Bag Ban

The Ministry for the Environment's consultation document on banning plastic bags is out.

The key table is in the appendix. Or at least the most interesting table. It shows, from a Danish study, the number of times a reusable shopping bag would have to be reused to have less environmental impact than current disposable bags.

The consultation document provides no cost-benefit assessment, but Question 8 asks those making submissions to assess whether the benefits might outweigh the costs.

I can only speak for our own household, but I doubt we're that we're that atypical.

We have a few reusable bags at home. The ones we have get reused a lot, because we use them on planned trips to the store. But most of our trips aren't like that. Most of them are grabbing a few things on the way home after getting off the bus. Maybe other people are happy to carry around reusable grocery bags every day on the off chance that they might need to grab milk, bread, eggs and butter on the way home. I'm not. On those trips, we use the disposable plastic bags. Because what else are you going to do? Walk home, get a bag, walk back to the shop? It's absurd.

The more likely outcome: buying the reusable bags on those trips, accumulating a stack of them at home, then finding some way of disposing of them down the line. The number of times these things get reused will be endogenous to whether disposable plastic bags exist. I'm expecting that the reuse rates will be dropping.

I also have a few hundred of the disposable bags now on order from Ali Baba because they're too useful around the house to do without. It may also be fun to bring those to the market for use as shopping bags after the ban.

Oh - another depressing part. MoE includes this line.

Retailers will profit from not having to provide free bags and by selling alternative carriers, and are in a good position to help their customers to transition.

Not a lot of economic intuition on display here. If it's true, it means that customers will choose stores based on whether bags are available. If that's true, the value destroyed by banning them is substantial.