Today's lesson in education through taxation comes from the Irish Republic, where in 2002 the government implemented a 15-cent consumer tax for each plastic bag issued at grocery store checkouts. In the first year the tax was in effect, the number of distributed bags dropped by 95 percent, and millions of dollars have been generated by the tax for environmental clean-up. Due to the success of Ireland's "PlasTax," governments in Australia, South Africa, Taiwan and other countries are considering similar measures.
My first exposure to paying for plastic bags was while I was living in Germany. Many German grocery store chains voluntarily charge as much as 25 cents per bag, both to encourage reuse and to pass on the extra cost of bags to the customer. Not surprisingly, the only chain that didn't charge me for plastic bags was Wal-Mart, which has 88 stores in Germany (and counting).
Since moving back to the U.S., I've been using canvas shopping bags. Sometimes it takes aggressive action to keep cashiers and grocery baggers from using plastic bags. If I'm not paying attention, a well-intentioned bagger first fills plastic bags with items, double-bags them, then places them in my canvas bags. Each vegetable and package of meat is also protectively wrapped in its own plastic bag.
Thankfully for those of you who feel "paper or plastic" is a basic civil liberty, it's hard to imagine such taxes or fees coming into existence here. Lawmakers and retailers aren't likely to risk the public backfire from a society more fond of the speed brought about by Wal-Mart's shameless plastic bag carousels than of the fuzzy feeling that comes from responsible stewardship of our planet.
Does the notion of sustainable living mostly fall on deaf American ears because of our seemingly limitless land and natural resources? According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the number of plastic bags deposited into U.S. landfills has doubled in the past 15 years, and the 1.63 million tons thrown away in 2003 alone would fill Ohio Stadium to the top six times. Unlike Ireland, we have plenty of space for stadium-sized holes to fill with plastic, so why change our ways?
For one thing, a typical plastic bag gets its start in a Middle East oil field. Crude oil and other petrochemicals destined for plastic bag nirvana are transformed into polymers which are then heated, shaped, cooled, flattened, sealed, punched and printed on. The end product, usually high-density polypropylene, takes decades to degrade in direct sunlight and much longer to disintegrate in the ground.
With this in mind, a small group in San Francisco is pushing for a 17-cent bag tax, which would be the nation's first. The proposal's strongest opponent is the American Plastics Council, whose primary mantra is eerily similar to the gun lobby: plastic bags don't hurt the environment, plastic-bag-toting people do.
While this may be a fair statement, corporate America has the power to mandate better practices rather than passing the blame. Just as Eric Schlosser recognized in "Fast Food Nation" that McDonald's could fix many of its industry's problems with stricter policies, so could Wal-Mart single-handedly change wasteful habits in our shopping routine. A five-cent per bag charge companywide would do more immediate good than any legislation, but we're wise not to hold our breaths for such acts of corporate altruism.
If you get nothing else from this column other than a feeling of guilt the next time you acquire a dozen fresh plastic bags on a routine trip to the grocery store, it's a start. You don't need to be a tree-hugging conservationist to answer "neither" the next time you're faced with the paper vs. plastic dilemma: it would be a far better use of your civil liberty.
Dan Magestro is a postdoctoral research associate in the physics department. He can be reached at magestro.1@osu.edu.
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