Unintended Consequences

Before an initiative was filed to stop it, the City of Seattle was going to join the ranks of many European cities and begin taxing folks for paper or plastic bags at stores.  Now in August, the City Council has put the issue before the voters.

I have almost always taken my bags to the grocery store.  Back in the day, a local grocery store chain, QFC (now owned by Krogers) used to donate 5¢ to the Washington State Nature Conservancy chapter for each bag you re-used.   Currently, Whole Foods gives you a 2¢ credit for every bag you bring in.  

But Seattle wanted to tax you (although they didn't want to call it a tax) 20¢ for each new bag you used.  Some portion of that tax would be retained by the grocer, but the bulk of it would go to the City.

Aside from the issues of people who don't have enough money, forgetting their re-useable bag, or not having enough disposable income for a re-useable bag, much less initiating a tax during a recession (which never seems to get through to Seattlites for some reason) there are several unintended consequences of this tax which concern me.

Obviously there are some good intentions with this tax.  The idea is that plastic and paper bags are filling up our land disposals.  Of course, so are millions of other things, including the paper and plastic bags from other stores not included in the tax.  The tax targets only grocery stores.  And the City is giving out free re-useable bags, which will mitigate, hopefully, the financial impacts on people.  But the idea that we don't have to use so much paper or plastic is good.

However, here are my concerns:

First, the re-useable bags are probably made in China or some other country.  They are made of plastic, and usually contain advertising all over them, which in not so subtle ways encouraging people to consume.  It's the consumption that is the issue, not the miniscule amount of bags which are used.  And the "carbon footprint" of using a plastic bag, or several plastic bags from overseas vastly outsizes the carbon footprint of paper bags manufactured from recycled pulp here in the US.

Second, paper bags are one of the last timber products still made here in this country.  Pulp mills pay good wages.  Many pulp mills are still relatively local.  Heck many pulp mills are still union.

Third, using plastic re-useable bags (which don't appear to be high quality enough to last years and years, but oh, that's the point, right?) encourages more frequent trips to the market.  That is, unless you have a huge collection of re-useable bags.  More frequent trips translates into more fuel, more consumption...In fact, it's a red flag that the local grocery store association supports this tax (they do get a portion of it, and they also know (this from a daughter and granddaughter of a grocer) that more trips to stores = more income for the grocer)

I think the most important unintended consequence are the jobs.  From the haulers of recycled pulp, to mill workers, to cargo truckers, to warehousemen, stockers in the grocery store, there is a whole vertical chain of people who rely on bags for employment.  Over the past few decades we have become rather cavalier about the elimination of jobs in the natural resource and related industries.  Whole communities have been turned into ghost towns while urbanites casually say things like oh, they can be trained to do something else.  Unfortunately the something else usually looks a lot like making mochas in a drive through.  

In environmental economics it is popular to assert that taxing makes people change behaviors.  And more than likely if the City wins in the election next August (which I predict they will by portraying the folks behind the initiative as bad and evil folks from the chemical industry promoting plastic bags), folks in Seattle will reduce their use of paper and plastic bags.  Meanwhile blinders will be on as another industry falls further into decline, more people lose jobs, and other ghost towns are created.

An alternative, I always believe, is to create incentives.  Bring in credits for using re-useable bags.  Educate people about consumption issues, shopping for more and less trips (buy for the week rather than 7 different trips to the grocery store).  Instead of punishing, how about rewarding?  And how about showing communities outside of Seattle, places that depend upon a pulp mill, a warehouse, a trucking outfit, that we understand their issues, too.