(Photo: Taber Andrew Bain)
The Austin City Council is about to outlaw the paper and plastic bags you get at the grocery store. Retailers don’t like the ban. One particularly clever argument by liquor retailers is that it will encourage people to buy less — not a good thing, so they argue, when unemployment is high.
This is a bad argument for so many reasons: 1) Booze demand and bag provision are at most only a tiny bit complementary — one can always carry the six-pack out by hand; 2) To argue that high unemployment is a reason for anything other than macro stimuli is totally self-serving. I think all universities should hire more economists to reduce unemployment (although others may differ). The best argument against the ban is that it is not efficient—the environmental improvements don’t justify the extra resource cost of schlepping reusable bags into stores. I don’t find even that argument to be very persuasive.
(HT to TC).
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Several countries have successfully implemented this technique with little (if any) economic kick-back; Bangladesh and China are two examples. They use simple netting bags or the customer brings their own. After spending some time in Dhaka, I can attest that it has caused neither an increased rate of unemployment nor a sudden decrease in alcoholism.
This already happened in Brownsville, TX but the requirement was that bags couldn’t be complimentary. You are still able to purchase the bags at the store. $1 for unlimited plastic or $2 for the recyclable ones.
Any business with 1/4 of a brain will sell bags, the reusable kind sold at every supermarket. This would generate profit and could be a promotional opportunity. It’s also possible they could get marketers to give them bags for free.
Liquor stores now have to provide boxes as a service – not required but they need the boxes, ideally with dividers, to get customers to buy more bottles that then need to be carried around.
Conveniently, almost every single bottle shipped to the store came in a box perfectly suited to carrying multiple bottles of alcohol. Those boxes are sitting there in the back room waiting to be thrown in the trash or recycled (maybe). I see an opportunity here.
Make people pay for plastic bags. Toronto, Ontario as well as many other cities have made this a bylaw. People buy reusable bags instead. The cost of plastic bags is only $0.05 but people don’t want to pay it. Reusable bags range from $1.00 – $2.00. Most people won’t bend down to pick up a dime but they still don’t want to pay $0.05 for something that used to be free.
We have a similar system in Ireland. There was a seriously problem with bag litter here, and attaching a levy to the use of bags (admittedly, a peculiar one to enforce and with loopholes) seems to have reduced bag litter significantly. Since bags costs money now, people reuse them (it’s a minor cost, the effect is largely psychological).
Paper bags are not levied, however (since they readily biodegrade – I’ve heard some dissenting arguments on that point for a variety of sound reasons), nor bags that are required for the purchase of the product, such as meat or fruit/vegetables.
There could be a pile of data there to check the effects on, if you were game…
My old joke used to be:
Do you know how to tell the difference between a hippie and a hobo in Austin? Hippies have their dogs on leashes.
Now the joke will be: the hobos don’t have bags around their beer.
(in case you’re dense, the joke is that it is difficult to tell the difference between the hippies and the hobos because there are a lot of dirty, weirdly dressed people walking around Austin)
Tell Mayor Leffingwell and the City Council: No Bag Ban for Austin http://www.bagtheban.com/take-action/austin/#.TyFzB7mbJqs.twitter
The city is correct to try to deal with the environmental costs associated with bag pollution. The proper action is a tax on bags which pays for the cleanup, etc. Unfortunately the political climate is more favorable to prohibitions than taxes, in part because the public will see that the revenue will probably not go towards bag cleanup, just into the general fund (although one can say even if the bags are cleaned up, society is made indifferent by other services).