ÉDITORIAL

Strategic Environmental Policies

Many environmental policies have been designed over the years to better safeguard our environment, including better fuel efficiency standards for vehicles and banning many forms of plastic.  These policies have often done tremendous good for both our environment and our health.  Smelling the fumes of cars that are 30 or more years old tells us how much vehicle emission standards have done to give us clean air to breathe.  It’s hard for younger generations to imagine what it smelled like walking along a busy street in the 1970s.
Yet there have also been failures in our attempts to regulate pollution.  In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Obama administration wanted to significantly tighten emission standards over the following 15 years.  Yet the motor vehicle industry complained that such standards would make it impossible to sell larger vehicles without incurring losses, and that these vehicles were necessary for people in rural areas or who work in construction.  As a compromise, it was agreed that larger vehicles would have less stringent requirements in terms of vehicle emission standards.  Yet the effects of this exception were perverse - it created a significant incentive for car manufacturers to focus on selling ever larger vehicles, as traditional cars required pricey new technologies to reduce emissions.  This made larger vehicles comparatively cheap.  The result was that the share of vehicles sold which were pick-ups and SUVs shot up sharply over the last decade, and overall reductions in total vehicle emissions since the more stringent rules were put in place have been mostly flat for several years.  
Another front in our drive to reduce our societies’ environmental impact is plastics.  This impacts us in many different ways, some more noticeable than others. Plastic straws will soon be largely illegal, leading restaurants and cafes to roll out alternatives, from cardboard straws to metal variants.  Disposable plastic bags will also be phased out in the near future.  When these individual measures are taken together the potential benefits are significant, but to optimize the results a variety of factors need to be considered.  Switching to non-disposable bags can seem like a positive way forward, but these types of bags need to be used many times to produce net benefits for the environment.  Of critical importance is the technology used to produce them.  Early cotton non-disposable bags had to be used thousands of times to have less impact than the equivalent number of disposable bags they were meant to replace.  Advances in technology have brought that number down to about a dozen for the current non-disposable variety.  Further improvements to the manufacturing process will be needed if people tend to forget their bags at home and pick up new non-disposable ones frequently at stores or supermarkets. 
In the end, the best approach is reducing our use of all types of disposable materials whenever possible.  An excellent starting point is packaging, something that offers comparatively little added value.  Biodegradable packaging could go much farther towards reducing waste than many other approaches that we’ve considered so far.  
n-disposable bags can seem like a positive way forward, but these types of bags need to be used many times to produce net benefits for the environment.  Of critical importance is the technology used to produce them.  Early cotton non-disposable bags had to be used thousands of times to have less impact than the equivalent number of disposable bags they were meant to replace.  Advances in technology have brought that number down to about a dozen for the current non-disposable variety.  Further improvements to the manufacturing process will be needed if people tend to forget their bags at home and pick up new non-disposable ones frequently at stores or supermarkets. 
In the end, the best approach is reducing our use of all types of disposable materials whenever possible.  An excellent starting point is packaging, something that offers comparatively little added value.  Biodegradable packaging could go much farther towards reducing waste than many other approaches that we’ve considered so far.  
Ian Barrett