Stories cover environmental impacts of bag bans differently.
The environmental cost of plastic or paper bags is neglected in a recent Oregonian blog but is covered in a Chicago Tribune article.
Two recent postings – a blog in the Oregonian and an article in the Chicago Tribune – differ in their coverage of current and pending bans of plastic bags at grocery stores. While the Oregonian weakly describes environmental effects, the Tribune fleshes out the topic.
Jeff Mapes' blog in the The Oregonian highlights Oregon's debate related to a bill that proposes to ban single-use plastic bags for customers at the point of sale. Shoppers would be charged five cents for each paper bag provided. The article highlights the economic cost to consumers by the so called "tax."
Unfortunately, the article ultimately fails to report on the environmental costs associated with any single-use bag. Instead, it focuses on reuse of plastic bags and the paper versus plastic industry battle currently underway in Oregon.
Plastic bags are cheap to produce, but they use petroleum products during production. They also largely contribute to plastic waste and pollution. These bags degrade slowly, with many discarded bags becoming a burden to marine environments.
Hilex-Poly – a plastic bag manufacturer and recycler – is mentioned, yet current efforts, difficulties and costs to recycle plastic bags are not discussed. The EPA estimates that of the 13 million tons of plastics produced on 2009, only nine percent of the category consisting of plastic bags, sacks and wraps were recycled. Recycling of plastic bags also leads to frequent jamming of sorting machines, increasing labor costs.
The blog focuses only on reuse of the plastic bags for other, unnamed household purposes – often trash can bags for household wastes. The end result is still the landfill.
The shift to a single-use paper product will result in a one time, end-user nickel "tax." But paper bags aren't necessarily less wasteful – they pose environmental issues all their own, due primarily to the greater amount of resources (materials and transport fuel/product weight) needed to produce them.
A similar bill to ban both plastic and paper in the Evanston, Ill., area is covered in the Chicago Tribune. The article discusses other regional bag bans across the United States – including some that have five-cent charges for both plastic and paper – and consumers' responses to the bans. Importantly, the Chicago Tribune article addresses the environmental consequences of both single-use plastic and paper bags. The reporters – Dan Hinkel, Jonathan Bullington and Robert McCoppin – did a nice job of bringing up alternatives to the single-use bags issues, including the use of biodegradable bags, recycled paper bags or consumers' own reusable bags.
These additional points aid readers in better understanding the issues at hand and the consequences of different choices.
Update, 5/3/2011: Subsequent articles in the Oregonian address other concerns of plastic bag use in stores.
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Based on a work at www.environmentalhealthnews.org.
