Opinion: NJ plastic bag research vindicates NC's decision to prohibit local bag bans

North Carolina’s current state budget, which was approved with bipartisan support and became law last fall without Governor Roy Cooper’s (D) signature, includes a provision barring local governments across the state from regulating and taxing plastic bags and other containers. Some have been critical of the General Assembly’s decision to preempt local regulatory powers, but it’s unclear whether that opposition represents a vocal minority. A new study out of New Jersey, however, will be seen as vindication for North Carolina legislators who voted for the new preemption measures.

Asheville and Durham officials had been considering proposals to ban and tax plastic bags. Unlike New Jersey’s ban, the Durham and Asheville proposals would’ve continued to permit the use of paper bags. Still, the phenomenon documented in the new report released in January by the Freedonia Group and commissioned by the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, which found that most people don’t use reusable shopping bags enough to achieve a net environmental benefit, provides a cautionary tale for proponents of bag restrictions across the U.S.

Researchers discovered that 53 million pounds worth of plastic shopping bags used annually in New Jersey before the state’s bag ban, a number that rose to 151 million pounds in 2022. The spike in plastic use following New Jersey’s bag ban is attributed to the way the ban makes people buy reusable bags at checkout. Those reusable bags, the report notes, contain 15-20 times the amount of plastic that’s in the traditional single-use shopping bags that are now banned in New Jersey. According to the study, reusable shopping bags must be used 11-59 times to have a net environmental benefit, but in practice the vast majority of people only use them 2-3 times.

A New York Times article published in 2022, three months after New Jersey’s bag ban took effect, foreshadowed the new report’s findings. The Times reported on the “mountains of bags” of the reusable sort that had already begun piling up apartments and homes across the Garden State. The Times reported that “for many people who rely on grocery delivery and curbside pickup services their orders now come in heavy-duty reusable shopping bags — lots and lots of them, week after week.”

At the bill signing for New Jersey’s bag ban, Governor Phil Murphy (D) boasted that he and New Jersey lawmakers “are addressing the problem of plastic pollution head-on with solutions that will help mitigate climate change and strengthen our environment for future generations.” Four years later, however, the Freedonia report indicates the bag prohibition has also failed in that respect.

“[Six times] more woven and non-woven polypropylene plastic was consumed to produce the reusable bags sold to consumers as an alternative,” researchers noted. “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.”

Thanks to the preemption provisions enacted by the General Assembly, employers, investors, and site selectors know that they don’t have worry about a patchwork of complex and costly local regulations and taxes in North Carolina. “One of the reasons North Carolina remains a great state to do business in is the consistency of rules and regulations throughout the State,” the North Carolina Retail Merchants Association noted in a statement in support of the new budget’s preemption measures. “This provision ensures consistency throughout the state instead of a patchwork of rules city by city and county by county.”

“We strongly believe prior to the passage of the budget provision that local governments were already prohibited, both constitutionally and statutorily, from banning plastic bags and other containers and taxing their citizens for these items,” the retailers association added. “The newly enacted provision was in response to a push to challenge current law and will hopefully head off costly litigation for everyone involved.” Members of the North Carolina General Assembly already knew they were protecting North Carolinians from costly regulations, taxes, and fees through preemption. The new report out of New Jersey, however, indicates they also protected their constituents from new regulations that, in addition to imposing new costs that would effectively act as a regressive tax hike, might’ve also done more environmental harm than good.

More: Ban on use of plastic bags to dispose of yard waste in Asheville set to begin

More: Opinion: White House talks about racist infrastructure while expanding law inflating costs

Patrick Gleason is vice president of state affairs at Americans for Tax Reform, senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a Haywood County resident.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Reusable shopping bags are also made with plastic