It's Easy Being Green: Unintended Consequences
On Mondays, Michael explores the world of environmentalism and its intersection with queer culture in the column It’s Easy Being Green, despite what Kermit says.
Subtitle: Bag Tax Equals Dog Poop
Photo by the author.
The District of Columbia recently enacted a tax on shopping bags. The supposed motivation for this tax was to help the highly polluted Anacostia, the tributary of the Potomac that joins its more famous cousin in the heart of the monumental core. This tax helps the river in two ways, supposedly. First, it encourages reuse of plastic bags or use of reusable non-plastic bags, resulting in fewer bags mindlessly disposed of in the street, washing through the city’s storm drains into the river. Secondly, the money raised from the collection of this tax also is to go to the clean-up of the Anacostia river and its watershed. All in all, it sound pretty sensible from an environmental perspective. Right?
My biggest complaints with this tax were two-fold. First off, it’s only $0.05 and not enough in my mind to encourage behavioral changes or raise enough money. Secondly, the tax applies to both plastic and paper bags. While plastic bags stick around in the environment for decades and paper biodegrades in days or weeks, the tax applies to both, regardless. Sounds pretty stupid to me.
This tax went into effect on January 1, 2010. So far, I’ve have more than one opportunity to explain to a livid customer why they were being charged “a nickle per” for their grocery bags. I’ve made an effort to bring my own bags to the grocery store when I go shopping (but then again, I did that before, too). I’ve been seeing people walking around with more and more reusable shopping bags. Perhaps, despite the nominal per-bag tax, the reminder at the register when the clerk asks if the customer wants a bag is enough to constantly remind individuals that these resources do have value and shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Which leads me to the purpose of this post. Perhaps you’ve pieced it together by now, but if you haven’t I’m not going to give it away quite yet.
When deciding upon some policy that will affect hundreds of thousands of people every day, I would generally think policy makers would really sit down and evaluate all the potential consequences of their actions. In the case of a bag tax, for example, I would imagine that some people would find the nickle tax so trivial that it wouldn’t modify their behavior at all, so they’d continue to use and improperly dispose of plastic bags as before. This is the reason I thought the tax should only apply to the “bad” item, the plastic bag, and the “good” item, the paper bag, should be provided as a free alternative.
It appears that there is another consequence of this new tax that no one might have predicted, but they could have. A full policy analysis would have evaluated all the things that happen to plastic bags once they leave the store. First, they serve their primary purpose for hauling recently purchased items. Secondly, many of these bags are used again, as trash can liners, lunch bags, and (yes) poop scoop bags. A good policy analyst would have considered the full impact of this tax and thought to herself, if people start to value grocery bags and start to reuse them, they won’t want to pick up dog poop with them.
So, this explains why I keep seeing so much more dog poop around DC than I did before January 1. The photo above was taken by me, and in it you should be able to see at least 4 stoolies lying about in the grassy tree box. Good times.
It is so important that our elected officials and decision-makers think about the potential unintended consequences of their policies. David Catania, the DC Council member who spearheaded the movement to legalize same-sex marriage in DC, has stated that once marriage equality is achieved, they anticipate removing DC’s domestic partnership registration. This is another example of what I would call bad policy.
Marriage equality is great, but sometimes people aren’t ready to take that big step. Sometimes committed relationships need extra support to blossom into potential marriages and life-long committed, story-book bliss. Domestic partnership registration serves a purpose, and removing it because full marriage equality is achieved is short sighted, and the equivalent of dog poop.
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I’m not sure why you’re in such a rush to defend paper bags. It’s true that they biodegrade more quickly than plastics, and are more readily recyclable, but they also consume considerably more resources (oil, potable water, etc.) and lead to the creation of more greenhouse gases in production than do plastic bags. Looking at a slightly more broadly at the environmental consequences of shopping bag use than just the Anacostia, using any disposable bag for every grocery purchase has environmental consequences, be it paper or plastic; it’s true that five cents may not seem like a lot, but I’ve definitely observed more people not getting bags at the grocery (and my local Giant has removed the bags entirely from the self checkout areas), so people *are* using fewer bags, and this notion that we should only tax plastic, even if plastic *were* demonstrably worse (which it isn’t), would still utterly fail at discouraging people from using disposable bags; they would just use paper for everything.
I think/hope that the legislation was considered in a broader context than just our local environmental concerns about pollution in the Anacostia, and given that, I’d like to think that the bill was targeted at all kinds of environmental consequence of bag use, including production. As for the dog shit: yeah, it’s an eyesore, but less likely to cause environmental damage than either paper *or* plastic bags, so I guess we’ll just have to deal with it.
The only reason you see dog poop around is because you live near inconsiderate and lazy dog owners who won’t buy baggies for their dog when they pick up the kibbles and bits. The bag “tax” (really a fee, and totally non-compulsory) is not to blame.
I agree the clerks in the stores should be trained to ask if you have your reusables with you. A way I’ve been dealing with my “bag-ne-sia” (reusable bag amnesia) is to develop better habits about bringing my own bags. A friend of mine gave me a Reusable Bag Reminder Kit from a company called bagnesia and it works great. It came with a great compact bag but also the reminders for house and car so I don’t forget to take either that bag or my others that I’ve been collecting into the store with me. Check it out- http://www.bagnesia.com or http://www.grabyourbags.com.
People should not be using plastic bags from the grocery store for doggy poop bags. There are fantastic alternative doggy poop bags that actually biodegrade. They might be a little bit more expensive but they are a much better choice for the environment. Another thing people could do is use their leftovernewspaper to scoop or pick up their dooggy poop and fold it into there instead and then throw it away.
I think an anti-littering public information campaign is in order, actually. Too many people litter both food and bags in this city which is directly related to the number of rats, gulls, pigeons and starlings in DC. When is the last time you’ve seen a message like Woodsy Owl, that crying indian dude, or any kind of anti-litter message in this city? Every generation needs to recieve that message, and from what I’ve seen in my neighborhood, the youngsters just don’t see anything wrong with littering.
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