Sometimes Going Green Has A High Price Tag

Steven Hayward at Power Line posted an article today about the unintended consequences in cities and counties that have banned plastic bags in supermarkets. It seems that the use of cloth bags has caused some unintended problems.

The article quotes U. of Penn. Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper 13-2:

San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase.

The article also quotes an article at Bloomberg.com:

Klick and Wright estimate that the San Francisco ban results in a 46 percent increase in deaths from foodborne illnesses, or 5.5 more of them each year. They then run through a cost-benefit analysis employing the same estimate of the value of a human life that the Environmental Protection Agency uses when evaluating regulations that are supposed to save lives. They conclude that the anti-plastic-bag policies can’t pass the test — and that’s before counting the higher health-care costs they generate.

Back to the drawing board…

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