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Blog Entry 94 of 102 A Journalist's Musings

As a journalist, I don't often have the opportunity to share my opinion. So I thought I'd come over here and share my point of view on matters affecting our community and the state. I'm not afraid to take a stand, and I welcome the conversation that will follow if you tell me your point of view!

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Will a plastic bag tax work?

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Contributed by: Hank Lacey on 12/8/2007

As I wrote in an earlier post, Councilwoman Katie Kruger plans to ask the Castle Rock Town Council to impose a fifty-cent tax on each plastic shopping bag dispensed to a customer at retail and grocery stores.

Ms. Kruger no doubt seeks to reduce the use of plastic bags. That is unquestionably a laudable goal, as the production of plastic requires oil and the energy necessary to transport that oil to the processing plant and run the manufacturing process.

Assuming people would seek to avoid payment of the tax, and use a self-supplied cloth bag or paper bags instead, the question becomes "will any resources, including energy and forests, be saved if the tax results in more paper bag use?"

Certainly paper production imposes huge environmental costs, too. These include the loss of forests and associated biological diversity as timber companies seek to engage in even-age, monocultural production. Given the ongoing destruction of forests in many parts of the world, encouraging more paper use seems unlikely to be a good response to the problem of plastic bag use.

Now, if the tax on plastic bags would be likely to encourage more people to recycle the paper bags they take from the grocery store as a substitute for taxed plastic bags, then perhaps those concerns would be lessened. The problem is, here in Castle Rock and in many other places, that recycling simply is not readily available to people.

Apologists for the status quo will say, and have said, that people can purchase recycling services from private garbage haulers. They will also say that some homeowner associations provide the service to their members.

The problems with these excuses for not doing more to expand access to recycling in our community are many. First, if you want to encourage the socially, environmentally and economically beneficial act of recycling on a wide scale, you have to make it extremely affordable for people. Too many private garbage haulers simply charge too much for the service. Besides, there is, practically speaking, no oversight of their activities, which means no one can be sure whether the garbage truck that picks up recyclable items actually takes those items to be recycled.

Second, unless recycling is profitable, private sector entities will not make it available on a wide scale unless they are subsidized. Moreover, recycling is an activity that can benefit from "economies of scale." The more people participate, the less costly - on a volume basis - it is for governments or private sector service providers to make it available. That means we in municipal government should be doing all we can to make sure that the maximum amount of people possible are actually recycling.

Third, there are several strong public interests in increasing the frequency and extent of recycling in our community and others - namely, the reduction in the use of the natural resources needed to manufacture new products (as opposed to products made from recycled items), the reduction in the amount of land needed for landfills, and the reduction in the amount of energy needed to collect and transport garbage. All of those reductions would lessen the collective greenhouse gas impact of our community and any other community that encourages recycling on a broad scale.

If the public interests in encouraging, or even mandating, recycling are as I have described them, and I don't think there's any doubt that they are, then recycling becomes the business of government. For it is and always has been a legitimate purpose of government to encourage and, ultimately, achieve the conservation of our natural resources.

Indeed, if governments didn't think it was an appropriate use of their powers to encourage or require responsible use of resources, we'd soon have a significant destructive impact on the economy. If, for example, the nation were to return to the condition of recycling awareness that existed forty, or even twenty, years ago, it would quickly run out of landfill space. The consequence of that would be higher prices for garbage removal to the consumer, higher costs for the entrepreneur due to increasing maintenance and regulatory compliance burdens at the landfill, and higher energy costs throughout the economy as more energy is used than otherwise would be the case.

So there's no legitimate reason to hold to a position that our local government should refrain from doing something to encourage more recycling in Castle Rock. There is, however, a very reasonable question about how the town would pay for it.

The answer lies in a new law passed by the Colorado General Assembly, HB 1288. This new law makes state money available to municipalities in the form of grants and requires municipalities to use the money to set up recycling and re-use programs.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is currently in the process of writing regulations to govern applications for and dispersal of the HB 1288 grant funds. The first awards aren't expected until sometime in 2008 at the earliest.

Castle Rock has no conceivably convincing reason to ignore this source of funding to address one of our community's biggest environmental problems. For members of the Council who don't want our local sales, use and property tax revenues spent on it, it's an answer. For members of the Council who think recycling services should be provided only by the private sector, it's an answer because the grant funds can be used to support private efforts to expand recycling access. For members of the Council who don't think recycling matters, it's an answer because many people in the community do think it matters, many entrepreneurs won't locate businesses in communities that don't adhere to modern environmental standards, and the money that would be spent comes from the state, not the town budget. Besides, those who think recycling isn't important are a definite minority holding to a view with pretty much no principled basis.

Nevertheless, Castle Rock has done nothing to expand recycling access. Nor has our town government even been willing to send a staff member to participate in the CDPHE committee process involved in writing the HB 1288 regulations. Nor has our town government even undertaken an analysis of the extent to which residents and businesses here already recycle, despite a clear directive from the Council that staff do so given last spring.

This is not only incredibly short-sighted, it is illogical and self-defeating. I am utterly convinced that, if municipalities lacking universal recycling programs don't take advantage of the HB 1288 grant funds within a few years, the General Assembly will order those municipalities to put a universal program in place. If that happens we lose our flexibility to put in place a strong and effective recycling program that is the best fit for Castle Rock.

I always thought a conservative value was to do at the local level what can be done at the local level. Recycling programs are done at the local level in thousands of communities in the United States. The Castle Rock Town Council's stubborn refusal to initiate a mainstream program that has huge benefits for the quality of life in the community, the world and local environment, and the economy, to say nothing of the moral imperative of doing all that is practical to fight climate change, is a stunning failure of governance.

Please, if you care about this issue, contact your representative on the Council, or better yet, come to a Council meeting, and let the Council know that it needs to join the mainstream of American values and put in place a recycling program of which all the town's residents and business owners can be proud . . . and pay for it with state grant money!

Oh, yeah, about those plastic bags. If we had a strong recycling and re-use program here in Castle Rock, we wouldn't necessarily need a tax to reduce the amount of energy used to make plastic bags. People could recycle the plastic bags. But even if we couldn't make recycling available for plastic bags, greatly expanded access to recycling would make it much more likely that people would recycle the paper bags they take at the grocery store in lieu of paying the plastic bag tax.

So the issues go together. A plastic bag tax without a universal recycling program in Castle Rock won't achieve its desired objective of reducing resource use; a plastic bag tax with a universal recycling program is likely to make a significant difference for the environment.

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Submitted By: Hank Lacey

posted on 12/11/2007 @ 11:44:01 AM

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Michael, with respect I think you're comment conflates two issues. I think Katie is right to be concerned about reducing plastic bag use. Plastic bags are hard to recycle and, if deposited in landfills or, worse, allowed to blow free (and eventually end up in streams, lakes, and the oceans), have a very deleterious impact on wildlife. And, yes, the current system (or, more exactly, non-system) for recycling here has problems. But the answer to that isn't to just pretend that recycling isn't important. It's to find a way to make it easier for people to do, so that even if there are some things in the bins that shouldn't be there the total volume of stuff kept out of landfills, re-used to save resources, etc. is increased.

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Submitted By: Michael Rule

posted on 12/10/2007 @ 6:52:32 PM

Rated Blog Entry

A plastic bag tax is a joke. Or should be. Is Councilwoman Katie pushing this for her constituents, or maybe just going off on her own agenda? Let's talk about some of the problems with recycling instead, like...abuse of the bins set out by private contractors by citizens using it for trash (the reason the bins behind Safeway are gone). Wait! let's just outlaw using bottled water instead! Give me a freakin' break.

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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments

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Hank Lacey

Castle Rock , CO

Hank Lacey has posted 102 blog entries and 8 comments since joining on 5/31/2007. Hank Lacey 's average blog rating is 4.98.

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