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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 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.
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.
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 use plastic. The carbon footprint is lower than paper evidently. People think paper is better because it can decompose, but it doesn't in landfills buried under tons of other trash without air for the bacteria. And it doesn't really matter: litter is ugly but harmless compared to ocean acidification or climate change.
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.
The paper bags are reusable at home though; plastic bags are really good for little else than trash bags, and the store bags have become so thin that they tear by the time I get my groceries put away. Paper bags, on the other hand, can be reused for countless things; I make them into books, cards, writing paper, etc. etc. Also you can throw paper bags into a home compost pile.
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.
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.
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.
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.