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These findings do not much impress Jack Macy and Robert Haley of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, two of the longtime movers and shakers behind the city's quest to quit plastic. Haley notes that "you can always get an LCA to support your view," and brushes it off as "bogus science" irreparably tainted by its connection to industry. The two then touted a 2000 study in Sweden that showed paper bags to be more environmentally friendly than plastic ones. This LCA, performed by the firm CIT Ekologik, is something of a security blanket for municipalities hoping to justify a plastic bag ban; officials in Manhattan Beach and Massachusetts have cited it as well. It warrants mentioning, however, that this was not a study of small grocery bags but hulking, 55-pound animal feed sacks. What's more, it too was commissioned by industry: a consortium of European paper bag companies.
When it comes to "bogus science," a helping of it found its way into San Francisco's anti-plastic-bag ordinance. The text refers to the "12 million barrels of oil" required to produce the 100 billion plastic bags Americans use each year. While these figures proliferate on the Internet, neither is verifiable. Even the American Chemistry Council is unsure exactly how many bags Americans use each year, and the notion of oil barrels is curious considering the vast majority of plastic bags produced in this country are derived from natural gas (the industry claims 85 percent of plastic bags used in America are domestically made).
The man claiming credit for this ubiquitous statistic is Vince Cobb, a 42-year-old Chicagoan who sells reusable bags on the Internet. Cobb told SF Weekly he did a back-of-the-envelope calculation cribbing an estimate on American plastic bag use from an old Wall Street Journal article and plugging in the number of British Thermal Units required to create one plastic bag according to a 20-year-old Society of Plastics Industry text. He then searched the Internet to determine the number of BTUs in a barrel of oil.
San Francisco's ordinance also trumpets the much-recited figure that plastic bags are responsible for the yearly deaths of 100,000 marine animals and millions of birds. These figures have utterly no basis in fact, and their worldwide proliferation is the result of what, for lack of a better term, could be described as an epic Internet screw-up. The figure is derived from a 1987 Canadian study claiming that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine birds and mammals died in discarded fishing nets. And yet, when the above passage was reprinted in a 2002 Australian study of plastic bags, the words "fishing nets" were, inexplicably, replaced by "plastic bags." From there, the Internet served as a misinformation superhighway, and the legend became fact. Combined with heartbreaking photographs of bags choking sea turtles and suffocating shorebirds, the statistic gave strength to growing movements to ban the bag — as evidenced by its inclusion in San Francisco's ordinance.
"It's very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags; the evidence shows just the opposite," Greenpeace marine biologist David Santillo told the Times of London. "With larger mammals, it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a global basis, plastic bags aren't an issue."
When Keith Christman begins to rattle off statistics demonstrating plastic bags' superiority over paper ones, his diction slows dramatically like a truck laboring up a mountain pass. The American Chemistry Council's senior director of packaging wants to make sure a journalist taking notes can get down every last damning figure. He's a pro.
In the media frenzy surrounding San Francisco's 2007 ban, a number of U.S. cities bandied about the idea of following suit. And yet, as Christman proudly points out, San Francisco remains the only sizable metropolis to have done so. Seattle's plan to put a 25-cent fee on all grocery bags, he notes, was curtailed until it can be voted on some time this year, thanks to a local petition. While Christman seems content to present this as a spontaneous outpouring of shoppers' righteous indignation, upon prodding from SF Weekly he admits that the petition was undertaken by an American Chemistry Council–bankrolled group. This kind of "lobbying" by the ACC and "local" groups affiliated with it has induced city governments around the country to scrap proactive plans to curtail plastic consumption.
"Lobbying" is also a euphemism for threatening to bleed a municipality by insisting upon costly environmental studies — or lawsuits if they don't comply. Last January, the Coalition to Support Plastic Bag Recycling — a group of bag manufacturers with ties to the ACC — sued Oakland, claiming the city could not undertake its proposed ban without first commissioning an Environmental Impact Report. The judge agreed, and the city junked its ban. Some of the same companies later derailed a plastic bag ban in Fairfax with a subsequent legal threat.
Stephen Joseph, the San Francisco lawyer representing Save the Plastic Bag, describes his group as "an informational campaign." Since it was formed by several plastic bag companies in June, it has also found time to hit the city of Manhattan Beach and Los Angeles County with lawsuits over their plastic-reduction ordinances as well as filing legal objections against Santa Clara and San Diego counties and the city of Palo Alto, which are merely considering such measures. Joseph says that a pending San Francisco move to mandate newspapers are delivered in compostable plastic bags may warrant litigation as well. This flurry of legal action, according to the plastics industry, isn't merely about preserving its business model. It's about promoting environmentally friendly behavior such as recycling. "We want to reduce waste," Christman says. When asked if he'd like to reduce Americans' fevered plastic bag consumption, he repeats, with emphasis, "We want to reduce waste."
