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Plastic Bags Are Good for You
By Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason. Excerpts:
"In 2006, the California Coastal Commission claimed that plastic bags
make up 3.8 percent of beach litter, and a few years later the
California Ocean Protection Council upped the ante to 8 percent of all
coastal trash. Last year the Dallas City Council pinned 5 percent of the
area's refuse on bags.
But the definitive American litter study—yep, such a thing
exists—reports much lower figures. The 2009 Keep America Beautiful
Survey, run by Steven Stein of Environmental Resources Planning, shows
that all plastic bags, of which plastic retail bags are only a subset,
are just 0.6 percent of visible litter nationwide. And those California
data? They come from the International Coastal Commission (ICC), which
the California Coastal Commission notes relies on information "collected
by volunteers on one day each year, and is not a scientific
assessment." (This insight, and many others in this story, is derived
from a study produced last year by Julian Morris and Brian Seasholes for
Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes reason.)
In D.C., a 2008 analysis prepared for the city's Department of the
Environment by the Anacostia Watershed Society found that plastic bags
were only the third-largest contributor to litter in the river, after
food wrappers and bottles and cans.
Stein's study did find plastic bags in storm drains, but again, they made up only about 1 percent of the total litter.
Some plastic bags do find their way into the sea, of course. And one
of the other concerns cited for the banning and regulation of plastic
grocery bags is the safety of marine wildlife. The Blue Ocean Society
for Marine Conservation is just one organization among many that claim
that more than 1 million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea
turtles die each year from eating or getting entangled in plastic.
Morris and Seasholes reconstructed an elaborate game of statistical
telephone to source this figure back to a study funded by the Canadian
government that tracked loss of marine animals in Newfoundland as a
result of incidental catch and entanglement in fishing gear from 1981 to
1984. Importantly, this three-decade-old study had nothing to do with plastic bags at all.
Porpoises and sea turtles are undeniably charismatic megafauna—the
pandas of the deep—and it's understandable that environmental groups
would want to parade them around in a bid to drum up sympathy, almost
certainly driven by the sincere belief that plastics put the beloved
animals at grave risk. But in the end, there's little evidence that
that's true. As David Santillo, a senior biologist with Greenpeace, told
The Times of London, "It's very unlikely that many animals are
killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite. We are
not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags.
With larger mammals it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a
global basis plastic bags aren't an issue."
"But what about larger-scale impacts, such as climate change? Where do
grocery bags stack up there? A 2011 study from the U.K.'s Environmental
Agency attempted to quantify the emissions footprint both of plastic
bags and of their substitutes. Holding the typical HDPE grocery bag up
as the standard, researchers found that the common reusable non-woven
polypropylene bag—the ubiquitous crinkly plastic tote, typically made
with oil—had to be used at least 11 times to hold its own against an
HDPE grocery bag. Cotton bags had to be used an amazing 131 times to do
the same.
In 2007, for a brief moment, the "It bag" wasn't a $30,000 Hermes
Birkin, it was a cotton tote designed by Anya Hindmarch that read: "I'm
NOT A Plastic bag." Celebrities from Ivanka Trump to Keira Knightly were
snapped toting the sold-out satchels for glossies like Life&Style and Grazia.
While we can never know for sure, it seems wildly unlikely that Ivanka
Trump has carried 131 loads of groceries in her life, much less in that
particular bag.
What's more, those U.K. Environmental Agency figures assume the HDPE
bag is not being reused. Nor do they account for the energy and
materials needed to regularly wash the reusable bags in hot soapy water.
Other alternatives did perform somewhat better in the global-warming
matchup, including paper bags (which would have to be reused three times
to match the single-use HDPE bag's footprint) and another type of
reusable bag made of low-density polyethylene (four times)."
""It takes 12 million barrels of oil to produce the 100 billion
plastic bags that are thrown away in the U.S. every year." Versions of
this claim show up everywhere from New York Times editorials to
Save the Bay pamphlets. But the origins of the figures are murky and
the dramatic tone is misleading. Even if the number is accurate, it is
almost a literal drop in the bucket: Americans consume a total of about
19 million barrels of oil a day. But as Morris and Seasholes
point out, all that fretting about oil use "is surprising, not least
because nearly all HDPE bags are produced from natural gas, not oil.
Indeed, between 1981 and 2012, on average only 3.2% of polyethylene bags
were made from oil. The reason is simple: it is far less expensive to
produce ethylene, the feedstock for polyethylene, from natural gas
(methane) than from oil." While the price of oil has recently declined,
the assumption that plastic bags are made primarily from oil remains
false.
In 2010, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
Americans threw away 690,000 tons of HDPE bags. Of those, approximately
30,000 tons were recycled. That means a total of 660,000 tons were
discarded, mostly into landfills (approximately 82 percent of
non-recovered municipal solid waste goes to landfill; 18 percent is
incinerated). That same year, Americans also chucked almost exactly the
same amount of "reusable" polypropylene bags (680,000 tons), of which
zero were recovered. In other words, those polypropylene reusable bags
actually constituted a slightly higher proportion of all bags going to landfills.
In April, NPR's Planet Money reported on the economics of
plastic recycling, and noted that while recycled plastic from bags and
sacks was once a profitable industry, times have changed. The prices of
oil and gas have fallen, which means it is cheaper to just make new bags
rather than undertake the laborious process of recycling the old ones.
As Tom Outerbridge, who runs a Brooklyn recycling center called Sims,
explained, "We can't afford to put a lot of time and money into trying
to recycle it" if no one's buying the final product.""
"A 2011 survey published in the journal Food Protection Trends
found coliform bacteria in fully half of the reusable shopping bags
tested in a random survey of shoppers in Arizona and California. The
same 2014 Edelman Berland study that found consumers frequently forgot
their bags also unearthed the fact that only 18 percent of shoppers
reported cleaning their bags "once a week or more." An article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases
traced a 2010 outbreak of norovirus to nine members of an Oregon soccer
team who had touched or eaten food stored in a contaminated reusable
bag."
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