"Canada Wants to Ban Single-Use Plastics"
by Vicky Stein
Some data exists on the effectiveness of city-wide plastic bag bans — San Jose, California, for instance, cut plastic litter in storm drains by 89 percent — but this kind of large-scale ban has never been tried before. The closest predecessor to Canada’s plans will be the upcoming single-use product bans in the European Union. The Canadian government is likely to follow the same research and recommendations as the EU, the official said.
But environmental engineer Morton Barlaz of North Carolina State University posits that bans might not be the best solution for our planet’s growing plastics problem.
“Nothing works like an incentive better than money. Instead of banning bags, we could start charging for them,” Barlaz said. Under that strategy, the hope would be to avoid losing access to useful products like plastic bags and straws outright, and instead voluntarily cut their use.
“Anything we’re talking about — a straw, a plastic bag, a piece of cutlery — it has a function consumers want. If we ban it, we need to think about the alternative and what that alternative does for people and the environment,” Barlaz said.
If the alternative to a piece of plastic cutlery is a piece of biodegradable plastic that costs more fossil fuels to produce and is equally difficult to dispose of, not to mention costs more for the business selling it, it doesn’t solve any of the problems we associate with petroleum-based plastics.
“Anytime you make a policy, somebody can come up with a legitimate, reasonable exception to that policy in about 30 seconds,” Barlaz said. “I have to wonder if incentives would get us most of the way there without these exceptions.”
Liboiron has another alternative to plastic bans — reducing Canada’s oil subsidies, which have a value of between $7.7 billion and $15 billion.
Because oil is the source of all petroleum-based plastics (as well as a major contributor to carbon pollution), Liboiron said, an increase in oil prices would decrease the cost-effectiveness of single-use plastics across the board.
Use the article excerpt to answer the question.
According to Morton Barlaz, how can a large-scale plastics ban policy potentially show fallacious reasoning?
(1 point)
Responses
Thinking about what alternatives do for people and the environment could help to improve disposal problems.
Charging people for single-use plastics could decrease demand for these problematic items.
Increasing the cost of oil could decrease the interest in using petroleum-based plastics.
Replacing banned single-use plastics with biodegradable plastics will not solve disposal problems.