When Good Intentions Lead to Bad Policy

In today’s age, there has been a greater push for “green” solutions. While I would say most people support environmentally sound policies, especially if the policy is based on common sense and are economically prudent, unfortunately, this goodwill can be used to enact “green” policies that are detrimental to the environment. The first and foremost policy is the plastic bag ban.

In 2022, New Jersey instituted a plastic bag ban for retail stores, grocery stores, and food service businesses. Along with banning paper bags, the only option for consumers was to bring in reusable bags. The goal, and hope, was that by reusing bags for groceries instead of using one-time bags such as plastic, the waste these plastic bags cause will be eliminated. This may sound logical, but there are a few issues.

First, we are making the assumption that one plastic bag is equivalent to one reusable bag. According to a UNEP report, to make a reusable bag’s impact to be environmentally neutral compared to a plastic bag, it has to be used between 50 to 150 times (Hunt 2023). So, if the average person goes shopping once a week, it will take between 1–3 years for that bag to have a “neutral” impact on the environment. This means that someone needs to remember to bring their bags to the store between 98% to 99.3% of the time without getting a new bag. Anything less than this success rate means that new bags are being used before the old bags become environmentally friendly. However, this does not include delivery.

At the beginning of New Jersey’s ban, deliveries used the new reusable bags instead of the old plastic ones. So, if someone had their food delivered, they will be adding to their total bags without ever using them. Considering that 15% of shopping is now online (Census 2023), this will prove to be an environmental disaster, at least public policy-wise, in the making. This is why New Jersey is trying to amend the law to navigate this issue. Furthermore, in my earlier paragraph, we made the natural assumption that when someone is going to the grocery store, they will use the same number of bags every time. Will the number of bags used per week would probably be similar week in and week out, there are outliers wherein you may need extra bags, for a party, or fewer bags. While the latter will not be as important, having a surplus number of bags means that we will need to average more than the UNEP report to break the “green deficit”.

So, the 98% to 99.3% success rate would actually need to be much higher, unless people recycled their bags to their grocery store or deliveries change the bags that they are using. If this were to happen, then the policy will only need a 98% success rate as we theorized before. While I have faith in my fellow man, asking them to be near perfect may be too much to ask. This is especially true if the UNEP report does not consider all environmental consequences.

In 2018 the Danish Environmental Protection Agency ran a cost-benefit analysis on how many times should a cotton bag be used before it is environmentally friendly. They ran multiple analyses wherein they analyzed just one economic indicator, which “focused solely on cotton’s climate impact”, and 15 “different environmental indicators”. With analysis of just one economic indicator, the cotton bag needed to be used 52 times, similar to the UNEP report. With the 15 indicators, it had to be used 7,100 times; unless it was organic, then it would only need to be used 20,000 times (Hunt 2023).

While it is feasible to hope someone uses the same bags over a three-year period, to hope someone uses it for over 136 years without getting a new bag or over 384 years for an organic cotton bag, maybe a bit of a stretch. In the former case, we would hope bags would outlive and will continue to be used after the original owner has passed. In fact, this bag would need to be used on a generational level. Knowing how well items are made today, this would be an unwise bet. If we look at organic bags, to use a bag for 384 years would mean using a bag for a longer period than the United States has been in existence. And in a strange twist, if we did start using an organic cotton bag when the United States was founded, it would start being environmentally friendly in the year 2160, which by happy coincidence, will be about the same year for the non-organic bag, that we started using this year, to have been environmentally friendly.

This is not to attack the motivation of those who made the law. After all, they just want to implement an environmentally friendly solution to a real problem. However, it is likely the solution is worse than the problem. This also does not include people who reused the plastic bags around the house, such as using them in small garbage cans. Without these bags, they either will use nothing or buy plastic bags. The latter will minimize the benefit of the policy and defeat its purpose.

So, when coming up with future policies, we should note a few things. First, when conducting a cost-benefit analysis, we must be careful on who is doing the cost-benefit analysis. If the agency were to have a motive, then the analysis itself can leave out a number of factors. This would lead to slanted analysis wherein bad public policies could be mistaken as good. Another issue is we are trying to control human behaviors in this type of analysis. This is a repeated mistake with environmental policies.

For example, in Mexico City, they instituted car bans based on the day of the week and license plate. For example, if the license ended in a “0” or “1”, you could not drive on Mondays, for “2” or “3” you could not drive on Tuesdays, and so on. The hope was this would lead to less driving and therefore less emissions. It turned out that people, due to the ban, people changed their behavior. How did they change their behavior? They changed their routes due to the “high compliance costs” and bought older, used vehicles. So, in an effort to bring down emissions, the new regulation led to an increase in car use, particularly in older, less economically friendly cars. Therefore, the regulation may have had the opposite effect as its intended consequence (Eskeland and Feyzioglu 1997). Precisely like the plastic bag may have.

Even if these ideas were good politics, good politics should not triumph over good policies. While we hope that these policies were well-intentioned, the effect of these policies may be the opposite of what they sought to achieve. Our hope for the future is that a more comprehensive cost-benefit analysis is used before instituting important policies. While a solution to a problem may be at hand, testing it vigorously before it becomes law may prevent bad policies to be enacted.

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