Paper or plastic? Neither
Washington Park Lake in Albany was finally frozen on Tuesday, its surface an image of winter calm and beauty. But for anyone who looked closely, the western edge of the lake wasn’t so pretty. Plastic bags were embedded in the ice.
It’s an unfortunate fouling of one of the city’s lovely places, a problem not unique to Washington Park or Albany, of course. Look at any roadside or waterway and you are sure to see singleuse plastic bags that have been carried by the wind to land where nobody wants them. They get caught in trees. They clog storm drains. They harm wildlife and pollute our oceans.
The problem is a global one. In response to the scourge, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is proposing, in the budget unveiled Tuesday, a statewide ban on the single-use plastic bags that were introduced in the 1960s and are now ubiquitously used by almost every supermarket and convenience store. Although the governor has yet to provide details, his plan seems a repeat of one that he introduced last year to skepticism from the Republicans who then controlled the state Senate.
Mr. Cuomo’s impulse is a good one. New Yorkers use about 23 billion plastic bags annually, and they are rarely recycled. It is senseless waste on a staggering scale, and for the good of our waterways and wildlife, it has to stop.
But there’s a significant problem with Mr. Cuomo’s plan: By merely banning point-of-sale plastic bags, the governor’s proposal threatens to dramatically increase the use of paper bags.
Is that progress?
The question is up for debate. While brown paper bags are at least biodegradable, studies have found that they have a bigger carbon footprint than their plastic counterparts because they require more energy to produce and transport.
The state could ban paper and plastic bags, but that would be impractical and create consumer headaches. A better solution is a five-cent fee on retail use of most plastic and paper bags, imposed at the point of sale as bottle deposits are. Similar bag fees elsewhere have led shoppers to adopt the habit of carrying reusable bags. That’s real and undeniable progress.
To be clear, the money raised by the fee should not be kept by retailers. Nor should it go into the state’s general fund for use on unrelated expenses. Instead, the state should spend the funds on the promotion and distribution of reusable bags and on environmental cleanup efforts.
We can understand why Mr. Cuomo might resist this approach. Banning something harmful sounds momentous and dramatic. It seems like quick and decisive action, no matter how ineffective. Even a modest fee on bags, meanwhile, will be criticized as a new tax.
But the less dramatic move is sometimes the more effective one, and so it is with the effort to curtail plastic bags.
While a ban would strip shoppers of a decision, a fee would ask New Yorkers to assume personal responsibility for an environmental problem. It would nudge them to conserve resources by remembering to carry their own reusable shopping bags. It would remind New Yorkers that the convenience of plastic bags comes with an inconvenient cost to taxpayers and the environment.
If you doubt it, take a stroll around the lake in Washington Park.