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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]
I'm wondering if there's a difference between paper bag users and plastic bag users. Not routinely washing a reusable bag is a plausible source for disease, but it isn't the only thing to consider.
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 go to the source paper you'll notice both authors are from law school. So, that being said, why are they writing about a medical issue and using questionable statistics?
Here is the abstract:
"Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase. "
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
A "bag" of woven metal could take advantage of the oligodynamic effect. Problem solved.
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.
Simple. Do what I do. Wash your bags regularly. Problem solved. I haven't had a problem in the two years I've exclusively used my own bags.
Hold it right there with your reasonable alternate hypothesis. We already have the answer we want. Plastic bag ban = neohippie commies = Liberals = certain death.
Sincerely,
Roger Ailes
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
whose other papers include:
- legal abortion turned your daughter into a herpes-ridden slut
- helping poor people treat their diabetes just leads to more fatties, yo
- health insurance mandates are so bad that they drive people to drink
- hey, you know what would really solve our health care problems? Tort reform.
We've known for some time that reusable grocery bags were like keyboards - absolutely filthy. If you force people to use unsanitary containers to carry their food it only makes sense that their could be a corresponding increase in the risk of infection.
Think about it, we have food sanitation standards for stores, we have medical sanitation standards for good reasons that can both be enforced when someone is supervising someone else. Remove the supervisor and people fall back to laziness because that is human nature. Logically, is there really any other expected outcome?
I think this passes the sniff test and should be tested more to see if it has merit. I say this as someone who originally supported the idea of the ban and still supports banning things like Styrofoam cups. Science needs to be put in front of emotion and allowed to run the course.
San Francisco is rapidly on the path that only can lead to one conclusion: They're all getting on the "B" Ark.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Actual problem: there's too many people, using too much land, and not only can nature not keep pace through renewing resources, but we're eliminating the habitats of species. The solution is to have fewer people, which requires we rethink our concept of "freedom," and to focus on cradle-to-grave handling of technology to reduce pollution.
That's taboo.
Fake solution: plastic bag bans, CFL lightbulbs, carbon caps, and "green" disposable junk you buy at stores.
It doesn't work but it (a) feels good and (b) doesn't interrupt our busy lifestyles.
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.
isnt this story where there was a sick girl, sharing a hotel room with lots of other people, the girl used a reusable plastic bag from a store as a bin liner in the bathroom and after a number of her room mates fell ill they found some germs on the plastic bag bin liner it's nonsense to suggest either - the bag is a more likely reason the illness spread than any other reason that comes with sharing a hotel room - that bags in general spread illness - that the exact same thing cant happen if we dont re-use plastic bags (I was using store plastic bags as bin liners long before there was a push to re-use plastic bags) this is simple that a person with a contagious illness spread it to people in her proximity, and some manufacturer of plastic bags has jumped on that to create a story against recycling plastic bags. clearer the manufacturer has a vested interest in plastic bags not being reused, shame on the 'researchers' who lent their name to this
I live in the suburbs of Austin, and will continue to shop at stores outside the city limits in order to keep my "single use" plastic bags (the ones that are, in fact, recyclable, sometimes made of biodegradable vegetable products, and are ALWAYS reused by my household for cat litter/dog crap pickup and disposal.)
Here's the REALLY stupid part of this all... if all bags had remained the Wal-Mart style of thick recyclable stuff, we wouldn't have a problem, since there already exists suitable recycling facilities to handle them. If all bags had moved to biodegradable, then they could be composted and again, no problem. The problem now exists in the difference between the biodegradable bags which cannot be recycled and the recyclable bags which do not biodegrade. There's no single stream answer for the dichotomy, so the answer they came up with is "ban all single use bags"... All they really had to do is ban the use of one or the other, and provide a process for recycling or mulching the bags that remained. Hell, the local HEBs all have the "recycle your shopping bags here" drop off boxes when you enter the store, just in case you can't figure out on your own that they're recyclable.
Mountain out of a molehill turned into a sweeping restriction on commerce. Color me surprised that it's happening in Austin, where the "metro train" is frequently empty... but hey, at least we have feel-good public transport options, right?
San Fran has a fairly low incidence of people bathing regularly.
At least that's what my nose told me the last time I was there.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It could. However, that means precisely nothing until you discover such a hidden cause, and until you find it you can't use it to parry accusations that arise from a plausible mechanism explaining what is shown to be happening - the hypothesis that filthy reusable bags are the cause.
State officials in California have asked municipalities to reduce their storm drain waste by 40%. Whatever the solution to that would end up being, it would be expensive, if not impossible. How do you prevent 40% of the waste in your storm drains, which are publicly accessible all over town? The requirement wasn't to reduce waste to a certain level... it was to reduce it by 40% below what it already is... so if your numbers are already good, you have to make them that much better. It's chasing after a rainbow.
So the state gave the municipalities a loophole: you don't have to reduce your storm drain waste by 40% (or at all) if you institute a plastic bag ban. No questions asked. The municipalities get to avoid costly Environmental Impact Reports, and they get to tell their residents "look! We're doing something for the environment," so they're passing these bans with little or no discussion. So now you have just as much waste in the storm drains, restaurants and other places that have been given a pass are still handing out plastic bags all day long, and stores that weren't given a pass are either giving out thicker plastic bags with handles that are labelled as "reusable" or selling people paper bags for 10 cents. You don't see people walking into stores with these thicker bags or the paper bags, so that means they're being thrown out anyway, and they have more mass than the "banned" bags, so we really haven't reduced waste at all... we've made it worse.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that foodborne diseases are caused by germs. You don't develop a salmonella, E.coli or C.difficile infection by wishful thinking, especially not as vague as "people think they are bad in a way they don't understand". Especially if that's not at all the position. People have no reason to be thinking the bags are bad for them, - what people tend to think is "fucking government making me haul around my own bags I had to pay for instead of the neato one-use ones which I could use for garbage bin lining and other such once I'm home with groceries."
Even where plastic bags are banned?
Might be partially metal bamboo if grown in China. They seem to be able to get heavy metals into most everything.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Grocery store worker here.. When a customer has their own bags, they usually want us to fill them to capacity and that means putting their raw meat in with their other food. When we use plastic, we bag their meat separate unless the customer requests otherwise (they usually don't). Also, some people never wash or clean their bags. I've put food into bags that reeked of cat piss, were littered with animal fur (cats love to sleep/hide in them), or were infested with insects so it doesn't surprise me that people are getting sick.