An update on New Jersey's paper bag ban

It gets stupider

I wrote a post back in May expressing frustration with New Jersey’s ban on paper bag. It was an incredible inconvenience for myself and my family. Normally we have reusuable bags, but that wasn’t an option when getting groceries delivered or using pickup. Instead we were gifted thick “reusuable” bags every time. And as a kicker the bags usually had large stickers on them that were nearly impossible to remove.

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to guess what happened next. And New York Times finally got around to reporting on the “unintended consequences”:

The mountains of bags are an unintended consequence of New Jersey’s strict new bag ban in supermarkets. It went into effect in May and prohibits not only plastic bags but paper bags as well. The well-intentioned law seeks to cut down on waste and single-use plastics, but for many people who rely on grocery delivery and curbside pickup services their orders now come in heavy-duty reusable shopping bags — lots and lots of them, week after week.

My favorite part is the subtle editorializing in this otherwise hard news piece. See if you can spot it.

The well-intentioned law seeks to cut down on waste and single-use plastics, but for many people who rely on grocery delivery and curbside pickup services their orders now come in heavy-duty reusable shopping bags — lots and lots of them, week after week

Is it well-intentioned? I don’t know and I don’t think its a newspapers role to speculate on the intentions of policy makers. The road to hell is paved with good intention.

The bill had some pretty obvious consequences that I wrote about when the law first went into effect. Proper journalism would ask about those consequences prior to their manifestation.

It’s okay, it’s just a hiccup!

“There’s clearly a hiccup on this,” said Bob Smith, a New Jersey state senator and co-sponsor of the bill, “and we’re going to solve it.” Mr. Smith said that the legislature would most likely create an exception by amending the rule to allow paper bags for online orders.

…

Dr. Miller said the bag situation in New Jersey was emblematic of a lot of environmental policies. “If we don’t pay attention to the unintended impacts of policies such as the plastic waste ban, we run into the potential of playing environmental Whac-a-Mole,” she said. “We solve one environmental problem only to create or exacerbate another problem.”

Who could have seen this coming?? Certainly not New York Times reporters.

It’s not “whack-a-mole” or perfect being the enemy of good. This policy was terrible for consumers, businesses and the environment since it just replaced cheaper single use bags (that are often ironically reused) with thicker more expensive and carbon intensive “reusuable” bags.

It gets stupider

To be fair, there were some unintended consequences of the bag ban. Can you guess what they were?

The chain told News 12 New Jersey in a statement, "Like other retailers across the state, we have experienced theft of our hand-held shopping baskets - an unintended consequence of the ban on plastic and paper bags. We continue to encourage and remind shoppers to bring their own bags, as well as offer our own durable and affordable two for $1 reusable bags in store."

People are walking out with hand-held shopping baskets!

You can almost think of this as civil disobedience. I can’t say I’m opposed! There’s only so many reusable bags I can tolerate before I take matters into my own hands.

Well, at least it was well-intentioned.