The Murphy bag ban which began on May 4, 2022 isn’t working, Save Jerseyans. Try to conceal your shock!
According to a new report from the Freedonia Group, part of a third-party market research firm, the Garden State’s much-celebrated but persistently controversial retail plastic bag prohibition not only increased plastic consumption but also increased emissions.
Freedonia interviewed retailers, their suppliers, and plastic bag distributors among other stakeholders before arriving at some objectively jarring conclusions for environmentalists who championed the bag ban as an important step towards attacking plastic waste and the purported negative associated environmental side effects.
“In 2022, following implementation of the New Jersey bag ban, total bag volumes declined by more than 60% to 894 million bags. However, the study also shows, following New Jersey’s ban of single-use bags, the shift from plastic film to alternative bags resulted in a nearly 3x increase in plastic consumption for bags,” the study’s authors explained. “At the same time, 6x more woven and non-woven polypropylene plastic was consumed to produce the reusable bags sold to consumers as an alternative. Most of these alternative bags are made with non-woven polypropylene, which is not widely recycled in the United States and does not typically contain any post-consumer recycled materials.”
“This shift in material also resulted in a notable environmental impact, with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production in 2015,” the authors added. “Notably, non-woven polypropylene, NWPP, the dominant alternative bag material, consumes over 15 times more plastic and generates more than five times the amount of GHG emissions during production per bag than polyethylene plastic bags.”
The law of unintended consequences and self-defeating virtue-signaling strikes again…
And it gets better!
“Reusable” bags are apparently utilized only a handful of times on average (2-3 instances) before being trashed by consumers which means they’re not doing much to combat “climate change.” Quite the opposite, in fact. Meanwhile, retailers are making a major mint. During 2022 alone, New Jersey retailers averaged eye-popping 60-70% profit margins on the sale of the incorrectly-named reusable bags. A batch of fifty stores analyzed by Freedonia cumulatively profitted to the tune of $42 million from selling bags.
Click here to read the full study.
