Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (23 page)

1966:
  Plastic produce bags on a roll replace brown paper sacks in grocery stores.

1974–75:
  Sears, JCPenney, Montgomery Ward and other big retailers replace paper with plastic bags.

1977:
  Paper or plastic? The plastic grocery bag is introduced to the supermarket industry.

1988:
  Suffolk County, New York, passes the first ban of plastic grocery bags. A suit by plastic bag industry trade groups overturns the ban.

1990:
  Maine bans single-use plastic bags in retail stores, but the law is overturned.

1996:
  Four of five grocery bags are plastic.

1997:
  The name “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is coined and brought to the world’s attention by Charles Moore and his Algalita Marine Research Foundation. They report that the plastic used in grocery bags is one of the most common found at sea.

2005:
  San Francisco proposes the nation’s first tax on single-use plastic bags—17 cents, the estimated cost to society and taxpayers of dealing with plastic bag waste.

2006:
  An industry-backed provision of the California Plastic Bag and Litter Reduction Act outlaws the sort of fees proposed in San Francisco.

2007:
  San Francisco bans single-use plastic bags.

2010:
  At least twenty communities nationwide follow San Francisco’s lead, either banning plastic grocery bags or imposing a fee on their use.

Sources: ChicoBag and the Packaging Institute

T
HE FAMILIAR
plastic grocery sack with the two loops for handles began its conquest of the carry-home, take-out world in the U.S. in the early 1980s, after Mobil Chemical (now ExxonMobil Chemical) sued to overturn a Swiss company’s patent on the bag’s design. Mobil won the case and the right to make the bag (as did anyone else who cared to do so) and the plasticky floodgates opened, helped by the well-timed invention of a machine that could churn out those same thin, white bags at the startling rate of five hundred a minute. The demise of the patent and the near-simultaneous advent of such speedy mass manufacture ended what had been the venerable paper grocery bag’s cost advantage and, therefore, its industry dominance. Weight, price point and ease of shipping (one truckload of plastic bags had the grocery-carrying power of four trucks of paper bags) all were suddenly in plastic’s favor. And if plastic needed more of a boost, paper companies in that era already had been taking a beating on the issue of deforestation and endangered species. Even so, consumers at first wanted to stick with the familiar, sturdy, traditional brown paper sack. Paper bags held more, they stood up on their own, you could line them up in the trunk or the backseat of the car. Try that with plastic bags and everything flops out and rolls around. Customers hated them.

But then, consumers hated pretty much every plastic thing compared to whatever material the plastic was imitating or supplanting—at first. The manufacturers knew what would happen next, though. New habits would set in, old objections would fade away and pretty soon consumers would start behaving as if there had never been anything other than plastic laminate kitchen counters or vinyl chair cushions or car bumpers made of polyolefin or bags made of plastic film. All the bag makers had to do was flood the market, exercise a little patience and let the unnatural take its course. That’s long been the bottom-line truism of the industry: If you plasticize it, they will come—whether they want to or not. That’s how you build a disposable economy, and it had worked since the 1950s.

An overturned patent and speedier plastic bag machines, coupled with the relatively cheap oil of the era, meant the “Paper or plastic?” tide inexorably slid in favor of those flimsy white sleeves of petroleum extract during the 1980s. Plastic grocery bags moved from a 4 percent market share at the beginning of the decade to more than 50 percent by the end of the eighties.

This played out amid dueling PR campaigns between the Grocery Sack Council (twenty-six plastic bag companies) and the American Paper Institute, each accusing the other of hawking inferior products and harming the environment. There were some early successes by the paper industry and brief flirtations with plastic bans. In 1990, Suffolk County, New York, banned plastic bag use in grocery stores but not other retailers, a differentiation that had less to do with the environment and more to do with the fact that a major Suffolk County employer happened to manufacture plastic bags for non-grocery retailers. Plastic bag makers sued over the unfairness of this and won, overturning the law in less than a year. Also in 1990, a unique piece of legislation took effect in the state of Maine that stated: “All retailers in Maine shall use paper bags to bag products at the point of retail sale unless the consumer requests a plastic bag.” Maine became the one state in the union to change “Paper or plastic?” into “Paper (unless the customer speaks up and insists on plastic).” Maine also just happened to be a state in which the dominant industry and single largest employer at the time was paper and timber, and where the governor’s brother was a paid lobbyist for the American Paper Institute. The outcry over this bit of heavy-handed favoritism was so great that the law ended up repealed the following year. Stores could bag however they wished, with the only extra requirement being a mandate for supermarkets to have a recycling bin for customers to stuff their old plastic bags into if they felt like it. After that debacle, the paper-plastic war pretty much went plastic’s way for the next fifteen years.

By the start of the twenty-first century, plastic bag manufacturers controlled more than 90 percent of the grocery bag market. The plastic industry is one of the few U.S. manufacturers that has not completely offshored itself, employing a million and a half American workers in recent years. It is able to wield considerable political clout through a web of trade associations and groups, including the powerful, 140-year-old American Chemistry Council, the defender-in-chief of all things plastic as the ultimate in safe, cost-effective packaging.

Certainly grocery bags are among the most common and simplest of plastic creations, most often made from high-density polyethylene, which in turn is made from the fossil-fuel-derived gas ethylene. A relatively low percentage of such bags is recycled. That’s because recycling the bags is notoriously difficult, as the lightweight filmy sacks clog the machinery and end up being carted to landfills as recycling “residue” more often than not. The bags cannot be recycled endlessly, contrary to common belief, but can only be “down-cycled” one time into some product other than bags. (Paper bags are far from perfect and the question of which does more environmental harm, paper or plastic, is still open to debate. Paper bags, however, can be endlessly recycled and, unlike recycled plastic, recycled paper bags are cheaper than virgin materials.)

Up until 2005, the recycling figure reported by the EPA for plastic bags was 1 percent. After that year, the EPA only reported the recycling rates for all bags, sacks and wraps, a much larger, mixed category of products, for which the recycling rate in the most recent year reported was 9.4 percent, better but still anemic. The plastic industry, not the EPA, is the primary source for these recycling figures; the effect of the change, intended or not, was to conceal the true recycling rate for bags as a discrete category. And even the combined figure is suspect; the true recycling rate may be significantly lower than 9.4 percent. As the Columbia University/
BioCycle
biannual study of the waste stream has shown, EPA reports consistently underestimate the amount of trash made in America, while overestimating the percentage of trash that gets recycled. So the paltry 9.4 percent recycling rate represents a best-case scenario.

Around the time that Andy Keller started up ChicoBag, concern had begun to mount about the environmental impact of plastic bags in general, and single-use grocery bags in particular. These concerns—about ocean and river pollution, litter, impacts on wildlife, the cost to taxpayers of disposing of plastic bags in landfills, the ineffectiveness of recycling efforts for a product that was supposed to be 100 percent recyclable—led a number of local, state and national governments to take action. Which in turn led the plastic industry and the American Chemistry Council to fight back just as they had done with the paper industry.

Ireland was among the first governments to act, way back in 2002, and that country’s success became a model for the rest of the world. A plague of plastic grocery bags papered Ireland’s coveted green countryside, the Emerald Isle’s reputation for physical beauty marred by roads, gutters, foliage and trees sporting beards of windblown bags. Ireland’s lawmakers and voters decided they had enough: They passed a plastic bag tax of 15 euro cents (raised to 22 euro cents in 2007, the equivalent of 30 cents U.S.). The rationale for the new tax boiled down to this: Plastic bags are a great product, but they have been used and disposed of in a profligate and wasteful way. This is because the bags have been viewed as “free” by consumers, when in fact they cost quite a bit in terms of the burden they impose on the environment and on taxpayers, who have to foot the bill for litter cleanup, landfills and pollution. The tax simply reflected the true costs of the bags—in effect, proponents argued, it merely ended a kind of “plastic welfare” that had acted as a market force that favored waste and unproductive overconsumption. The tax proceeds went to Ireland’s environmental agency.

Fifteen cents is a relative pittance, but it does add up over hundreds of bags, and so it had an immediate and profound impact on the behavior of Irish consumers. They simply didn’t want to pay for a bag that had previously cost them nothing. Plastic bag use dropped more than 90 percent in a matter of weeks. Reusable bags became fashionable, while carting around plastic bags increasingly was viewed as a social gaffe. People would stump out of the store with loose cans and loaves of bread cradled in their arms and then dump it all in a heap in the trunk rather than buy a plastic bag. The tax was never much of a burden because relatively few people paid it—they simply avoided the bags. The windblown litter has been curtailed. The main question among the Irish was why it had taken so long to come to their senses.

Predictably, grocery chains acted as plastic manufacturers’ surrogates and opposed the levy. But they soon changed their positions for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it turned out to be good for business. “I spent many months arguing against this tax,” recalled Feargal Quinn, who founded Ireland’s top grocery chain. “But I have become a big, big enthusiast … Now we’re saving the environment, we’re reducing litter and since we’re not paying for bags, it ultimately saves money for us, and that reduces the price of food for our customers.”
⁵

For the first time since the dawn of the age of plastic, a Western democracy, an entire people—one with whom Americans have long had a special affinity and affection—had turned away from a major component of the disposable economy. They had plasticized a common product, and people had indeed come—and then they left it in the dust and found they felt better off for it. The convenience of the disposable bag had turned out to be either an illusion, or simply not worth the trouble. The ban has survived all complaints and court challenges since.

Other countries around the world soon adopted similar policies. Taiwan’s 3-cent bag fee was a fraction of Ireland’s, yet it knocked down plastic bag consumption 69 percent. Mainland China banned the bags outright, and consumption there dropped 66 percent. Bangladesh imposed a ban as well after severe floods were linked to storm drains clogged by plastic bags.

In 2005, the plastic bag battle moved back to the U.S. when San Francisco’s Commission on the Environment voted unanimously to recommend that the city adopt a measure based on Ireland’s law—a 17-cent fee to shoppers for every plastic or paper grocery bag. Proponents expected the fee would drive a reduction in plastic bag use—and pollution—just as occurred overseas. But there was one key difference. Ireland had no domestic plastic bag manufacturers to battle and lobby against a bag tax. America did.

The mayor and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors decided to move cautiously, postponing action in order to study the actual costs of plastic bag waste and to try out what proved to be an ineffectual voluntary program with grocery store chains to track and reduce plastic bag waste. The delay proved fatal to the tax proposal, giving the plastic bag industry time to form a coalition with the motto “Sack the Tax,” and to lobby successfully in the state capitol to block San Francisco’s bag tax. The resulting legislation bore a green title—“The Plastic Bag and Litter Reduction Act”—but its most meaningful provision was to outlaw all local plastic bag fees. San Francisco—and every other city in California—would be permanently barred from adopting Ireland’s bag tax. It was a huge victory for the plastic industry, one of their biggest ever.

San Francisco officials responded with their own end-around. They couldn’t impose a tax, but they realized nothing in the new law forbade them from adopting a simple and outright local ban of single-use plastic bags.
⁶
In April 2007, San Francisco became the first city in America to outlaw the single-use plastic grocery bag. Only paper bags with at least 40 percent recycled content, compostable plastic bags or reusable bags were allowed.