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Are Plastic Bag Bans Making People Sick?
theodp writes "A paper by Wharton's Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright suggested that San Francisco's eco-friendly ban on plastic bags might actually be killing people. Klick and Wright found that food-borne illnesses in San Francisco increased 46% after the bag ban went into effect in 2007, with no such uptick in neighboring counties. Most likely, the authors concluded, this was due to the fact that people were putting their food into dirty reusable bags and not washing them afterward. But Tomas Aragon, an epidemiologist at UC Berkeley and health officer for the city of San Francisco, begs to differ, arguing that in order to establish a link between the bag ban and illnesses, the authors would have to show that the same people who are using reusable bags are also the ones getting sick. Aragon offers an alternative hypothesis for the recent rise in deaths related to intestinal infections, noting that a large portion of the cases in San Francisco involve C. difficile enterocolitis, a disease that's often coded as food-borne illness in hospitals which has become more common in lots of places since 2005, all around the U.S., Canada, and Europe (for yet-unexplained reasons). 'The increase in San Francisco,' he suggests, 'probably reflects this international increase.'"
In Ireland that didn't happen when they introduced a levy on plastic bags years ago and their usage plummeted.
Might I humbly suggest the cause lies elsewhere? Such as the original food quality. [insert nauseating overused quote about correlation!=causality]
There are many many cities in both the USA and Canada (and probably Europe) that have banned plastic bags. If you want to prove your case, then you should be able to point to simmilar correlation of increase of illness in those cities with the start of these bans as well. If, on the other hand, there is no such correlation in these other cities, then this has nothing to do with plastic bags at all and is something else happening in SF.
I would be willing to wager the latter.
If you put a leaky package of ground beef or chicken with your fruits and then proceed to eat said fruits after you get home from the store without washing them, then you're at fault for getting sick.
You also have to look at it this way... what's a few sick/dead people worth over the fact that there will less bags taking up landfill space and be on this planet for thousands of years not decomposing? worth it.
This is the wrong approach to environmentalism. We need to focus on the big stuff, not on feel-good tokenism like bag bans or super-duper biodegradable coffee cups.
Does the small stuff help? Yes. But we are stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.
Want to make disposable bags less of a problem? Let's encourage people to reuse them for small wastebaskets and dog poop pickup. This keeps purpose-bought bags from being made and out of the landfills. I also use them as a packing material, in place of wadded paper or packing peanuts.
Chinese factories are busy pumping untreated toxic effluent directly into rivers which drain to the oceans. Let's stop pretending that Mother Earth's greatest menace is a plastic bag.
What is the ecological footprint of a hospital admission? Maybe, for reasons described in TFA, bag bans aren't quite as bad as everybody says - we still know they're getting people sick because busy people don't always wash bags properly - and people as a whole never will. The cross-contamination vector has been well studied by the foodservice industry.
Let's focus on real environmentalism, not on tokenism designed to make yuppies feel good about themselves.
Not routinely washing a reusable bag is a plausible source for disease
Just an observation: Doesn't food usually have its own packaging/wrappers to protect it from the filthy bags?
No sig today...
I can't vouch for San Francisco, but in the UK, the supermarkets have always fought against plastic bag bans. Which suggests to me you are inventing a conspiracy where there isn't one.
Just an observation: Doesn't food usually have its own packaging/wrappers to protect it from the filthy bags?
Fruits and vegetables don't usually come prepackaged, at least in the US. Most meats are packaged, but also tend to leak. Just about everything else comes prepackaged.
I predict that within a week, at least one right-leaning website is going to be publishing a column using this to attack the idea of environmentalism and arguing that this proves liberalism endangers human lives.
Wait, what's useless about the bag carousels? All of the reusable bags Walmart sells fit on there as well, and they make bagging way more quick and efficient.
How are they useless? The cashier spends less time bagging using that system than they would with conventional free standing racks from which they have to detach each bag. This system has the customer spend the time doing that task instead. It also allows the cashier to start on the next customer while the current one is removing his/her last final bags. Sure it is probably only a 5-10% time savings, but that means you can get by with fewer cashiers or have reduced time in line.
The real problem with plastic is the creation of plastic marine debris. Plastic bags are the #1 source of plastic marine debris, which is quite harmful to ocean life.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
2) it is plausible they are cherry picking data so they can sue on behalf of people who get sick
3) did they have an objective epidemiologist on the team. If they just went through the databases without one, they can easily find whatever patterns they are looking for.
4) Did they have an objective statition on the team. Again, it is easy to find patterns.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So cross contamination would be very easy to pick up that way, I seem to remember that there was a huge outbreak of e.coli in europe regarding brussel sprouts a few years back linked to exactly that.
This is a great point.
Where does produce come from? The fields. And here in America (and indeed much of our fresh produce comes from Mexico), have you seen rows of Honey Buckets in the fields? Not too many? A few? Where do you think farm workers pee (and take a dump) in the middle of a hot long California day?
Yes, that's right, in the field.
Wash your veggies.
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