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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.
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...
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 ...
Yes...But... you should have quit while you were ahead. The small stuff IS the big stuff. "5 bags a week," you say. "No big deal." but there are 1 million others in San Francisco who could say the same thing as could 38 million in California, 300 million in the US, 7 billion in the world. (Yea I know let's suppose only 1/6th of the world's population are wealthy enough to throw away plastic every week, that's only 52 billion bags a year, no big deal right?) Except that it is. We've only been able to produce cheap disposable plastic for a couple of decades and already our oceans are filling with plastic.
Plastic bag bans work and the biggest unintended side-effect is that it will stir up a bunch of self-righteous lawyers paid no-doubt by the bubble-bag industry. I live in Ireland and I've seen this work. In fact of all of the environmental campaigns in my lifetime, only the installation of scrubbers on a nearby coal-power plant (also a "no brainer") had a more direct and dramatic impact than Ireland's plastic bag ban-- this in a country which did not benefit from the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign where Iron Eyes Cody finally guilted enough whiny white Americans out of being jerks to make a difference for a while. I'm not asking everyone to travel to the southern ocean and stop whaling and oil spills. Just don't be a jerk. It isn't as difficult as our nation's cultural inertia makes it seem.
Speaking of stepping over dollars for pennies, I'd rather go to the store less often. If we have to make everything about bags then reducing the number of bags used could also be accomplished by not having to purchase shit that was designed to break and be replaced within six to eight months. We shouldn't just count the bags themselves but the stuff that we bring home in them.
I've always wondered why the environmental evangelism only cares about cars, solar panels, and plastic shopping bags. Stop taxing my bags and start taxing products that just don't last. We have the data, we know what products last a long time and we know that "modern" versions of them won't last a long time. For god sake we know how to engineer better products.
For example. I have a coffee grinder that I've been using for around 10~12 years. I consider myself lucky to have such a good quality product. A week ago it started making more noise than usual. After years of faithful service it's finally giving out. I know that if I buy a new one--even from the same brand--it will probably last a year at best. When you consider that most of today's products fit in that category of 1/10th the lifespan they should have.... is buying 10 times as much shit really a good idea?
Crappy products should be taxed, if not illegal. Someone should tell Washington that it's not all about cars and shopping bags.
I remember when CFLs were just starting to become well known. They literally did last for years. I got them because I was tired of standing precariously on a chair to change an incandescent light every two months. I didn't buy them for the sake of mother earth. I purchased them because they genuinely were better products. CFLs used to last. Every one of the CFLs I've purchased in the last year has had to be replaced. Is the energy saved still going to offset the environmental cost of manufacturing, distribution, and landfills considering your projections originally assumed a much longer lifespan?
Wake the fuck up America, we need to stop the fraud, waste, and abuse that exists in nearly every market. Nearly everything you have should be lasting longer and we need our government to make that happen. For the sake of the consumer and for the sake of our planet. Get your politically inclined environmental hippies doing something useful (besides legalizing marijuana) and lets get the campaign for better products going.
I want this account deleted.