retailer, it amounted to an estimated $42 million in profit across all its bag sales in New Jersey.” It’s not that New Jersey residents were rigorous in their observation of the ban but that they are so often compelled to buy ever more shopping bags as a result of their own failure to keep a ready supply of totes with them at all times.
As Democratic New Jersey state senator Bob Smith observed, “the number of these bags are accumulating with customers.” New Jersey residents are drowning in reusable bags that rarely get reused. And because it requires a greater investment of energy and resources to make an ecofriendly shopping bag, the environmental benefits plastic-bag-banners envisioned are unlikely to be realized.
Indeed, the most you can say in the bag ban’s favor is that it was effective at banning bags. But few other benefits supposedly associated with the prohibition have been realized. MarketResearch.com’s Freedonia Report alleged earlier this year that plastic consumption in New Jersey tripled in the wake of the ban with the rise in the production of reusable items – many of which include materials that cannot be recycled or contain no recycled materials whatsoever. “This shift in material also resulted in a notable environmental impact,” the report said, “with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500 [percent] increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production in 2015.”
Bag-banning evangelists take issue with the Freedonia study. They have impugned not its methodology or findings, but the fact that it was commissioned by an association that represents the interests of American plastic-bag manufacturers. The Philadelphia-based PBS affiliate WHYY deemed the study “viral” “misinformation.” But the outlet’s “climate desk” reporter, P. Kenneth Burns, cited only the authority of one former university professor who questioned the “source” of the report’s data and complained that it was not peer-reviewed. Without calling into question any of Freedonia’s conclusions, WHYY went on to accuse the outlet of engaging in unscrupulous and manipulative tactics akin to those employed by the tobacco industry in the mid-20th century.
You don’t need a longitudinal study to conclude that New Jersey’s bag ban has been an abject, unpopular failure. You need only to trust your own eyes. This spring, the state Department of Environmental Protection began hearing remarks from residents on some proposed “tweaks” to the draconian restrictions. Some exclusions to the blanket proscription on the distribution of single-use plastics might now include handleless receptacles for “loose items” or uncooked meats. There can be no handles, however, because that “would perpetuate the use of traditional single-use plastic carryout bags.”
The DEP is also considering new mandates on reusable-bag manufacturers so their products can reliably endure for “a minimum of 125 uses.” That’s still galactically shy of the point at which a reusable bag becomes a worthwhile investment. “According to one eye-popping estimate,” CNN reported last year, “a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to make it a truly environmentally friendly alternative to a conventional plastic bag.” According to Freedonia’s findings, alternative bags are used “on average” only two or three times “before being discarded.”
This is an irredeemably stupid policy. Its inefficacy is matched only by the additional burdens it imposes on New Jersey’s consumers. You would think that, after watching New Jersey commit ever harder to this failed experiment, no state would be lining up to follow its lead. But it’s never wise to question California’s commitment to maddeningly foolish interventions into its citizens’ private lives.