This piece was originally published by DC Bureau. It has been republished here with permission. Learn more about DC Bureau.
Part I of Fish and Paint Chips, The Science of Trash, can be found here.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other public information, the referendum was backed primarily by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the plastics industry trade association, and the 7-11 chain of convenience stores. The ACC made local headlines with its all-out summer media blitz to promote the referendum, ultimately spending $1.4 million before the vote was held. In comparison, the Seattle Green Bag Campaign to support the fee raised less than $100,000.
In a press release trumpeting its victory, the ACC argued that whatever its environmental implications, plastic is good for the economy. The release repeated a common industry argument: recycling, not outright reduction, should be the centerpiece of any plastics policy. “[R]ecycling legislation in New York, California, Rhode Island, Delaware and cities across the country is expected to increase significantly the amount of plastic bags and wraps that are turned into new consumer products, such as durable decking, fencing, railings, shopping carts and new bags,” it stated. Indeed, the industry has long argued that if consumers recycle and reuse enough plastic, less of it enters the waste stream, so there is little need to rethink manufacturing strategies. The ACC’s PlasticBagFacts.org Web site repeats the argument: “Banning recyclable plastic bags will not solve the litter problem or reduce the amount of waste in our sewers and landfills. Litter must be addressed directly by targeting behavior and increasing access to recycling bins and waste receptacles.” Nowhere at the “Taxes And Bans Don’t Work” link is there a discussion of cutting unneeded plastic production in the first place. Nor is plastic the only interested party. Considering the seafood industry’s current scope ─ $55 billion a year, according to the 2009 International Association of Culinary Professionals award-winning book Bottomfeeder ─ it’s hard to imagine today’s legion of commercial fishing outfits, seafood restaurant chains and other players quietly giving up and going home, even if upcoming studies establish a link from seaborne toxics to humans. To take just one example, while the Red Lobster franchise is hardly the source of the problem, it has done little to educate consumers: the restaurant’s Web site has a link to a “Seafood & Health” page, but it consists only of recipe recommendations and a nutrition calculator designed to tout the benefits of fatty acids and other features of a seafood diet.
One of the problems with any political effort to reduce waste is that science, unlike campaign money, is often not directed at a specific outcome. Marcus Eriksen of the Algalita Foundation said that when it comes to studying the world’s pollution gyres, even groups that agree about the outlines of the problem often don’t see eye to eye on how to handle or study it. “When any issue becomes pop science, as ocean pollution is now, you get competition to be the go-to expert on the issue,” he said, pointing to his own group, NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego as only the biggest of many figures in the field. But that friendly rivalry, he said, shouldn’t stand in the way of the greater good: “I’d love to see others doing more trawls, getting more data. [NOAA and Scripps] have only gone to the same gyre we have for the last 10 years” ─ the one located in the North Pacific ─ “and the question now is, what’s the global picture?” Without that kind of picture, it will be difficult to convince other governments, whether local or national, that their communities are contributing to the problem.
The ACC, for its part, argues that when it comes to tackling solid waste, plastic is the wrong focus. “Clearly, if you ban a plastic product, you’re going to have less of that plastic product,” said Keith Christman, senior director of market advocacy for the ACC’s Plastics Division. “That’s not really the question. The question is whether you have less total waste.” He suggested that localized bag bans or fees have no effect on pollution because the constant demand for bags means that consumers will find them one way or another. He pointed to an April 2008 garbage audit performed by a contractor for the city of San Francisco, where non-compostable plastic checkout bags have been banned at most stores since late 2007, that found retail bags as a percentage of total street litter had not decreased over the following twelve months. (Litter had, however, decreased overall by 17 percent.) He dismissed as ineffective Ireland’s 15 euro-cent bag fee, implemented in 2002, which a February 21, 2007, Reuters article said had reduced plastic bag litter by 95 percent. The article quoted environment minister Dick Roche as saying that the number of bags used by shoppers dropped from 328 per person before the fee to “as low 21 per head each year,” largely because shoppers had switched to reusable bags.
In broad terms, Christman’s message was consistent: “Litter is a problem bigger than any one entity.” He stressed ACC’s partnerships with retail stores to implement voluntary recycling measures under the aegis of its Keep America Beautiful program, and correctly pointed out that environmental impact studies suggest paper bags, because of their carbon dioxide implications, are not always a sound alternative to plastic. (Plastic “consumes 40 to 70 percent less energy to manufacture, generates 80 percent less solid waste, and produces 60 percent fewer atmospheric emissions,” according to the newest edition of the consumer product magazine Utne Reader.) However, canvas and even polyester bags, which are increasing in popularity, are much less harmful over time than paper or plastic, a point studiously ignored by a late 2007 report commissioned by the ACC’s Progressive Bag Alliance titled Life Cycle Assessment for Three Types of Grocery Bags, which includes a telling caveat: “This study did not examine the impacts associated with reusable cloth bags, so no comparison was made between the cloth bags and single-use polyethylene plastic bags. In other studies, however, cloth bags were shown to reduce environmental impacts if consumers can be convinced to switch.”
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