Plastic bag bans can backfire if consumers just use other plastics instead

Plastic bag bans can backfire if consumers just use other plastics instead

Rebecca Taylor, economics lecturer at the University of Sydney, writes: "A U.K. government study calculated that a shopper would need to reuse a cotton carryout bag 131 times to reduce its global warming potential - its expected total contribution to climate change - below that of plastic carryout bags used once to carry newly purchased goods. To have less impact on the climate than plastic carryout bags also reused as trash bags, consumers would need to use the cotton bag 327 times....

"...My results showed that bag bans may not reduce total plastic usage if people begin purchasing trash bags to replace the carryout bags they were previously reusing for their garbage. As this finding shows, well-intended product bans can have unintended consequences....

"In particular, my results showed that bag bans caused sales of small (4 gallon), medium (8 gallon) and large (13 gallon) trash bags to increase by 120 percent, 64 percent and 6 percent respectively. "