Ottawa’s plastic ban may actually hurt the environment

” a market research firm, found that in New Jersey… “non-woven polypropylene… 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.” In other words, the ban helped increase pollution. “

Despite a court ruling late last year, which deemed the Trudeau government ban on single-use plastic (cutlery, straws, grocery bags, etc.) “unreasonable and unconstitutional,” the ban essentially remains in place pending appeal or further regulatory action. But according to the government’s own data and analysis, plastic waste is a virtual non-issue in Canada, as 99 per cent of all plastic waste is disposed of safely in landfills or is incinerated. And less than 1 per cent of Canada’s plastic waste finds its way into the environment.

Moreover, there’s great potential for people to replace banned plastic items, including plastic grocery bags, with other plastic bags not included in the ban such as heavy gauge “reusable” shopping totes and other types of plastic trash bags made of heavier-gauge plastics than the filmy bags banned from grocery stores.

In New Jersey, for example, while plastic grocery bag use did decline following a statewide ban in 2022, plastic substitute materials skyrocketed, plastic consumption rose threefold for heavier reusable bags and sixfold for woven and non-woven polypropylene bags, which are not produced domestically, not recycled nor do they contain recycled content. Freedonia, a market research firm, found that in New Jersey “increased consumption of polypropylene bags” contributed to a “500% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production” and that “non-woven polypropylene… 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.” In other words, the ban helped increase pollution.

In California, an environmental interest group called CALPIRG recently issued a report generally favouring plastic bag bans, observing that they do indeed reduce the use of banned bags. However, the report notes that “loopholes,” which allow consumers to use heavier plastic bag alternatives, results in more plastic consumption and waste—not less. According to CALPIRG, plastic bag disposal rates increased in one jurisdiction (Alameda) from 157,000 tons in the year before the ban on single-use grocery bags to 231,000 tons in 2021. On a per-person basis, it rose from 4.1 tons disposed of per 100,000 people to 5.9 tons disposed of per 100,000 over that same span.

In both New Jersey and California, efforts are underway to “fix” the loopholes that have allowed proliferation of plastic consumption and waste in the wake of plastic bag bans. However, these actions are unlikely to work unless they can somehow stop consumers from simply switching to plastic garbage bags or buying online heavier-gauge plastic shopping totes (and trashing them after a few shopping trips). Consumers have already shown they’re prepared to do these things.

Here at home, there’s no reason to believe that Canadian consumers will react any differently to a ban on single-use plastics. Canadians are just as likely to reach for the convenient substitute, whether that’s heavier paper products or heavier plastic products not covered under existing bans.

If sanity reigned, Canada would get ahead of the perverse consequences likely to flow from plastic bans by scrapping the entire idea and allowing consumers to consume what they believe best suits their lives and pocketbooks. Canada already has an admirable waste management system that keeps 99 per cent of disposed plastics safely locked away in environmentally protective landfills or eliminates them completely through incineration.

There’s no need for plastic bans or a governmental takeover of the plastics sector via regulation. Government should throw these bans in the bin.

Author:

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

Related Topics:#FraserInstitute #KennethGreen #Ottawa'sPlasticBan #PlasticCutlery #PlasticGroceryBags #PlasticStraws #TrudeauPlasticBan

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Canada should not want to lead the world on climate change policy

Published on October 8, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Ross McKitrick

Some commentators in the media want the the federal Conservatives to take a leadership position on climate, and by extension make Canada a world leader on the journey to the low-carbon uplands of the future. This would be a mistake for three reasons.

First, unlike other areas such as trade, defence or central banking, where diplomats aim for realistic solutions to identifiable problems, in the global climate policy world one’s bona fides are not established by actions but by willingness to recite the words of an increasingly absurd creed. Take, for example, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ fanatical rhetoric about the “global boiling crisis” and his call for a “death knell” for fossil fuels “before they destroy our planet.” In that world no credit is given for actually reducing emissions unless you first declare that climate change is an existential crisis, that we are (again, to quote Guterres) at the “tip of a tipping point” of “climate breakdown” and that “humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.” Any attempt to speak sensibly on the issue is condemned as denialism, whereas any amount of hypocrisy from jet-setting politicians, global bureaucrats and celebrities is readily forgiven as long as they parrot the deranged climate crisis lingo.

The opposite is also true. Unwillingness to state absurdities means actual accomplishments count for nothing. Compare President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris treaty and disparaged climate change as unimportant, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who embraced climate emergency rhetoric and dispatched ever-larger Canadian delegations to the annual greenhouse gabfests. In the climate policy world, that made Canada a hero and the United States a villain. Meanwhile, thanks in part to expansion of natural gas supplies under the Trump administration, from 2015 to 2019 U.S. energy-based CO2 emissions fell by 3 per cent even as primary energy consumption grew by 3 per cent. In Canada over the same period, CO2 emissions fell only 1 per cent despite energy consumption not increasing at all. But for the purpose of naming heroes and villains, no one cared about the outcome, only the verbiage. Likewise, climate zealots will not credit Conservatives for anything they achieve on the climate file unless they are first willing to repeat untrue alarmist nonsense, and probably not even then.

On climate change, Conservatives should resolve to speak sensibly and use mainstream science and economic analysis, but that means rejecting climate crisis rhetoric and costly “net zero” aspirations. Which leads to the second problem—climate advocates love to talk about “solutions” but their track record is 40 years of costly failure and massive waste. Here again leadership status is tied to one’s willingness to dump ever-larger amounts of taxpayer money into impractical schemes loaded with all the fashionable buzzwords. The story is always the same. We need to hurry and embrace this exciting economic opportunity, which for some reason the private sector won’t touch.

There are genuine benefits to pursuing practical sensible improvements in the way we make and use fossil fuels. But the current and foreseeable state of energy technology means CO2 mitigation steps will be smaller and much slower than was the case for other energy side-effects such as acid rain and particulates. It has nothing to do with lack of “political will;” it’s an unavoidable consequence of the underlying science, engineering and economics. In this context, leadership means being willing sometimes to do nothing when all the available options yield negative net benefits.

That leads to the third problem—opportunity cost. Aspiring to “climate leadership” means not fixing any of the pressing economic problems we currently face. Climate policy over the past four decades has proven to be very expensive, economically damaging and environmentally futile. The migration of energy-intensive industry to China and India is a very real phenomenon and more than offsets the tiny emission-reduction measures Canada and other western countries pursued under the Kyoto Protocol.

The next government should start by creating a new super-ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate where long-term thinking and planning can occur in a collaborative setting, not the current one where climate policy is positioned at odds with—and antagonistic towards—everything else. The environment ministry can then return its focus to air and water pollution management, species and habitat conservation, meteorological services and other traditional environmental functions. The climate team should prepare another national assessment but this time provide much more historical data to help Canadians understand long-term observed patterns of temperature and precipitation rather than focusing so much on model simulations of the distant future under implausible emission scenarios.

The government should also move to extinguish “climate liability,” a legal hook on which dozens of costly nuisance lawsuits are proliferating here and elsewhere. Canada should also use its influence in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reverse the mission creep, clean out the policy advocacy crowd and get the focus back on core scientific assessments. And we should lead a push to move the annual “COPs”—Conferences of the Parties to the Rio treaty—to an online format, an initiative that would ground enough jumbo jets each year to delay the melting of the ice caps at least a century.

Finally, the new Ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate should work with the provinces to find one region or municipality willing to be a demonstration project on the feasibility of relying only on renewables for electricity. We keep hearing from enthusiasts that wind and solar are the cheapest and best options, while critics point to their intermittency and hidden costs. Surely there must be one town in Canada where the councillors, fresh from declaring a climate crisis and buying electric buses, would welcome the chance to, as it were, show leadership. We could fit them out with all the windmills and solar panels they want, then disconnect them from the grid and see how it goes. And if upon further reflection no one is willing to try it, that would also be useful information.

In the meantime, the federal Conservatives should aim merely to do some sensible things that yield tangible improvements on greenhouse gas emissions without wrecking the economy. Maybe one day that will be seen as real leadership.

Author:

Ross McKitrick

Professor of Economics, University of Guelph

Economy

Federal government’s environmental policies will do more harm than good

Published on September 25, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

The study covered grocery bags, food packaging, soft drink containers, furniture, t-shirts and other plastic products. In most cases, replacing plastics with alternatives causes greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 35 to 700 per cent.

Through a variety of regulatory and spending initiatives, the Trudeau government is expanding its control over our lives, often in the name of climate change or other environmental objectives. For example, the government plans to force consumers to buy electric vehicles instead of conventional cars and has proposed or implemented plastics restrictions on consumers and businesses—everything from plastic drinking straws and plastic utensils to clothing material and food packages.

However, while evidence of the high costs to consumers continues to mount, evidence of the environmental benefits is notably absent. Indeed, many recent studies provide evidence that Ottawa’s restrictions on consumers may well cause net environmental harm. One reason is that the plastic products the federal government is so intent on restricting are more environmentally efficient than alternatives.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology concludes, “15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives.” The study covered grocery bags, food packaging, soft drink containers, furniture, t-shirts and other plastic products. In most cases, replacing plastics with alternatives causes greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 35 to 700 per cent.

Why? Because plastic generally takes less energy to manufacture and transport than the alternatives. In fact, many plastic products that are more environmentally friendly than non-plastic alternatives (according to the study) are products the Trudeau government wants to ban or curtail through regulation.

Other evidence shows plastic bans of the type imposed in Canada cause environmental ruin, contrary to the predictions of politicians. For example, research in New Jersey found after single-use plastic bags were banned in 2022, shoppers switched to the heavier reusable bags. “Owing to the larger carbon footprint of the heavier, non-woven polypropylene bags,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “greenhouse gas emissions rose 500%.”

Similarly, the New York Times reported that while California banned single-use plastic bags almost a decade ago, in 2023 “Californians threw away more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed, according to figures from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.”

Also from the Wall Street Journal, analyses suggest electric vehicles often emit more particulate pollution (dust, dirt and soot) than conventional vehicles. That’s because most particulate pollution these days is not from the tailpipe but from tire wear. EVs are much heavier than conventional vehicles so their tires wear out faster, increasing particulate pollution. The firm Emissions Analytics compared a plug-in electric to a hybrid vehicle and found the plug-in electric, which weighed more, emitted about one-quarter more particulate matter than the hybrid as a result of tire wear.

Last year, the chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board noted that EVs manufactured by Ford, Volvo and Toyota were all about 33 per cent heavier than conventionally powered versions of those same vehicles. That’s a problem not only for the environment but also for driver safety—and yet more evidence that the Trudeau government’s EV mandates will harm Canadians.

When it comes to vehicles, plastic products and many other things, the Trudeau government should begin reducing its control over consumers. The harm to consumers is evident; the compensating benefits to the environment—if any—are not.