The Many Sides of New Jersey’s Plastic Bag Ban

During 2022, New Jersey’s paper and plastic bag bans began. From that day onward, no New Jersey grocery store larger than 2,500 feet could have paper or plastic bags at the check-out. While the law included exceptions like plastic in the produce and meat aisles, as a New Jersey resident, I can say the ban was big.

When the ban began, because I forgot to bring my own bag to the market, I had to buy them. At the time, Instacart added to most shoppers’ accumulation by packing orders in reusable bags.

Now though, two years later, I am less forgetful and keep a massive pile of reusable bags in my car and garage. But my stash could be the problem.

Plastic Bag Bans

The Upside

In New Jersey, one study concluded that plastic bag use plunged by 594 bags per person. Somewhat similarly, well-designed bans covering more than 12 million people in five states have cut single use plastic bag use by (an estimated) six billion bags a year. In addition, twelve states and more than 500 cities now have the bans. (Also though, 19 states have ban the ban mandates.)

You can see the benefit:

Even the grocery stores enjoyed the bans when those substitute bag sales boosted their profits.

The Downside

Meanwhile, it is indeed possible that fewer single use plastic bags nudged us toward alternatives with more plastic. According to USA Today, we began using non-woven polypropylene that we rarely recycled. (and contained no recycled materials). One study suggests New Jersey’s plastic consumption tripled after the ban.

Our Bottom Line: Externalities

Always, government regulations create positive and negative externalities. Defined, as the impact of an uninvolved third party, we could also think of a spillover. The perfect example of a positive externality that spills over is the people that remain healthy because one individual was vaccinated. On the negative side, though, we have pollution reduction mandates that iniiate a ripple of job losses.

With their plastic bag ban, New Jersey lawmakers had hoped to boost sustainability. You can see that they have and have not had success. While we have a slew of statistics on both sides, we also are dealing with an unquantifiable mandate. Knowing this problem, I did want to conclude with more numbers.

The UN told us how much we have to reuse bags to offset their environmental impact. With cotton bags, it’s a whopping 50 to 150 times. As for those “tote” bags that we buy at supermarkets, we just have to reuse them 10 to 20 times. Meanwhile, paper bags are in the 4 to 8 category while thicker plastic bags have to be reused 5 to 10 times.

So, where are we? Let’s just know what we don’t know. But, as economists, we should look for the tradeoffs.

My sources and more: For data on New Jersey’s bag ban success, this report is a possibility. Then, though, USA Today had a somewhat different conclusion. As for banning the bans, this article had some information. Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.