Plastic Read online

  When plastic first began to penetrate the packaging market, it was promoted for its durability, not its disposability. The reason babies in the 1950s could suffocate on dry-cleaning bags was that people were holding on to them for other uses—as DuPont had encouraged when it first introduced the bags. What's more, those early bags were pricey. "Keep [your] clear plastic bags ... Clean inside and out with a few dabs of a sudsy sponge," an outfit called the Cleanliness Bureau advised readers of the New York Times in 1956. "Dry the bag promptly and it will stay lovely for many seasons to come."

  But it didn't take long for the industry to recognize that disposables were the route to growth, and for a prosperous public to get comfortable with the idea of throwing plastic packaging away. Especially as that packaging multiplied. Today, the average American throws out at least three hundred pounds of packaging a year; Americans' combined mountain of stripped wrappings and emptied containers accounts for a third of the total municipal waste stream.

  Plastic grocery bags would become that stream's most potent symbol.

  Mark Murray had plastic bags in his cross hairs long before the current wave of anti-bag warriors did.

  Murray is executive director of Californians Against Waste, a statewide group that was formed in 1977 to push for the passage of a bottle bill in California. Its mission has since broadened to encompass a range of waste-related issues, from electronics recycling to dairy-farm refuse. One reason California has long been on the leading edge of solid waste legislation is CAW and, by extension, Murray. He's spent his entire career with the group, having joined as an intern in 1987—a fresh college graduate and political junkie who arrived in Sacramento in search of a job. He had no great interest in recycling, but for someone with an intensely competitive nature, the issue turned out to be ideal. As a reporter profiling Murray once observed: "It provided battles that were winnable—not like saving the whales or shutting down nuclear power." He may have just stumbled across the issue, but recycling—really, the whole megillah of waste reduction—quickly became an obsession. At the same time, he became well practiced at balancing his idealistic goals with the demands of realpolitik. He's a pragmatist who's open to compromise, at times too much so, according to critics to his left.

  Now in his forties, Murray has close-cropped hair with a sharply receding hairline and the zero-body-fat frame of a long-distance runner. Indeed, he's a competitive marathoner, and such endurance is a useful quality when one is a lobbyist for a nonprofit with long-range goals. Murray knows what it is to keep pushing ahead with his sights fixed on a distant finish line. He's been hoping to get rid of plastic shopping bags for more than twenty years.

  According to Murray, some waste questions are complicated, but not the ones surrounding plastic bags. "The plastic bag is a problem product," he said flatly when we met for lunch one fall day when the legislature was out of session. "I'm not out there suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the bag is one of them."

  Murray's chief gripe about the bag is not the oft-cited one: that they clog up valuable landfill space. In fact, studies have shown that plastic bags and other plastic trash take up much less space in landfills than paper waste or other materials, in part because plastic can be more tightly compressed. Nor is Murray concerned that plastic bags can "last hundreds of years in a landfill," which was one of the stated reasons for a bag ban proposed in Fairfield, Connecticut. Nearly all trash—no matter the material—can endure in a landfill. Archaeologist William Rathje—self-proclaimed "garbologist" for his studies of landfills—has unearthed newspapers from the 1930s that were as clear as yesterday's edition, and decades-old sandwiches that looked fresh enough to eat.

  Murray isn't worried about what happens when bags get into landfills; he's upset that so many don't. Sometimes litter accumulates when a person carelessly tosses a cigarette butt or soda can to the ground, he explained. "But the plastic T-shirt bag often becomes litter after it has been properly disposed of. The plastic bags blow out of garbage cans, they blow out of the back of garbage trucks, off transfer stations and off the face of landfills." They are intrinsically aerodynamic. Indeed, they're even more aerodynamic now than they used to be. In response to an earlier generation of environmentalists' concerns about landfill space, bag makers have made them even lighter and thinner.

  Yet unlike paper litter, when plastic bags get into the environment, they don't biodegrade. Twenty years ago, Murray staged what he called a press stunt to illustrate that problem: he tacked a bunch of paper and plastic bags onto the roof of a downtown Sacramento building. Sure enough, as the weeks went by, the paper bags gradually melted away, but the plastic bags just slowly shredded into smaller and smaller pieces.

  The environmental implications of that persistence is what has driven many activists—especially those concerned with marine debris—to do battle against the bag. Murray, however, is mainly motivated by concerns about waste—the ever-growing impact of our throwaway culture. He's an advocate of zero waste, a concept that has been gaining ground among policymakers over the last decade or so, especially in California, where several state agencies and a number of counties and cities have adopted it. Zero waste is less a concrete goal than a guiding principle for policies designed to dramatically reduce the torrent of trash we now bury in landfills and burn in incinerators. More than a prescription for diverting garbage into recycled goods or compost, zero waste embodies a broad ethic aimed at lightening the load we're imposing on the planet. Zero-waste policies encourage people to reduce consumption while also pushing industry to extend the lifespan of the things we use by designing and producing products that can more readily be reused, repaired, or recycled. At its essence, zero waste is an ethic of resource conservation that would seem thoroughly familiar to our great-grandparents.

  The plastic bag is a fundamental affront to that ethic. It's made up of resources that were a hundred million years in the making, and yet its useful lifespan is measured in minutes—just long enough, Murray said, "to get my groceries from the store to my front door." The bag can't be repaired. It's not easily recycled. And the number of times it can be reused is limited. Bags may see double-duty carrying lunch, picking up dog poop, and lining trash cans, but studies show a plastic bag has to be used at least four times to mitigate the environmental impact of all that goes into making and disposing of it. Paper bags have similar environmental impacts, but they don't cause long-lasting litter and they are readily recycled. In Murray's zero-waste world, we'd all be carrying reusable bags. But for years he couldn't get anyone, aside from members of environmental groups, interested in attacking the problem of wayward bags.

  Then Charles Moore sailed his catamaran into the North Pacific plastic vortex and lifted the curtain on the back end of our throwaway lifestyle. This dystopian vision was especially disturbing to beach-blessed California, a place that sees the ocean as its backyard. The state's long coastline is a priceless natural treasure—a draw for its forty-six-billion-dollar tourist industry ; a rich and diverse fishery; a mecca for surfers, sailors, swimmers, and scuba divers. Eager to safeguard that resource, California's Ocean Protection Council had called for the curbing of all single-use plastic products through fees and bans. In a state of beach lovers, even free-market conservatives like the Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger considered the bags a big enough problem they were ready to bid them hasta la vista. Bag litter was what turned Schwarzenegger against the bags. "Trash on the beach has always been Arnold's pet peeve. He can't stand it," explained Leslie Tamminen, an environmental activist who worked with Schwarzenegger and was instrumental in assembling a broad coalition that pushed for a statewide ban on the bags in 2010.

  How much do the bags contribute to that vast offshore swirl of debris? No one can say for sure. They're a hazard to sea life, but probably not as great a threat as ghost nets or the hard plastic microdebris that's most prevalent in the gyre. Still, bags are colonizing
beaches like a new invasive species: volunteers in the 2008 international beach cleanup picked up nearly 1.4 million. No doubt some were cast off by careless picnickers. But surveys suggest that most come to ground miles inland and reach the ocean via storm drains and waterways. A study in Los Angeles County found that 19 percent of storm-drain litter was plastic bags. That's bad news for California coastal communities because most are under a federal order to keep their storm drains clear of trash that can be swept into the ocean. Complying with the mandate has cost Southern California cities more than $1.7 billion since the 1990s. For those communities, bag debris was potentially "a huge financial burden," said Murray. So by the early 2000s, "you had moderate and conservative local government officials in Southern California also clamoring about the problem of plastic bags, not just environmentalists."

  For the first time in his long tenure at CAW, Murray saw a real political opening to move against T-shirt bags. If enough local communities took up the bag issue, it would provide ammunition for a fight at the state level. In his experience, that was the way to win the support of the politically powerful grocers and retailers, who much preferred a consistent statewide policy to a patchwork of local regulations. Declaring war on plastic bags suddenly looked politically feasible.

  Then San Francisco fired the first shot, setting off a political chain reaction that put the city, and ultimately the entire state, on the frontlines of the bag wars.

  San Francisco prides itself on being at the forefront of green policymaking. There are charging stations for electric cars in front of city hall. Residents get tax credits for installing solar panels. City trucks collect used grease from restaurants for the biodiesel-powered fleet of municipal vehicles. The city has one of the most aggressive recycling programs in the country, recycling or composting over 70 percent of its waste and sending less than 30 percent to landfill—the exact reverse of the national ratio. In 2002 city leaders adopted zero waste as a goal, pledging to reduce that 30 percent to nothing by 2020.

  City leaders already tilted green, but they had very practical reasons for targeting bags. City grocery stores were handing out 180 million bags a year, and all this clingy, flyaway plastic was wreaking havoc at San Francisco's state-of-the-art recycling plant. People weren't supposed to put the bags in their recycling bins, but invariably people did. At the recycling facility, the bags would come loose, flutter around, and gum up the works. The plant had to shut down twice a day or more so that workers armed with box cutters could manually cut out plastic bags wrapped around the conveyor belts. Plastic bags were costing the facility about $700,000 annually.

  There were other costs as well, according to Robert Haley, a longtime staffer in the San Francisco Department of Environment who is in charge of shepherding the city toward its goal of zero waste. In fact, when Haley totted up all the problems related to plastic bags—at the landfill, the recycling center, as litter on the streets and in parks—he estimated the cost to San Francisco at $8.5 million a year, admittedly a tiny part of the city's multibillion-dollar budget, but in Haley's view, a needless expense for the deficit-plagued city. The bags may have been a nice convenience for San Francisco shoppers. But the price of that convenience, Haley reckoned, was higher than the city could afford.

  A ban on the miscreant bags was one obvious solution. The city of Mumbai had done it in 2000 after determining that plastic bags clumping in storm drains had dramatically worsened monsoon floods. The city even set up a special police squad dedicated to ferreting out and fining shops and factories that violated the ban. Other Indian cities followed Mumbai's lead with bag bans of their own, as did Bangladesh, Taiwan, Kenya, Rwanda, Mexico City, parts of China, and other places in the developing world.

  But rather than an outright ban, Haley—and Murray, who was working with him—were more intrigued by the idea of putting a price on the bags as a way to discourage their use. Their model was Ireland, which in 2002 levied a fifteen-cent fee on plastic bags, a so-called plastax. Within weeks, use of the bags dropped 94 percent and the amount of plastic bag litter decreased significantly. Carrying a plastic bag in Ireland quickly became about as socially acceptable as "wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one's dog," noted one reporter. The plastax generated twelve to fourteen million Euros in annual revenue that was dedicated to defraying the program's costs and to supporting a variety of environmental programs. Although the fee wasn't popular at first, the Irish soon accepted it, and one study even found that "it would be politically damaging to remove it."

  Such fees serve as a way to make visible the social costs of a product. We may be used to paying nothing for grocery bags, but that doesn't mean they have no cost. Instead the costs have shifted elsewhere—tucked into the price of food, or showing up in taxes that are necessary to deal with the environmental impacts of the bags' production and disposal. Murray and Haley believe fees shine a light on the environmental costs of products, which can ultimately change consumer behavior and promote better product design.

  Any type of single-use bag, paper or plastic, has environmental costs. Each drains down finite resources for the sake of an almost trivial convenience. "You pay for everything else in the store," Haley observed. "Why shouldn't you pay for bags?" A fee ought to persuade people to kick the single-use habit altogether and start bringing their own reusable bags.

  So with that goal in mind, in 2004 Haley and his staff put together a proposal urging the city to levy a fee on all grocery bags—paper as well as plastic. They set it at seventeen cents, the estimated cost of each bag to the city. City supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, also a zero-waste advocate, was happy to sponsor it.

  The proposed fee was controversial—opposed by retirees on fixed incomes, grocers who didn't want to inconvenience their customers, and, of course, the plastics industry, which blasted it as a "tax [that] is going to hurt those who can least afford it." Using the volatile word tax to describe a fee that could easily be avoided by bringing one's own bags would be one of the industry's consistent and most effective strategies in skirmishes to come.

  While Mirkarimi was trying to muster the support he needed, the grocers and bag makers teamed up for an end run around the city. They went to the state capital to push for statewide legislation to head off San Francisco's fee plan and "keep this issue from going crazy," as one industry lobbyist put it. The result was a law requiring all major grocery stores to offer bag recycling, but another key provision preempted cities and counties from imposing fees on plastic bags. One of the best options for dealing with the problems of single-use plastic bags in California had been gunned down.

  Murray, to the fury of many environmentalists, helped draft that legislation. Ever the pragmatist, he considered it a transitional measure that would move the state one step closer to getting rid of the bags. Within a year or two, he figured, it would be clear that store-based recycling didn't work and didn't reduce bag consumption, and he could go back to legislators and say, See, we told you so. Now let's put a fee on the bags or ban them.

  But he didn't anticipate the explosive effect of limiting cities' choices. Local governments don't like being told what to do by state government, especially on a traditionally local matter like waste disposal. "Telling them they couldn't enact a bag fee just motivated the hell out of them to do something," said Murray. "This lit a fire under the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that hadn't existed there before." Mirkarimi called it "the ricochet that became my ammunition."

  With that new ammo, he wrote up a proposal to simply ban plastic bags. The formerly reluctant board of supervisors passed it nearly unanimously, and Mayor Gavin Newsom signed it in April of 2007. The new law barred the major grocery stores and pharmacies from giving out T-shirt bags unless they were made of a compostable plastic. (San Francisco is one of the few cities that can handle such plastics, thanks to its extensive composting program.) The stores could still distribute paper bags, leaving San Franciscans free to continue their single-use bag habits. Haley didn't entirely lik
e it, but he ration­alized that paper bags could be recycled or composted, and if one ended up on the ground or in the Bay, it would quickly biodegrade. "One good rain and it will go away."

  Inspired by San Francisco's example, cities around the country began drafting measures of their own, nearly all aimed solely at plastic bags and most calling for flat-out bans. Lawmakers in a rural Virginia county were motivated by complaints that escaped bags got caught on cotton plants and mucked up the harvesting and ginning equipment. Philadelphia city councilmen were worried that bags were clogging the city's antiquated sewer systems. Residents of a small Alaskan town were moved to action by bags dangling from willow bushes in the tundra. Coastal communities like the Outer Banks counties in North Carolina and the San Diego suburb of Encinitas cited the issue of marine debris.

  Strikingly, these political uprisings were entirely local in character. Unlike attacks on other types of plastic products, this battle had no national drive to "ban the bag." The campaigns against PVC and phthalates and bisphenol A have all been shepherded by well-established environmental groups—Greenpeace, Health Care Without Harm, the Environmental Defense Fund, and others—using the media and the Internet to generate public pressure so that even if lawmakers don't respond to consumers' concerns, retailers might. And indeed, while federal regulators are still considering what to do about bisphenol A, big-box stores have stopped carrying baby bottles that contain the chemical. Such coordinated efforts help explain how, to paraphrase Fortune magazine, Walmart became the new FDA. But anti-bag initiatives genuinely sprang from the grass roots, proposed by local activists or officials acting more or less on their own—and not always for the most well-thought-out reasons. One industry lobbyist derided it as the Sixty Minutes phenomenon: "you see something in the paper and then on TV and it gives you a legislative thought." The popularity of bans was also surely enhanced by what one writer called their "righteous simplicity." Unlike a fee, a ban didn't ask much of anyone—except the plastics industry.