2010 California Election Forum

Does tax on plastic bags make "cents?"

Democratic liberals in the State Legislature want to impose a tax on each plastic bag you use at the store.

But like most government programs, they don't look at the unintended consequence of their actions.

The first obvious consequence is that this social engineering bill will push the cost up for us all; hurting the poor and those on fixed incomes (i.e., seniors) the most.

The second unintended consequence is that the tax hurts the environment. That's right, plastic actually is better than paper.

Let me explain.

One hundred million new plastic grocery bags require the total energy equivalent of approximately 8,300 barrels of oil. Here's how this energy usage breaks down: extraction of the raw materials, manufacturing, transport, energy exerted in product use and curbside collection of the bags. Of that, 30% is actual oil and 23% is natural gas used for bag production. The rest is for fuel used along the way.

That sounds like a lot until you consider that the same number of paper grocery sacks use five times that much total energy.

A paper grocery bag isn't just made out of trees. Manufacturing 100 million paper bags with one-third post-consumer recycled content requires petroleum energy equivalent to approximately 15,100 barrels of oil plus additional energy derived from other sources, including hydroelectric power, nuclear energy and wood waste.

When the cashier bags a purchase in paper, the consumer doesn't see that it took at least a gallon of water to produce that bag (more than 20 times the amount used to make a plastic bag), that it weighed 10 times more on the delivery truck and that the paper bag took up as much as 7 times the space as a plastic bag during transit to the store.

Finally, one paper bag ultimately results in producing between tens and hundreds of times more greenhouse gas emissions than a plastic bag.