From the Boston Globe: A new law in Michigan will prohibit local governments from banning, regulating or imposing fees on the use of plastic bags and other containers. … It’s not a ban on plastic bags — it’s a ban on banning plastic bags. … The new public act prohibits local ordinances from ‘‘regulating the use, disposition, or sale of, prohibiting or restricting, or imposing any fee, charge, or tax on certain containers,’’ including plastic bags, as well as cups, bottles and other forms of packaging.

Michigan is in the news this month, but three other states–Arizona, Idaho, and Missouri– already have a similar law. This interests me, because I don’t see a reason for such a law.

The reason to ban or charge for plastic use is obviously the impact plastics have on the planet. Most of the plastics we use now will literally never decompose, because most bacteria, our primary decomposers, won’t eat them. Over long periods of time, many plastics will degrade, but mostly into tiny pieces of plastic toxin, that are then eaten by sea creatures, who, if they survive, may themselves be eaten by animals higher up the food chain, including the plastic-creators. Living near the shore, instances of the negative effects of plastic on marine life are readily observed. Maybe that’s why the great state of California was the first to pass a state-wide ban on plastic bags.

Plastic is amazingly versatile, and cost-benefit analysis, which rarely considers post-use results, usually finds plastic superior to other substances. It reduces food waste by keeping our food fresh longer, uses less petroleum to manufacture than heavier container alternatives require to transport, greatly reduces disease and infection in medical environments because it is disposed of rather than sanitized, and has broadened the efficacy and availability of everything from eye glasses to air travel.

Since plastic is not going anywhere soon, and since it persists, it only makes sense to not use it when possible. Lots of people don’t realize this, and in a logic-based world (some other instance of the multiverse), this would be a simple matter of public education. People have trouble visualizing large-scale effects, such as the massive amount of junk we throw out, but if they knew, they might act differently. For  example: 60,000 plastic water bottles are discarded every minute in the US.*

So why ban the bans?  I have no theories.

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*That is a current, conservative-assumption-based figure which I computed myself after an inordinate amount of web research. Thanks to the drastic downsizing of the US government over the past 2 decades, it is nearly impossible to find objective info; I trust neither the Water Bottlers Association nor banthebottle.com. I long for a reliable .gov source manned by phlegmatic, career civil servants.