Here is a screencap of a new Twitter account supposedly held by Phil Rozenski, director of environmental strategies at the plastic bag maker Hilex Poly Co.:

I was a bit confused by the ‘retweet’ I got so I went to check out the tweeter. A retweet is usually someone repeating what you said to share it with a wider audience. Phil had zero followers and I never wrote the sentence that he put after RT @plasticless.

If he had cared to read my blog he would have seen that I spent a whole weekend writing a series of posts that closely examined the arguments made by the plastic bag industry.

The accusation that I was being a drama queen was interesting. My quip that there was a 50% chance of finding a plastic bag in my front yard apparently touched a nerve. Again, if he was acquainted with the level of commerce and the wind direction and velocity on my street, he might not think I was being dramatic.

Welcome to Twitter, sir.

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It’s time to wrap this thing up. Here are the last two pro-plastic bag arguments made by the plastic industry:

Myth #9:
Recycling plastic bags is too expensive.

Fact:
The price of not recycling them is high. Recycling can help save resources and minimize the amount of waste going to landfills. Also, recycling helps reduce litter, as bags are contained and stored. Its worth noting that it takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound of paper.

Myth #10:
There’s no demand for recycled plastic.

Fact:
Today there is a growing market for recycled plastic that didn’t exist 15 years ago. It’s also cheaper now to use recycled plastic than to obtain new materials, increasing potential for more recycling of used plastic bags. Recycled plastic grocery and shopping bags are currently being made into new consumer products such as clean new plastic shopping bags, outdoor decking and railing products.

One bone I am going to pick here is the assertion that it is cheaper to use recycled plastic than to obtain new material. I don’t know if that ever was the case for any of the various types of plastic. While the actual industrial process of recycling plastic may have been cheaper than making new plastic up until recently, tax payers pay the bill for most of the costs of recycling such as labor and transportation.

The recycling business has been hit very hard by the recession. Plastics that were separated by consumers for recycling may end up in landfills in the UK, Canada, Australia and the United States.

Outsourcing recycling to Asian countries often means that the process will be carried out in unsafe, unethical a environmentally unfriendly ways.

Reducing and reusing are not given a lot of press because they are concepts that exist outside of what is defined as ‘the economy.’

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This quote comes from a plastic industry publication:

Myth #8:
Low recycling rates for plastic bags prove recycling them doesn’t work.

Fact:
Recycling does work. The problem is not everyone knows that plastic grocery bags are 100% recyclable and not everyone has access to plastic bag recycling in their community. A national at-store plastic bag recycling program would bring the recycling solution to everyone and increase rates. One Southern supermarket chain has such a program, and recycles more than 20% of the volume of plastic bags that it provides to customers.

In actual fact there are some dreary statistics floating around the internet about how recycling rates have plateaued despite the explosion of environmental activism, environmental journalism, environmental media etc.

4-6% is the sad number for plastic recycling overall. This 20% that the plastic industry brags about for one supermarket chain is an exception and it might be the best case scenario.

Here is a 2002 article from the New York Times that provides an overview of the state of plastic recycling back then. Not much has changed.

Additional reading : Where can we put all those plastics?

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Ok, I get it. Paper bags are bad. The last time I checked, though, there wasn’t an area the size of Texas filled with floating paper bags in the middle of the North Pacific.

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The statements above sent me off on a little research jag. There is a little bit of spin and misrepresentation going on. Here are the facts behind the facts:

• The EN13432 standard requires 90% biodegradation within 90 days under commercial composting conditions.
• There is no standard that applies to home composting.

That does not mean that plastics can’t be formulated in such a way as to compost in backyard composters and it does not mean that the ones that are currently being used do not biodegrade at all in less controlled conditions. The dog poop bags that I mentioned last month are made from a corn based plastic and break down in 10-45 days.

Commercial composting is an industry that should be growing. The agriculture industry is far too reliant on chemical fertilizers that require a huge energy input to produce. 2% of the world’s energy production is used to convert atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer. We need to have a viable alternative in operation before we truly hit the wall with fossil fuel scarcity. If we weren’t frighteningly behind in this regard, we wouldn’t be worried about what to do with biodegradable plastic bags.

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The plastic people got this one right. The plastic is made quite efficiently. That’s why so much pointless crap is made from it. Most opponents of plastic shopping bags focus on the environmental impact of discarded plastic.

The only fact I can think of to counter with is that the oil used to make plastic bags is a nonrenewable resources. Alternatives like cloth bags (or paper for that matter) are made from renewable resources.

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The plastics industry has been accused of using the same rationale that has been the mantra of the NRA. Their version would be “Plastic bags don’t choke marine animals, people choke marine animals.”

They cite sources. A couple of the links they provide direct back to a very general EPA page about municipal waste.

The fact that none of the facts say anything about plastic says something about plastic.

It entertained me for a moment to imagine a bunch of plastics industry executives doing a careful survey of all the litter in the English-speaking world (I hope the picked most of it up while they were at it). I am not living in the English-speaking world right now, so I can’t counter their fact with a random survey.

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The plastic industry is totally pwning the paper industry with these statistics. You will notice that my blog is not called PaperMore. Reusable bags can’t be compared to plastic in the same way because the number of plastic bags that a reusable bag replaces is variable. We have been devotedly using cloth bags for a couple of years. We have lost a few in a taxi (I assume they continued to be used). One of our early ones recently broke. The 8-10 bags that we have used and are still using have undoubtedly had a lower cost to the environment than the hundreds or even thousands of plastic bags that we could have used instead.

In defense of paper…

• Paper is compostable
• Paper is recyclable
• Paper is biodegradable
• Paper can be reused
• Paper can be used to light a fire in a wood stove
• The Unknown Comic died of suffocation when he tried to perform with a plastic bag over his head (ok, I made that up, he’s alive and writing a book)

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Heather Timmons of the NYT recently went to a plastics convention in India and came away with some choice words from the people whose livelihood depends on the market for plastic shopping bags.

“Politicians have gone overboard. Our industry is facing a problem and we have to fight.” – Arvind M. Mehta, president of the Plastindia Foundation

The plastics industry is fighting back against efforts to reduce or eliminate the use of plastic shopping bags. Lobbyists have managed to convince various levels of government in the US and elsewhere to table bag bans and bag taxes. They also want to influence public opinion. PlasticsIndustry.org has a page devoted to dispelling what it terms as myths related to plastic bags. I am going to devote one blog post to each of the ten myth-busting efforts.

I don’t have that much to say about this one. The wording of the myth is kinda silly. As far as the facts go, compostable plastic is a completely different substance. I think you can essentially call San Francisco’s law a ban on plastic bags. Sources like AP, the NYT and MSNBC call it a ban.

I will hand it to the plastics industry, their arguments are effectively spurring many government into inaction.

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