Americans unlucky enough to be living in deep blue states are subjected to the Established Church being imposed upon them. One of its articles of faith is that the man-made end of the world is nigh and the faithful must flagellate themselves to atone for their gaseous greenhouse sins.
Thus, California, for instance, is set to abolish the internal combustion engine by 2035, and its residents are required to do the penance of being forced to buy electric cars that go dead within a few hours and cost a fortune to repair.
In New Jersey, however, citizens never imagined that a 2022 ban on free disposable plastic grocery bags (and even on the old-fashioned brown paper shopping bags they replaced), which supposedly would save the Garden State from boiling into a desert wasteland in a few decades, was actually a scam hatched by government and business working together to line the pockets of supermarkets with green millions—green as in currency, not conservation.
A new study from MarketResearch.com’s Fredonia Group found that the ban, far from helping the environment or fighting global warming, actually bloated New Jersey’s carbon footprint, with consumption of plastic nearly tripling, to 151 million pounds from 53 million pounds. That’s because the heavier, supposedly reusable shopping bags of non-woven polypropylene make use of more than 15 times more plastic, generating more than five times the greenhouse gases per bag while being made as the extremely thin polyethylene bags that were banned.
The new bags, sold for $1–$2 each, usually contain no recycled materials, and 90 percent of them are used just two or three times before being thrown away, ending up in landfills or left unused at home. What’s more, grocery delivery services are being used significantly more, with the new, heavier polypropylene bags used for every transaction. One factor in the reusable bags’ being grossly underused may be that they have been found to spread contagious diseases, sometimes by polymerase chain reaction, as a study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases documented.
Coronavirus has been found remaining on plastic for 72 hours. So how do shoppers like the idea of taking those bags they bought for $1 and washing them with a disinfectant solution of 62 to 71 percent ethanol, 0.5 percent hydrogen peroxide, or 0.1 percent bleach to kill the virus? Or following some of the other burdensome regimens recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?
The absurdity of such a backfiring of imposed policy, which is so resented by consumers, is laughable enough that you would imagine this would be something on which the industry affected would confront and oppose the Big Brother of state government. But it turns out there is more going on here than just an opportunity for corporations to look heroic and give the planet a few more years before it becomes a setting similar to one of Charlton Heston’s 1970s dystopian science-fiction movies, such as “Soylent Green,” “Omega Man,” and “Planet of the Apes.”
The ban is an ongoing gold mine for supermarkets. Sales of the heavier, more polluting, bacteria-carrying bags that end up being purchased over and over means as much as $200,000 in profits per store location. In the case of one major retailer, an in-depth study found an estimated $42 million in profit in bag sales across New Jersey.
So why would businesses ever object to the state government’s restricting the freedoms of their customers and smothering them with a needless new inconvenience that actually hugely hurts rather than helps the environment when they can make tens of millions of dollars on the proposition, plus look like they’re helping in the fight against climate change to boot?
New Jersey, which also targets Styrofoam cups and other food containers, is far from alone. Some 11 other states, all of them Democrat strongholds, also ban plastic grocery bags: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. Styrofoam bans date back to the late 1980s in the trendier California localities, but that ban backfired too, since the paper alternatives were found to generate more waste in volume and energy use and more air and water pollution.
The ill effects totally unexpected by the public go further still, with the costs of going green killing small food businesses and hurting foam manufacturers. Thousands of jobs, many held by minorities and low-income workers, are laid for sacrifice upon the altar of the green idols.
Five years ago, one of the leaders of the trendy left, like Chicken Little, infamously told us “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” then added mockingly, “and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?” Apparently, we now have seven years left before the apocalypse, according to the state religion. And yet somehow, the sacraments of that false faith end up taking the jobs of the left’s most dependable voters, and line the pockets of big business—as long as those corporate interests adhere to and promote their creed of impending doom and consumer mortification.
