The real cost of plastic bags

The overwhelming plastic bags

I have been back in North America for several months now, but I still feel uncomfortable with the battle that I have to fight almost every day against plastic bags. Do I forget that issue during a short second while paying at the pharmacy? I’ll go out with three plastic bags wrapped around my shampoo. Do I start discussing the weather with the cashier at the grocery store? I’ll find myself with two plastic bags for each of the products I bought. If I say from the start that I don’t want them, I can still be sure that I’ll find my eggs and my milk carefully packed inside two plastic bags each.

In the US, as was the case until very recently in France, the plastic bag is the common currency of any commercial transaction. If you have a look at the Reusablebags website, you’ll learn that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Americans consume around 100 billions plastic bags a year. If one takes into account any kind of plastic bags and wraps, as the EPA does, then this number skyrockets to 380 billions a year. No wonder then that people have difficulties understanding why I don’t want to fill my closets with them!

San Francisco's groundbreaking decision

But it seems that there actually are people in America who do care about the plastic bags problem. I have just discovered while looking at an old issue of the Christian Science Monitor that San Francisco has decided last March to ban all kind of non-reusable bags from its retail stores and pharmacies, thereby eliminating around 90% of them. Such a decision is really a first in the United States, and San Francisco had indeed very good reasons to take it, as it is facing an increasing scarcity of landfills and experiences little recycling success: in spite of a decade of efforts, only 1% of the plastic bags in the Bay Area do have a second life, a ratio comparable to any other place in the United States (incidentally, this might sound like a failure, but for the tax-payers, this is actually a reason to be relieved, as the recycling of a ton of plastic bags has a net cost of almost 4000$).

A potential climate asset...

Aside from its economical advantages, San Francisco’s decision could also turn out to be a real asset in the fight against global warming. Here are the facts: the city consumes 181 millions plastic bags a year. The decision to eliminate them will spare the use of 430 000 gallons of oil per year, an amount that could permit the circulation of 140 000 more cars each day. Isn’t that quite impressive? Just imagine what would happen if every town in the United States followed that decision. That would diminish the US greenhouse gases emissions to an amount equivalent to taking 77 millions cars off the road each day!

... which could also turn out to be catastrophic

However, the plastic bags’ ban could also have catastrophic consequences on San Francisco’s emissions, depending on whether the retailers choose paper bags or starch bags to replace them. Paper bags, though clearly less expensive than starch bags (whose price has been rising steadily because of the pressure put by the ethanol demand on corn market), are also very energy consuming: according to the Society of Plastics Industry, it takes four times more energy to produce a paper bag than to produce a plastic bag. And as paper bags are made of wood pulp, an increase in their production would also imply more forest cutting. Evidently, such an eventuality is not very welcome in a time when we badly need the carbon wells graciously provided by temperate forests…

Is San Francisco’s decision a good or a bad news then? It is still difficult to say. But I wouldn’t be surprised if now was the perfect time to launch a business that would sell some of the wheeled reusable-bags that have become an increasingly common sight in Paris during the last year…