| I sometimes am not clear on what the goal is. The article seems to argue that the goal is very narrowly to reduce the amount of plastic bags created/consumed and then claims a study shows that the bans do indeed achieve that goal. It's hard to imagine this goal not being achieved, but it's too narrow. I haven't seen any study showing that total plastic trash, incorrectly disposed, is reduced. It could be hard to study, I admit. I'd love to know the amount of the reduction as well. My guess would be there is a reduction, but it is fairly small. For example, in the San Jose survey: https://web.archive.org/web/20230512013405/https://www.sanjo... pre-ban creek and litter surveys only showed 9% single-use plastic bags and this dropped to 2%. I'd imagine 7% reduction is the upper bound on the impact, but it could be smaller than that if other litter increased. Maybe that's high enough to make the ban worth the inconvenience, I don't know what the right threshold should be. Broader goals could include reducing total plastic production, reducing fossil fuel mining, etc. I'm more suspicious that these goals are not being meaningfully affected by bag bans. |