The Math Behind Sacking Disposable Bags

The amount of plastic bags grocery store clerks stuff full of food is kind of an industry secret, for some reason. And it’s a secret the major grocers are willing to protect, as the city of San Francisco found out when it tried to create a voluntary agreement with grocery chains to track and try to reduce bag use. It was part of an effort by the city to cut down litter and landfill loads to achieve a “zero waste” goal by 2020. The grocery chains saw no problem with reducing use – fewer bags given out means fewer bags they’d have to buy. But counting, and revealing those counts, was out of the question.

In the fall of 2006, legislation signed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger required chain stores to collect and recycle plastic bags that otherwise end up in landfills and storm drains. But the law prohibited any municipality from requiring stores to “conduct additional auditing or reporting." It also prohibited the imposition of any fee to the stores for plastic carryout bags, avoiding something like the 15 cent per bag tax Ireland instituted in 2002. That tax had resulted in a reported 90 percent reduction in bag use in just a few months, exactly the sort of slash in garbage that would have helped San Francisco get a lot closer to its zero waste goal. The fee prohibition—a move Jack Macy of the city’s SF Environment department blames on plastic industry lobbyists—killed a 17-cent tax the city was considering.