An extremely effective tax on plastic bags
 

In January, Washington, DC effected a 5-cent tax for each plastic bag distributed in a retail purchase. The result: monthly consumption of plastic bags in the district has fallen from 22m to 3m - absolutely incredible.

D.C. bag tax collects $150,000 in January for river cleanup - washingtonpost.com

In my mind, this is a model for effective, targeted taxation aimed at internalizing environmental externalities. Rather than generating a deadweight loss, the tax moves us into a more efficient use of resources by imposing a cost on consumers for the needless use of plastic bags. What's more, the tax leverages our psychology - it's not necessarily true that we really value a marginal nickel enough to change our behavior; it's that we begin to stop perceiving the bags as 'free' - which of course, in terms of environmental and resource considerations, they are not.

I recently left the district for the west coast, and I desperately hope that my new state adopts this system.

Would you support a similar proposal in your own area? If not, I would be interested to hear the objection. In my view, almost everyone wins from the new allocation, except those few people with a strong interest in the manufacture of plastic bags.

Plastic bags at grocery stores are usually such pieces of junk... I'd be bothered if I "paid" 5 cents for a bag that fell apart before I got to the car. I've frequently thought that the only way to really convince people to stop using plastic bags is to charge people for them. Taxing them is an interesting way to force it to happen.

Living near and shopping in the D.C. area, I have seen the bags in the rivers and it is beyond bad, in some areas it appears you could walk across them to the other side, it really is gross.

I have no problem paying an additional .5 cents for a bag as long as the entire profit from the bags go toward clean-up situations and NOTHING else, the ONLY thing that should get "rich" on this tax is the environment.

In most grocery stores I shop at you get a .5 cent credit for each reusable bag you bring and use.

Toronto has had the $0.05 tax for a while now. Our own consumption of plastic bags have dropped drastically.

It created a new market for those reusable bags made from recycled plastic. Everyone sells them now---even the public library.

I think it's about time we focus on all three Rs: reduce, reuse, and recycle. I think recycling has become too much of a crutch in terms of our usage habits. It's the most resource intensive of the three.

I have noticed that a few more people are bringing their own bags around here, but even though one supermarket gives you $0.03 cents, it has only saved 75,000 bags at that one store in the last year (They have a sign with the total on it).

I bet if they charged people, instead of hiding the tax in the prices of the goods, that more people would see it add up, and use the better bags that might cost something up front, but are better in the long run.

And I still think that every state should implement the 0.10 cent per aluminum can fee. It is so much more cost effective to recycle aluminum than it is to mine new aluminum, yet I pick up lots of cans around Ohio on the side of the road, yet none in Michigan when I was growing up.

The local hippie co-op went "bag-free" on July 4th, 2009. Prior to that, they encouraged reusable bag use by giving you a bean every time you brought in your own bag. This bean is worth 5 cents; when you leave the store, you put the bean in one of four bins, and each bin has a different local charity/environmental cause on it (supporting the store's recycling center, the local animal shelter, the local wildlife rehab center, etc). The top bin rotates every month to a new organization. You still get a bean every time you bring in a bag, even though they now charge if you want a paper bag. They also supply cardboard boxes at the front of the store for customer use.

I'd like to see more stores in our area adopt a similar model, because it really has made an impact. I think it's also encouraged people in our area to reuse bags at other stores.

I think this is a great idea, I do have a drawer full of plastic bags that I reuse as much as possible, but I'm down for reusable bags.

Wonder what would happen if wal-mart went this way at all their stores. That's ALOT of bags each day.

Wow. I caught five seconds of this on the news, and all I came away with was "plastic bags" and "five cents". I didn't know it was already in the works (or maybe I just forgot about it) in DC. In my daily life, I'm always short of plastic bags, but use them in nearly every application imaginable that they could be used for... it's a bag. Stuff goes in it.

I do know, however, that in places in Europe, such as Germany, and in Scotland (perhaps all of the UK now) this endeavor for phasing out, or at least gaining revenue from plastic bags, and bottles, whether glass or plastic or aluminum, has been underway for a majority of the past decade.

I'd rather see that type of tax on all the plastic water bottles (yep, you see them everywhere...laying in ditches, floating in the rivers).

Same concept I imagine. SURE....I'd be totally willing to bring & re-use my plastic bags at the food store weekly if it saved money & taxes.

We all need to be willing to do our part. Keep the USA Green.

I don't know if it's a municipal thing, but virtually all retailers in my little town have also begun charging for plastic bags. Reusable canvas bags are much more common as a result. I have no idea what sort of impact it's had regarding keeping bags out of landfills or what have you -- I don't even know if such figures are being tracked anywhere.

I'll play the devil's advocate here, and point out that the non-uniform nature of alternative bags/boxes greatly increases the amount of time it takes to bag the groceries.

GG... I am sure the extra amount of time is small compared the decades of pollution that results in the use of plastic bags.

That said, I am all for reducing the amount of plastic we use. And I agree with hunnychile, plastic bottles are just as bad, if not worse, than plastic bags.

I don't see why the amount of time would increase. If anything, the reusable bags are faster -- since they tend to be larger and sturdier than the plastic ones, more stuff fits into them. That means less time spent fiddling about with bags and more time spent actually bagging.

I know that some of the stores in town require the customer to bag their own groceries. While the customer might take longer than a bag boy or the cashier, they also tend to have two parallel conveyors so that one customer can be rung through while the prior one is still dealing with their groceries. In places where there are bag boys, I find that usually by the time I've been rung through and paid my groceries are bagged and ready to go. I suppose it might take a little bit more time for people who shop for larger families, but either way it doesn't seem like a significant change.

I worked as a soda route salesman for years, and it never made sense to me that they got rid of the glass bottle - the one totally recyclable package we had. Few were thrown away because you could get money back for turning them in.

Disposable bottles are viewed as just that - something to be thrown away. I don't like paying extra for anything, but I understand that we'll be up to our eyeballs in used plastic pretty soon.

Reusable bags, deposits on plastic bottles - implement the programs!

It's a usage tax, I'm fine with it.

The only complaint I have is with myself. I always forget to carry my reusable bags into the grocery. I wish I had a nickel for every time I forgot them. Get it? A nickel? heh.

How much of the money actually goes to physical clean-up, and how much goes to administering the program? I wouldn't have a problem w/ the tax if it could be done with 80% of the funds going to physically cleaning up the mess, and have the program still pay for itself.

The one big problem I see with the tax is that it might not aid much with the displacement (or planned obsolescence) of the bags, and the disharmonious effect they have in any one particular environment.

From what I've learned of manufacturing facilities, I doubt they will be producing any less the number of plastic bags (bottles, what have you) from what they produced last year, to fast-forwarding to the next five years. Such identities don't really monitor who their consumers are, just that they have a surplus of product if there should ever be a hitch in their factories maintenance. That last part doesn't really matter, but I still don't see what impact this tax will make, if any at all, on the actual manufacture and distribution of plastic bags. Sure, some might not feel like wasting five cents for every bag, but perhaps many others won't even care, or notice, that this tax is in place (if implemented elsewhere).

I'm not stating that this isn't a good idea, it's that the implementation and supposed benefits might not at all be what they seem.

SOCIALISM, OPPRESSIVE GOVERNMENT, NANNY STATE!

WHAT'S NEXT ? TAXING WHAT WE EAT ?

MORE BIG GOVERNMENT, GOVERNMENT NEVER DOES ANYTHING RIGHT

COMMUNISM, MAOIST PROGRESSIVE

HOLIER THAN THOU INTELLECTUAL ELITISTS

WILL ACTUALLY CAUSE THE PRODUCTION OF BAGS TO INCREASE, ENDLESS BIG GOVERNMENT BAG TAXES

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T WANT THIS

WILL CRUSH SMALL BUSINESSES

MORE EXAMPLES OF GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER OF EVERYTHING

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This thread is awfully one-sided. Now that that expected conservative reaction has been covered, I think it's a good idea too.

Great way to argue the other side, I'm sure everyone will be lining up to argue... whatever it is you are arguing about.

Go you.

I'm not sure I follow your logic. Let's assume for the moment that in many places that implement the tax, consumer demand for plastic bags drops at a similar scale to what we saw in DC (plummeted down to 15% of original demand). Do you think this would not lead manufacturers to cut back on production? If not, then do you think they would simply produce (and then sit on) 10x the inventory that they could ever conceivably need? That doesn't seem realistic to me...

You might also argue that the tax wouldn't have the same effect elsewhere as it did here, but I haven't yet heard any compelling reasons why that might be true. I'd be interested to hear what you think.

But it is realistic. Manufacture of products worldwide is not ideally fit to what consumers demand. There is gross surplus and waste produced each year for any and every corporate product, of the consumer product itself, not to mention the energy, resources, and unusable "run-off" to create it, and what remains. If they have extra inventory, they might export it at a slight discount, but in higher quantities, to areas that have yet to implement this tax. There's also another thing to note: now, nearly 45% of all of North America's own plastic shopping bags are manufactured in Asia (China predominantly, but there are also numerous other plants in other Asian countries, Taiwan, for instance). This has increased from 25% just a decade ago. What does a factory in China care about our own domestic relations and politics? Bottomline is the only real thing the Chinese industry is concerned with (not as a whole, but as a generality of the majority) and whatever helps them increase that in the most efficient way possible, that's the route which is followed.

I also came across a website that has a unique and opposite stance to the issue here: Save The Plastic Bag
(it's more targeted towards the West Coast, which you might prefer)

It's a stark contrast, of course, and I'm not in agreement either way or the other, but at least they use relevant statistics and current anecdotes as to why plastic bags are beneficial / harmful. The basic idea behind the tax is just 'hopeful idealism', not something that would seek to allay, or even partly remedy, the environmental situation at its source, save for post-contributions to environmental clean-up projects. Actually, that's exactly the aim you would think might happen, but I just don't see it coming as a "complete solution" to the problem, if it were to expand.

Maybe I'm just too used to seeing plastic bags in evryday random places in friends' homes all too often, and in places where I do business; the product, while perhaps flimsy and a nuisance outdoors, is clearly a ubiquitous installation of our consumer culture, for better or worse. In my mind, it'll take increasing "unneeded" taxings over several years to lessen its grip nationwide.

Sorry, I still don't really follow. I'm sure that there is some degree of waste and that there will be surplus plastic bags for some period, but I don't understand the argument that a radical decline in demand will somehow have no impact on production.

I also think that you vastly overstate the danger that the demand shortfall in the US would be made up by increased exports to other countries with different policies. The demand for plastic bags is not particularly price-elastic. If plastic bags were cheaper tomorrow than they are today, do you think consumers would find new and inventive uses for them? As far as consumers in most countries are concerned, plastic bags are already free.

As far as Asian countries and the bottom line, I don't see why a foreign manufacturer of bags would need to care (or even know) about our internal policies in order to respond to shifting demand. I'm not sure I understand the objection; it's not as if someone can sell us more plastic at the point of a gun.

Leaving aside the international implications for just a moment, it's also irrefutably the case that at the very least, we would be dumping less plastic into our immediate environs (rivers, landfills).

FWIW I'm in agreement with the site that shifting from plastic to paper isn't really the goal. This is not what has happened in DC, by and large; most people are either using reusable bags, or bringing their own bags, or making do with fewer bags.

Where is it that you see there is a 'radical demand in decline'? There is no decline in demand as of yet because the prices of the bags are the exact same as they were a year ago; (well, I don't really know this for a fact) the only thing that has shifted is that the there is now a tax on plastic bags for consumers, not the distributors, wholesalers, or the retailers. They'll probably keep ordering and buying with very little inkling that what they might need to do is order less this time.

Perhaps I'm wrong about this, and more of these chains will notice they can reduce their overhead by not buying as much plastic bags anymore, and decide to instead start making their own custom, sturdy "grocer" bags for people to buy. But still, will all this news of we don't want bags any more in San Francisco or in Washington D.C. affect worldwide plastic production and distribution for the foreseeable future? I'd be happily surprised if that were to occur.

The radical decline is the drop in consumption from 22m to 3m per month. Yes, I think it's self-evident that retailers will order fewer bags. What is the alternative... are they going to accumulate a surplus of 19m bags every month? Where will they put them?

I always wondered about that myself. I remember the logic being something about how much water it wastes. Personally, I prefer glass bottles over plastic.

As far as the bags and the tax, I'm not for it as it just makes my groceries that much more expensive and I'll end up buying Glad trash bags.

I wonder, what was the increase in sales for garbage bags?

You are still talking about locally. I stopped at that in my initial post. I already agreed that this is effective way to curb limits on plastic shopping bags in a given localized area, but nationally, and internationally, it will remain much the same.

This was just a small sample test, and to classify it as "extremely effective", even when the own article didn't jump to that conclusion ("promising, but still needs ..." was the keyword I read there) is something I would not make just yet.

Manufacturers will continue the produce much the same way now as they did before. Now, will that translate to less distributor buyership? Perhaps, and is most likely to occur if a sanction/tax/law is inacted; will those plastic wares end up in another environment in some lesser developed country instead? I can't say. For years, though, decades probably even, the model of production for plastics, steel, lumber/wood, and glass, world over, have remained almost precisely consistent, regardless of consumption.