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In swaths of the city where owners of small stores can only dream of grossing $2 million, you'd never know there's a plastic bag ban. Standing in the doorway of the Bayview's True Hope Church of God and Christ, Herbert Ward nods across the street at Candlestick Park. On game days, he says, plastic bags still blow over the fence and inundate his neighborhood. (In fact, in August one airborne bag spooked a police horse on crowd control duty for the Chargers-49ers game; it ran wild and killed 78-year-old fan Eugene Caldwell.)
As for ban proponents' fervent claims that plastic bags were clogging our landfills, this triggered bouts of head-shaking and wan smiles from those in the know. While a visit to the Pit reveals seas of plastic bags, by weight and volume they occupy only a minuscule percentage of landfill space. A 2003 survey commissioned by the California Integrated Waste Management Board estimated that plastic grocery bags represent 0.4 percent of the waste stream. Paper bags tallied 1 percent.
The argument that biodegradability is paper bags' saving grace is extremely problematic. Firstly, biodegrading paper represents a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Secondly, in a properly run landfill, paper doesn't really biodegrade. In fact, nothing much really does.
Professor William Rathje, currently on leave from Stanford's archaeology department, has excavated 21 landfills in the United States and Canada. Among other things, he's discovered that we greatly overstate the amount of vegetables we eat while heavily understating the amount of alcohol we drink. But he has also pulled "mummified," readable newspapers of the "Dewey Defeats Truman" era out of landfills, along with intact vegetables, hot dogs, and paper sacks sturdy enough to tote them in. Digging through the dirt, Rathje has found that while Americans are using more and more plastic goods, they occupy less and less volume in our landfills due to "lightweighting." Between 1976 and 1992, plastic grocery bags' thickness was reduced by half; today, they are thinner still. While paper products now often incorporate more recycled content, they haven't grown thinner — if anything, it's the opposite. So even if, as the city's Department of the Environment claims, half of San Francisco's paper grocery bags are recycled, that still means millions are going into landfill, where they occupy scads more space than the plastic bags they replaced — and will, for a long time.
"Plastic bags, especially in landfills, take up so much less volume than paper bags," Rathje says. "If you're worried about the amount of space in landfills taken up by plastic bags — don't."
The notion that replacing plastic grocery bags with paper ones benefits the environment depends upon a rather chauvinistic definition of "environment." San Francisco's ban was meant to rid the city of the bags we see — blowing through our streets, gumming up our recycling machines. It isn't concerned with the ramifications of paper bags we don't see: tens of thousands of trees being felled, pulp and paper plants disgorging noxious chemicals into the air and water, and seven times the exhaust-belching trucks required to transport the bulkier paper bags across the nation and deliver them to local stores.
There are no hard numbers at hand regarding how many additional paper bags San Francisco has consumed thanks to the plastic ban — but you can make a reasonable estimation. Mirkarimi's approximation that 127 million fewer plastic bags have been distributed in San Francisco is based on the ban targeting the large outlets that handed out 70 percent of the estimated 181 million plastic bags used yearly prior to the ban. Assuming shoppers use 1.5 plastic bags for every paper one — a standard ratio in studies calculating bags' environmental impacts — then San Franciscans have potentially consumed up to 84 million paper bags in the past year. That sounds like a lot — and it is — but it averages out to each person using one paper bag every three days.
According to the Environmental Defense Fund's "paper calculator" — and factoring in the city's requirement that bags be composed of at least 40 percent recycled material — the ecological consequences are staggering. That many paper bags weigh about 5,250 tons, which results in the felling of 72,000 trees, sulfur dioxide emissions of 91,200 pounds, the release of 21.5 million pounds of greenhouse gases, and the generation of 40 million gallons of wastewater.
In the past two decades, a number of "Life-Cycle Analyses" (LCAs) have measured the "cradle to grave" environmental impact of plastic and paper shopping bags. SF Weekly was unable to track down any that rated paper as being more environmentally beneficial overall. Again and again, paper bags were found to require more energy to create and transport, emit more greenhouse gases, generate more water and air pollution, consume far more fresh water, produce much more solid waste, and produce markedly more eutrophication of water bodies (a condition in which an excess of nutrients, often nitrogen, leads to choking algae infestations).
Several of these LCAs were commissioned by the plastics industry — yet Charles Lardner, a spokesman for the American Forest and Paper Association, said the paper industry does not dispute the studies' findings. And a number of the studies were not connected to the plastics industry. A 2004 analysis by the French retail giant Carrefour found the most environmentally friendly bag to be a heavy-duty reusable plastic sack; paper bags were found to be the worst of all. Regarding so-called "biodegradable plastic," while LCAs differ, several found it to require far more energy to produce and distribute than regular plastic. What's more, it requires the cultivation of vast amounts of corn or potatoes, which are farmed unsustainably using powerful chemicals. The West German, Australian, and Scottish governments weighed the scientific evidence to deduce that a simple elimination of plastic bags in favor of paper ones would be an ecological step backward. This conclusion was duplicated last year in Seattle.
