is this NPR article about plastic bag bans accurate?

[jberryhill]

8. It's quite obviously not comprehensive

...and makes a number of inappropriate comparisons.

First - the point about increased sales of trash bags - Well, yes, people who were recycling their plastic bags as trash bags, instead of having them end up as free-range litter, were not the problem in the first place. Absolutely, sales of trash bags increased when people who were behaving responsibly no longer had plastic shopping bags to use for that purpose. But, they are also not the people who are littering in the first place.

Second - the comparison to cloth bags - I don't use reusable cloth bags. I use reusable bags which are themselves made out of recycled plastic. The assumption that every plastic bag user is going to go to cloth is not warranted by any facts.

Third - I'm going to guess you did not actually look at any of the studies cited in that article, but merely relied on the summary written by someone whose qualifications you don't know. The cited Danish study, for example, actually compares a number of different types of bags:

In general, LDPE carrier bags, which are the bags that are always available for purchase in Danish supermarkets, are the carriers providing the overall lowest environmental impacts when not considering reuse. In particular, between the types of available carrier bags, LDPE carrier bags with rigid handle are the most preferable. Effects of littering for this type of bag were considered negligible for Denmark. Carrier bags alternatives that can provide a similar performance are unbleached paper and biopolymer bags, but for a lower number of environ-mental indicators. Heavier carrier bags, such as PP, PET, polyester, bleached paper and tex-tile bags need to be reused multiple times in order to lower their environmental production cost.

Those types of bags are also, for example, the type of reusable bags sold in Carrefour stores in France, and in other supermarket chains.

The actual conclusion of the Danish study is that LDPE reusable bags are preferable to disposables, in terms of impact.

But, if you buy into the false dichotomy between disposable plastic bags and cloth bags - as if there were no other types - and if you don't read the source materials, then you will not realize that the article was written to attract attention by being contrarian.