First, a bit of background to those who do not hold the pleasure of hailing from Toronto the Good.
The current mayor is Rob Ford, who was elected in 2010. He is, to put it gently, a controversial man, who splits City Council into factions, with the exception of half a dozen swing voters. Earlier this month he was in the minority in a 33-1 vote to accept $350 thousand from the federal government for a gang intervention project to help 300 young people find gainful employment instead of falling into a gang. He justifies it by saying that the money offered by the federal government wasn’t coming out of the federal coffers, but was instead taxpayer money, and will come out of taxpayer pockets… somehow, somewhere. Indeed, Rob Ford is a mayor who sides with the voters.
Now, Toronto has had a 5-cent plastic bag tax in effect since 2009. Rob Ford has been a staunch opponent against the 5-cent tax, but only moved to remove it in council last week. In a surprise vote, the council voted 24-20 not only to remove the tax on July 1st, 2012, but to ban plastic bags altogether on January 1st, 2013. This does not please Rob Ford.
Do you know the meaning of situational irony? It’s a label applied to an action that has the opposite effect of its original intent. For example, remember the Oracle at Delphi’s prophecy to King Croesus, that if he went to war, “a great empire will fall.” And so Croesus marched onwards, hoping to win glory and conquer nations, but history tells us that it was Croesus’s empire which fell.
The plastic bag ban is a textbook case of situational irony. It’s beautiful.
As far as the effect of such a ban goes, it’s a nice gesture. Plastic bags are an unsightly reminder of our single-use product culture. Over 450 million plastic shopping bags are used in Toronto each year, amounting to 6900 cubic metres of landfill capacity annually. They last for decades and do not decompose in landfills. It would not require significant reorganization of our commercial habits to adapt to shopping without a plastic bag. San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles all function perfectly well with their own plastic bag bans. Torontonians are a hardy folk, toughened by the trials of amalgamation, spotty transit in the suburbs, and Nickelback on the airwaves. Surely we are stronger than those west-coast denizens. We shall survive.
Shopping bags, doggie bags, and garbage bags need not be the disposable plastic type distributed to carry home groceries. Substitutes can be obtained, or will rise up to fill the void left by the humble disposable bag. After all, humans are the MacGyvers of the animal kingdom. However, plastic bags are themselves products voluntarily reused by consumers – once for shopping, and then once for waste disposal. There is an unsettling possibility that bags specifically purchased to line bins and collect dog poop may be even more wasteful than plastic shopping bags. And although you may be able to justify the purpose of a sassy “My Bag is Not Plastic” reuseable bag in organic cotton manufactured in Thailand, there are no fashionable, reusable replacements for bin liners and doggy bags in the world.
(Well, considering how they’re marketing tampons and pads in neon wrappers and cheery patterns, “fashionable” might be a possibility for garbage and pet waste disposal. But not a chance for “reusable”.)
On the other hand, the plastic bag ban is mostly a gesture, but one with some economic impacts. Compared to issues like reducing gridlock, zoning, and the subway brouhaha, a plastic bag ban looks petty. Plastic bags occupy less than 1% of landfill volumes.
The plastic bag manufacturing industry in Ontario is severely negatively impacted. According to the Canadian Plastic Manufacturers Association, local manufacturers employ 15,000 in the GTA and 35,000 across Ontario. Smaller retailers also face problems in finding suitable and competitive replacements for plastic bags before the January 1st deadline. Paper bags are not as durable and are more expensive to manufacture, and reusable bags are often manufactured in developing countries, incurring significant economic and ecological costs from transport. If only shoppers could remember to take some of their pre-existing reusable bags from the hall closets of that fine city.
All in all, it’s difficult to see what consumers, retailers, and manufacturers will do under the plastic bag ban until January 2013. Will the ban last? The bag tax lasted three years in municipal politics. Will the ban be enforced? The city did not enforce the five-cent bag tax or collect the resultant $5.4 million in revenue. Is a small, well-intentioned step in the right direction that much better than no step at all?
I believe that, much like the bag tax, the plastic bag ban will remain in place for several years, during which it will not be rigorously enforced. I also believe that reducing the manufacture and consumption of plastic bags, many of which are not reused for bin liners and the like, although painful for the industry, is necessary in slowly shifting society and the economy towards more sustainable paths.
(And if all else fails, we can get plastic bags from Markham.)
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