Study says New Jersey bag ban led to higher greenhouse gas levels

New Jersey's plastic bag ban has shifted consumer bag use to reusables while also resulting in a 40 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions and creating a profit center for retailers selling reusable bags, a new study says.

The Jan. 9 study, prepared by Freedonia Custom Research and funded by the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, said that since the state's single-use bag ban went into effect in May 2022, total bag volumes in the state have dropped 60 percent to about 900 million bags.

But it pointed to a six-fold increase in polypropylene used to make woven and nonwoven PP reusable bags and said 90 percent of alternative bags are used only two or three times, much less than the reuse rates needed to mitigate higher greenhouse gas emissions from those bags.

"This shift in material resulted in a notable environmental impact, with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500 percent increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production in 2015," according to a news release from Freedonia.

The study said the typical nonwoven PP bag, the dominant alternative bag, uses 15 times as much plastic and produces five times the GHG emissions in production than the single-use polyethylene bag.

As a result, it said overall GHG emissions from production of bags sold in the state increased 40 percent after the ban, compared with the baseline in 2015.

"Although plastic film bag emissions saw a reduction of nearly 90 percent, released emissions from other retail bag options greatly influenced overall greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in an increase," the study said.

But the study also suggested that under what it called a "high reuse" scenario, overall GHG emissions could fall by up to 70 percent.

The study estimated that one large retail store can turn a six-figure profit from selling the PP bags and other non-single-use alternatives.

"An in-depth cost analysis evaluating New Jersey grocery retailers reveals a typical store can profit $200,000 per store location from alternative bag sales — for one major retailer this amounts to an estimated $42 million in profit across all its bag sales in NJ," Freedonia said.

The study estimated that before the ban, a typical store lost $9,000 to $13,000 from the single-use bags it gave away to customers.

The study said the use of traditional single-use PE bags in the state dropped from 2.3 billion units before the ban, in the baseline year of 2015, to about 300 million in 2022 after the ban.

It said nonwoven PP bags accounted for about 44 percent of those used in 2022, up from 3 percent before the ban, and it noted that while the number of bags sold in the state dropped, the amount of plastic used increased with the heavier woven and nonwoven PP bags.

It estimated that in 2015, about 34 million pounds of plastic went into the single-use PE bags, but that dropped to five million pounds in 2022.

But it said that the much heavier nonwoven PP bags required about 80 million pounds of plastic in 2022, after the ban.

Environmental groups and others who backed the ban have said it reduced litter in the state.

Clean Ocean Action, for example, pointed to figures from the New Jersey Food Council that said in the five months after the ban started it had eliminated 3.44 billion plastic bags and 68 million paper bags.

The bag ban was part of a law, the Single Use Waste Reduction Act, that also limited expanded polystyrene food ware and plastic straws.

A September survey from Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J., said a majority of New Jersey residents continued to support the bag ban after its first year and it said the typical consumer had acquired at least 10 reusable bags.