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Paper and Plastic Bag Bans Continue. And Recyclers Ain't Happy About It

By Rain Noe - August 6, 2013

in Design Business | Sustainable Design

A website called Plastic Bag Ban Report documents that trend (encompassing paper bags, too) with a grinding regularity. Last month, L.A.'s City Council voted "No store shall provide a plastic or paper single-use carryout bag to a customer." This month, Santa Fe got plastic bags banned and attached a fee to paper bags. Now Laredo, Texas and Vail, Colorado are mulling over similar policies.

Just yesterday, an interesting development in recycling—one that you're bound to have mixed feelings about—as brought to our attention. As more individual businesses and municipalities are starting to ban both paper and plastic bags, or impose fees to discourage their use, it's pissing off a certain group of people. No, not consumers. Recyclers.

The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, or ISRI, yesterday fired a blast out of their e-mail gun stating "Policymakers are banning bags and creating fees without considering the real impact on recycling, and the recycling industry... Rather than bans and fees that take away jobs and increase costs to consumers, policy makers should take advantage of the great economic and environmental opportunities associated with responsibly recycling these bags." They followed this up with some surprising statistics:In the United States, approximately 77 percent of paper mills rely on recovered fiber to make some or all of their products thanks in part to recovered paper's significant cost and energy savings. Recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees, 79 gallons of oil, 7,000 gallons of water, and 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space. According to the U.S. EPA, plastic recycling results in significant energy savings, an estimated 50-75 million Btus/ton of material recycled.

"Policymakers and consumers are often surprised to learn the important economic role that paper and plastic bags play in the continuous life-cycle of paper and plastic products," said Joel Litman, president of Texas Recycling/Surplus, Inc., and ISRI's Paper Stock Industries Chapter. "Our company is designed to recycle these bags into valuable commodity grade materials that are then sold to manufacturing plants to make finished products around the globe. This is a win-win for the local economy and the environment."

It's a strange development, to be sure. Think of the "Military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned us about: It was started to solve a problem, but once that problem went away or became significantly reduced, the machine became too profitable to a subset of people for us to dismantle it. We seemingly have it within our power to ban disposable paper and plastic bags, yet an industry has cropped up to recycle these things, turning our waste into their lifeblood. Is the Recycling-industrial complex here to stay? Do any of you foresee a future where we could potentially draw it down, or is the genie out of the (plastic) bottle?

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Adam

11 years ago

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This recycler's argument is totally bunk. (See: Broken Window Fallacy)

Creating jobs based on artificial demand for the sake of employment does not improve the economy. It is a poor allocation of resources to produce something wasteful and unnecessary, and it is a waste of capital that could go towards something that would actually be of benefit to consumers and the environment.

Not that I agree with government bans, but this ban would (artificially) reduce the demand for bags -- and in turn reduce the demand for recycled materials for bag production. If the market does render disposable bags obsolete, we could all expect to see prices drop in stores that once had to pay to purchase and handle those bags. Sorry baggers, recyclers, and bag manufacturers. Creative destruction has your number. Adapt.
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Steve

11 years ago

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Reduce and Reuse come before Recycle. What's the recycling rate on single use plastic bags? Less than 1%? There is so much going to landill and not being recycled, that this article just misses the point. Even on the items that we do the best job of recycling, most recyclables are recycled at rates of 30-50% or less. With all the litter on our streets and plastic in the ocean, these bag bans are the way to go!
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Richard

11 years ago

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Pioneering retailers in the UK are starting to think about this problem differently, by selling PRE-usable garbage sacks at the checkout for those customers who have forgotten their reusable totes. The transformable plastic carrier bags are designed and manufactured to be reused as a shopping bag until the need arrises to be converted into a large 60 litre garbage bag or recycling sack. The idea came about from the knowledge that in areas where single use bag taxes have been implemented reducing plastic and paper bag use, sales of garbage sacks increased by up to 80%, creating a perverse effect on the amount of resources. By providing both the sack and the bag in one combined product the net effect is to reduce the amount of material resources required for making two separate products in the first place. The real issues here are not about the materials used, but about human consumption habits and if we can design new models of consumption we can consume less. Unfortunately the bag taxes and bans make us actually consume more, so lets get pre-cycling as well as recycling!
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paul

11 years ago

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What Jason said. If recyclers see themselves as just recyclers, rather than materials handlers or whatever integral process goes into reusing those bags, they're doomed. Buggy whip makers didn't demand a quota on horse-drawn transport: the leather workers found jobs in other leather working businesses or maybe moved down the bench to work on saddles and tack instead.

This could be a design exercise of a sort: working out what process(es) go into a product and how industries evolve, to accommodate new trends or requirements and constraints. I'm thinking of Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn."
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Jason

11 years ago

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If a recycling company runs out of material, the answer is not to keep creating trash so they have something to do. A trash-based company should be looking for the next source knowing that bags will eventually disappear. There will always be new untapped resources like the ocean Gyres (garbage patches). The first company who figures out how to help clean the ocean pollution problem and recycle its plastic soup will be a giant. A money-making giant.
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Andrew

11 years ago

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It appears to be a matter of choosing between a stronger economy, where more jobs are available, or whats better for the environment. Without the bags being produced in the first place, you are reducing the amount of plastic materials being produced. The recyclers see it as a loss of available recycled materials companies can use. With less companies using fossil fuels and raw materials to recycle, the environment is improved in that sense. This is a severely complicated situation.
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Mike

11 years ago

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If you go anywhere that hasn't banned bags, 80%+ people are walking out with plastic bags. Everywhere that I've ever lived that has a recycling program prohibits putting these bags in. Unless people make a specific effort to locate a bag recycling drop off location, they're not being recycled right now.
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Ryan

11 years ago

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Seems like fallacy to me. Recycling plastic or paper bags to make other things may be the best use of existing bags, but it still takes fewer resources to not make bags at all and make those other secondary products out of fresh resources. How big is the recycling industry for bags? Do they not recycle a large amount of other plastics and papers? Surely we could be doing a better job of recycling necessary things that would otherwise end up in landfills.
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