But for Garden State lawmakers’ pigheaded resistance, this odious statute would be long gone.
Back in September 2022, I declared the State of New Jersey’s experiment in banning disposable packaging — not just single-use plastic bags but disposable food containers and even brown paper bags for larger retailers — a “hilarious disaster.” Yes, the bag ban was spectacularly successful if your only metric of success was banning bags. But by any other measure, even those articulated by the ban’s advocates, it was a failure.
The first, and by far the most humorous, unintended consequence of the ban was a spike in the number of shopping carts consumers started stealing in order to convey their groceries from the checkout aisle to their pantries. “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.” The humor value here dissipates quickly once anyone with an elementary grasp of consumer prices realizes that the additional costs associated with this outbreak of theft would soon be passed on to consumers.
The ban also ensured that Garden State residents were suddenly drowning in reusable shopping bags — utilities that are somehow never there when you need them most (a condition that forces consumers to purchase ever more bags at checkout). The result, according to state senator Bob Smith, was that “the number of these bags are accumulating with customers.” As a resources-management strategy, that is nothing short of insane. It requires more material and energy to make a reusable bag. The alleged environmental benefits associated with this reform were dubious from the start.
Unlike disposable plastic bags, reusable alternatives are not recyclable — not if they meet the standards set by the state’s bag-banning ordinance. That might come as a surprise to New Jerseyans who were admonished by the NJ EPA to recycle their old bags lest they contribute to the waste the bag bans were meant to reduce. But critics of this reform — ahem — foresaw the likelihood that the bag ban would only create more waste because human beings are not programmable automatons who will forgo efficiency and convenience just to make state lawmakers feel good about themselves.
Via Fox News:
Instead of having the intended beneficial impact on the environment, the reusable bag ban has actually backfired, data reported in the study show. Plastic consumption in the state has nearly tripled, with New Jerseyans previously consuming 53 million pounds of plastic before the ban, compared to 151 million pounds following the ban, FCR researchers reported.
“Future generations in NJ won’t miss what they never had,” wrote one New Jersey resident. Indeed, the logic of privation extended beyond bags. “One positive note is that I notice I purchase less because I know I will likely be carrying my items in my hand when I leave the store. With prices going up, that is a win for my pocket!” Imagine that. Not only are we now physically burdened in ways we weren’t previously, we are also financially imposed upon in a once unimaginable fashion. And all for nothing other than the self-satisfaction Trenton derives from demonstrating its capacity to make life marginally more expensive and annoying.
The profound imbecility of this utterly useless act of meddling for its own sake has led to unmitigated disaster. But for Garden State lawmakers’ pigheaded resistance, this odious statute would be long gone. But then, if residency was easy and affordable, it just wouldn’t be New Jersey.