BAG IT: The Santa Fe City Council has passed a ban on plastic bags at grocery stores, following the lead of such cities as Los Angeles and Seattle.
By Rob Nikolewski │ New Mexico Watchdog
SANTA FE – The Santa Fe City Council has banned plastic grocery bags.
Effective in six months, customers will get only paper bags— and be charged 10 cents each. Or they can bring their own cloth bags and avoid the surcharge.
The fee will be waived for people on government assistance programs, such as food stamps.
But do bans on plastic bags — passed in other green-than-thou communities such as Los Angeles and Seattle — really help the environment?
Great Britain prides itself on being environmentally-friendly, but in 2006 its Environment Agency studied the plastic vs. paper debate and concluded:
* That the re-use of plastic bags for other purposes such as bin liners “produces greater benefits than recycling bags.”
*The many cloth bags “have a higher global warming potential and abiotic depletion than conventional polymer bags, due both to the increased weight of material in a bag and higher material production impacts.”
* That paper and cotton have to be “re-used at least 3, 4, 11 and 131 times respectively to ensure that they have lower global warming potential than conventional (plastic) bags that are not re-used”
*And that “recycling or composting generally produce only a small reduction in global warming potential and abiotic depletion.”
Todd Myers of the free-market Washington Policy Center says plastic bag bans are little more than feel-good measures than real, concrete policies that help the environment. “Few of these cities even attempt to assess the climate impact of switching from the least energy-intensive grocery bag to bags that use far more energy to produce,” Myers wrote in a column for Real Clear Science.
Update 8/29: A public affairs firm for the plastic bag industry saw our post and sent this link to their “Bag The Ban” campaign.
Greenies, if you send us a link to your campaign, we will link to it as well.
Contact Rob Nikolewski at rob@nmwatchdog.org and follow him on Twitter @robnikolewski
