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Plastic bag bans may lead shoppers to buy more plastic

Legislators in many cities have banned plastic shopping bags, or added fees for their use. A study
finds that this may conversely incentivise customers to buy more plastic bags for everyday use.

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When people end up with fewer plastic bags from their shopping trips because they now carry
a fee or are banned altogether, they end up buying multipacks of garbage bags as bin liners.

Many cities around the world have set plastic bag bans or have introduced
fees to reduce the amount of plastic usage. That’s because plastic is
notoriously hard to get rid of in landfills, and micro- and nanoplastics have
contaminated rivers, seas and can be found even in our bodies.

Yet even though these policies are meant to reduce plastic use, they may end
up simply causing more plastic bags to be purchased instead, as a new study
by a University of Georgia researcher, published in Environmental and
Resource Economics, details.

Plastic shopping bags are seen as single-use items. They often end up being
reused as bin liners for small trash cans. When people end up with fewer
plastic bags from their shopping trips because they now carry a fee or are
 banned altogether, they end up buying multipacks of garbage bags as bin
liners, defeating the purpose of the plastic bag bans or fees altogether.

“We know there is a demand for using plastic bags, and we know, if these
policies go into effect, some bags will disappear or will become more costly to
get,” says Yu-Kai Huang, a postdoctoral researcher at the UGA Warnell School
of Forestry and Natural Resources. “So, we wanted to see the effectiveness of
this policy in reducing bag usage overall.”

Studies conducted earlier have assessed the effect of bag bans on plastic
consumption, but not the combined effects of fees or a bag ban. According to
a news release, Huang, an environmental economist, “used a new way to
calculate the effect of either policy while also accounting for variables such
as residents’ income levels and an area’s population density, both of which
influence the amount of trash generated in a community.”

Huang’s study employed retail scanner data and a general synthetic control
method, finding “that both types of [carryout grocery bag] regulations are
associated with significantly higher plastic trash bag sales.”

Knowing that plastic grocery bags are often reused in the home, Huang and
professor Richard Woodward of Texas A&M University assessed plastic bag
sales in counties with bans or fees in place. They compared this data with
that from counties without these policies in place. In order to leave out
shoppers crossing over to neighbouring counties to avoid the policies, they
chose counties far away from each other to study.

The result of their assessment found that California communities with bag
policies saw sales of 4-gallon (15 litres) trash bags increase by 55 percent to
75 percent. Meanwhile, sales of 8-gallon (30 litres) trash bags increased by 87
percent to 110 percent. “These results confirm previous findings on bag bans
and provide new evidence on bag fees,” the authors note.

Even though sales of small garbage bags increased after bag bans or bag fee
policies, sales of 13-gallon (49 litre) trash bags – the size of kitchen trash cans
– were almost the same. This further underscored the double life of plastic
grocery bags, Huang says.

“Carryout grocery bags were substituted for similar sizes of trash bags before
implementing the regulations,” he wrote in the paper. “After the regulations
came into effect, consumers’ plastic bag demand switched from regulated
plastic bags to unregulated bags.”

When the side effects of plastic bag Route

bans or
6 fees were calculated according to
weight, purchases of 4-gallon trash bags increased consumption by between
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