Plastic (24 page)

Throughout California, such lawsuits, or threats of lawsuits, slowed the local drives to outlaw plastic bags, forcing at least a dozen cities—including Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Jose—to back off ban proposals and even withdraw enacted laws.
The $50,000 to $250,000 required to prepare a full environmental-impact report is a high barrier for cash-strapped California municipalities. But eventually a group of cities decided to pitch in and pay for a report they all could share. When it was completed, in early 2010, it confirmed what Joseph had been saying all along: paper bags carry many more severe environmental impacts than plastic.

That finding was surprising to some plastic-bag-ban advocates, including Carol Misseldine, director of Green Cities California, the group that commissioned the report.
It didn't temper her distaste for plastic bags, but it drove home how the political debate had gone off track: the issue isn't really plastic or paper, she said, but the habit of carrying groceries and other merchandise home in bags designed to be used just one time. "Single-use products have extraordinary environmental impacts in manufacturing, processing, and disposal," she said. "We have to get back to a mindset that relies on durable products."

Roger Bernstein of the American Chemistry Council has understood that all along. He recognizes that the plastic-versus-paper fights are sideshows; the real threat to the industry is the battle against single-use products, the drive to replace disposables with reusables. The push for bans and fees are being driven by "a pure expression of the zero-waste ethic, and total non-choice about reusable bags is the end game," he said disdainfully. "Everything needs to be reused!" Bernstein is vice president for state and legislative affairs for the ACC, which has increasingly taken on the role of chief lobbyist for the plastic bag. I met with him and other ACC representatives at their headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, shortly before the group moved to a new state-of-the-art-green, LEED-certified building closer to Capitol Hill.

Bernstein, in his sixties, is a slight, sharp-featured man with a thick thatch of gray hair and brown eyes magnified behind his glasses. He's been a backroom warrior for the industry for more than thirty years. A former journalist, he started at the Society of the Plastics Industry, then moved to the American Plastics Council, a group formed by major resin makers in the late 1980s, and then joined the ACC when it merged with the Plastics Council in 2000. The ACC had kept its distance from the bag battle, but it took up the fight in early 2008 when the bag makers became overwhelmed by the blizzard of anti-bag measures. The ACC clearly hoped to prevent the furor over bags from snowballing into broader anti-plastics initiatives.

Bernstein divides the politics of plastic into "fear issues" and "guilt issues." Fear issues, he said, are the ones concerned with "environmental self-protection" or with safety questions such as the debate over the potential health risks of bisphenol A. "You have to address those with all the information you can bring to bear on [the chemical's] safety," ideally from third-party sources that will be considered more credible than the industry itself. To that end, the industry has sponsored research studies on suspect chemicals, studies that have a striking tendency to produce results showing the chemicals in question are safe far more often than those conducted by independent researchers do. Bernstein called it delivering information; critics called it sowing doubt.

Plastic bags don't arouse fear, but, as Bernstein recognized, they do play on people's sense of guilt about consumption and the wastefulness of throwaway products. The answer to that is to give people ways to feel all right about single-use plastic products. That means public relations campaigns to remind people about the benefits of plastics and industry-sponsored bills and programs that promote recycling, which he called "a guilt eraser." Recycling assures people that plastic isn't just an infernal hanger-on; it has a useful afterlife. "As soon as they recycle your product," he explained, "they feel better about it." Then they don't want to ban it.

Bernstein learned the methods of guilt assuagement in the late 1980s during an earlier public outcry over plastics packaging. Fears about shrinking landfill space touched off a wave of calls for bans on Styrofoam takeout containers and other visible forms of plastic trash.

In response, seven of the major resin makers, including DuPont, Dow, Exxon, and Mobil, launched a special initiative—a short-term "strike force," as Bernstein described it—to ramp up plastics recycling, at that time virtually nonexistent. The group spent some forty million dollars developing plastics-recycling technology and providing technical help and equipment to communities that wanted to start recycling programs. It was a great boon to recycling, but the commitment was shallow—the support evaporated once the political furor died down.

The heftier and lengthier investment was a $250 million, decade-long campaign of print and TV ads spotlighting how plastics enhanced people's health and safety, with heavy emphasis on products such as bike helmets and tamper-proof packaging. The Plastics Make It Possible campaign succeeded in lifting plastics' favorability ratings, polls showed. People still thought plastics posed serious disposal problems, but they weren't clamoring for bans anymore.

That was also due to the heavy stick the industry wielded, alongside the proplastics carrots. Aggressive industry lobbying succeeded in defeating or gutting hundreds of restrictive bills. "There were no bans, essentially, in all that time," Bernstein recalled proudly. Between recycling, PR, and hardball lobbying, "There were no products that were put out of the marketplace."

The ACC is using that same playbook again. It's launched a major public relations effort, reaching out especially to the millennium generation with a Facebook page, Mylecule (which as of August 2010 had only seven monthly users), a YouTube channel, a Twitter handle, blogs, and sponsorship of art exhibits and fashion shows where the message is "plastic is the new black."

Meanwhile, Bernstein is directing the political combat. He's choosing his battles carefully, focusing on high-profile cities and states to get the most bang for the buck. For instance, the group spent $5.7 million in California during the 2007 to 2008 legislative sessions, when some of the most intense bag debates were taking place, and nearly one million dollars during the months in 2010 when the legislature was considering a proposed statewide ban.
By highlighting the environmental problems of paper bags, the ACC succeeded in steering initiatives aimed at banning plastic bags to either voluntary or mandatory store-based recycling programs in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Annapolis, and the state of Rhode Island, among other places.

But more recent fights have required the ACC to address the issue of reusability directly—a point where the industry can play to people's mixed feelings about single-use products. In Seattle, for instance, the group waged an aggressive campaign against a 2008 law passed by the city council requiring grocers to charge twenty cents each for either plastic or paper bags—the same approach San Francisco originally wanted to take. Left standing, the law would have marked the biggest victory to date for advocates of reusability. You'd think an ecotopia like Seattle—where the public utilities use goats instead of pesticides to keep down weeds—would be an unlikely place for a plastics showdown. Yet Bernstein and his colleagues realized they had a shot at winning when they got a look at polling conducted by the city. The polls showed that most Seattleites were willing to accept a ban on plastic bags. At the same time, they were unwilling to pay a fee for them at the grocery store. They could live without plastic bags, but not without the convenience of a free one-time-use tote for their groceries. That ambivalence—certainly not limited to Seattleites—offered the ACC an opening.

The group spent more than $180,000 on a successful drive to gather signatures for a ballot initiative to overturn the fee, and then another $1.4 million on the election—the most spent in the city on any election in at least fifteen years.
Using the same PR firm that crafted the famous Harry and Louise ads that defeated the Clinton-era health-care reform initiative, the group developed an ad campaign that recast the fee (which citizens could avoid by not buying bags) as a regressive mandatory tax, as in the following radio ad:

Man: You heard there might be a tax on grocery bags, on paper and plastic bags, right?

Woman: Another tax in this economy? ... But most of us already reuse or recycle these bags.

The campaign maintained that the fee would cost each consumer three hundred dollars a year, which assumed each consumer was buying fifteen hundred bags a year—or twenty-eight bags a week. Whether or not an individual really would purchase so many bags, it was a powerful argument in the midst of the Great Recession, and one that was difficult to counter. There's no easy catch phrase to articulate the logic of making hidden environmental costs visible. What's more, advocates of the fees—groups such as the Sierra Club and the People for Puget Sound—raised just a fraction of the ACC's war chest, leaving them outspent by a margin of fourteen to one.
By the time the election took place, no one was surprised when voters rejected the fee.

The ACC followed a similar strategy the next year in California when state lawmakers proposed restricting all single-use grocery bags. The measure was designed to steer Californians toward reusables by banning plastic bags and requiring grocers to charge at least a nickel for paper bags. Given California's political influence, the ACC, and member companies ExxonMobil and Hilex Poly, pulled out all stops to defeat the measure, together spending more than two million dollars on efforts that included peppering the statehouse with donations to key legislators and blitzing Sacramento (where lawmakers lived) with newspaper and radio ads decrying the fee as a regressive tax that would cost Californians more than a billion dollars a year.
(The ACC even attacked reusable bags by funding and publicizing research that showed the bags could be a breeding ground for food-borne bacteria.)
"Instead of wasting time and telling us how to bag our groceries, lawmakers should be working on our real problems, including a huge budget deficit, home foreclosures, and millions of workers without jobs," the ACC argued on a website that called for voters to "Stop the Bag Police." The arguments may have been beside the point, but even proponents of the ban admired how shrewdly they played to the state's political climate. They made the concern with bags seem silly, as if it were "one of those nanny-government type issues," said Murray. At a time when California was $19 billion in the red and the fractious state legislature was months late in approving a budget, no lawmaker wanted to be seen as a person who banned bags but couldn't manage to organize the state's finances. In the end, the state senate killed the bill, twenty-one to fourteen.

Still, the unprecedented breadth of the coalition that supported the proposed ban—environmental groups, recycling groups, unions, the state's grocers and retailers, and even Schwarzenegger—suggests that the bag's days in California are numbered. Indeed, Murray and other strategists simply shifted their focus, taking the issue, as he said, "back to the locals." In the following months, a number of cities, including San Jose, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica, began moving ahead with plans to restrict T-shirt bags. And unlike the earlier generation of anti-bag measures, these aim to restrict paper bags as well.

California has long been a bellwether state—pioneering the trends that the rest of the country later follows. It's hard to know if that will prove the case with plastic bags, whether the marine debris and waste issues that resonate so strongly in California politics will have the same effect elsewhere in the country. The ACC may have succeeded in squelching most the proposals for bans,
but its intense lobbying failed to stop the District of Columbia city council from passing a five-cent charge on plastic bags, the proceeds of which will be used to fund a cleanup of the district's litter-choked Anacostia River. The 2009 measure was promoted with slogans like "Skip the Bag, Save the River."
Residents grumbled about it at first, but after nearly a year, according to city officials, consumers and shop owners have come to accept it and are using notably fewer plastic bags. The D.C. experience suggests that people are willing to pay the price of convenience when its true costs are made clear.

Along with the political combat, the ACC continues to push that time-tested guilt eraser—recycling. It has spearheaded a variety of initiatives to spur recycling of plastic bags, from purchasing hundreds of recycling bins to place on California beaches to backing store-based programs. On Earth Day 2009, the ACC announced a more significant commitment: an initiative to manufacture plastic bags with the same proportion of recycled content that paper bags have long contained. Until now, that kind of bag-to-bag recycling has not been widely pursued, since new bags are so cheap to make. The small percentage of bags that are recycled generally go into producing plastic lumber, often used in decking and fences. But the ACC promised that through this new program, bag makers would spend millions to retool their equipment; by 2015, 40 percent of the plastic in T-shirt bags would come from recycled bags.
The program would recycle upward of 470 million pounds of plastic, the ACC estimated.

"It is a little too little, a little too late" was Mark Murray's reaction.
For even if the initiative fully succeeded, it would recycle only thirty-six billion bags—a mere third of all the bags Americans currently consume every year. Murray and other critics have long maintained that T-shirt bags simply don't lend themselves to the practical and economic requirements of recycling. They're so nearly weightless that it's difficult to gather enough of a critical mass to make recycling them economically worthwhile. Collecting them through curbside programs is tough because the bags are so flight-prone, and the store-based collection programs pushed by the ACC have scarcely raised bag recycling above single-digit rates.