Could a plastic bag ban stop people from being trashy?

CORPUS CHRISTI — Littering the landscape with plastic shopping bags is indeed a problem. The proposed solution — banning them — doesn’t address the problem at its source, which is the people doing the littering. A bag ban only removes bags from their arsenal, much like a ban on so-called “assault” rifles can change the cosmetics of a law-abiding gun owner’s home arsenal. For an inanimate object, the plastic bag, like the assault rifle, has attained quite a reputation for villainy. Truth is, its penchant for premeditated environmental depredation is overblown. Lift an empty one to appreciate the tininess of its footprint compared to a paper bag or a Prius. The green reputation of those two products overlooks their manufacture, which does much heavier environmental damage than the manufacture of plastic bags. Improperly discarded plastic bags make an unsightly spectacle of the landscape, which more easily camouflages other litter such as plastic drink bottles, plastic foam cups and cigarette butts that fly easily out of car and truck windows. The bags’ environmental impact is smaller than their visual statement. Also, we tend to remember our outrage at the sight of those bags caught in trees and brush more readily than we remember how useful they are when used properly. The ones that come back from the grocery store make it safely into the house, where they are reused as budget trash can liners, lunch bags and pet poop picker uppers. In the home environment the bags usually are disposed of safely in a trash can or — better — the recyclables bin. We have no idea how many bags can be wadded and stuffed into one bag for storage or recycling. We just know it’s a lot. Plastic bags from a convenience store or fast food restaurant are much more likely to end up as litter, which is no reason to ban convenience stores or fast food restaurants. Plastic bags make a minuscule dent in landfill space and, according to a 2009 Wall Street Journal article, were found to be only a tiny fraction of the street litter in San Francisco, less pervasive than chewing gum and cigarette butts. The heavily touted alternatives, paper bags and reusable shopping bags, pose their own problems. Paper bags are more costly and less environmental to manufacture, and aren’t as strong as plastic — especially when wet. A joint study by the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University in California found that reusable grocery bags tended to harbor dangerous germs and that most users weren’t aware that the bags needed to be washed to prevent this problem. That doesn’t negate the reusable bags as a solution. Preventing the germ problem by washing the bags is easy enough. The local Surfrider Foundation promoted reusable bags at the Jan. 31 City Council meeting, also urging a plastic bag ban. The council is scheduled to discuss a ban at its Feb. 21 meeting. While we share the sentiment that inspired the call for a ban, bags don’t litter, people do. But since the bags, unlike guns, have no Second Amendment protection, maybe we’ll find out whether a bag ban will solve Corpus Christi’s trashy people problem.