Who could have thought this could happen?

Plastic consumption in New Jersey spiked by nearly three times following the state’s implementation of a strict ban on single-use plastic shopping bags, a study found. 

“Following New Jersey’s ban of single-use bags, the shift from plastic film to alternative bags resulted in a nearly 3x increase in plastic consumption for bags,” Freedonia Custom Research (FCR), a business research division for MarketResearch.com, reported in a study published this month. 

New Jersey implemented a ban on single-use plastic bags in 2022, the strictest ban on bags in the nation at the time, billing it as an effort to cut back on the plastic one-use bags piling up in landfills. 

It feels so good to virtue signal and project yourself as helping to save the planet until reality blows up in your face. While shoppers did switch to using renewable plastic bags, those ended up accumulating in people’s homes:

Plastic consumption in the state has nearly tripled, with New Jerseyans previously consuming 53 million pounds of plastic before the ban, compared to 151 million pounds following the ban, FCR researchers reported. 

Also, the benefit of using the reusable bags won’t occur for quite a long time:


In order to have a positive impact on the environment and the  state’s plastic consumption, researchers found shoppers would have to reuse the bags a minimum of 16 times. 

Even Tony Heller weighed in:

What’s worse is that people do not clean reusable plastic bags often so the germs or bacteria from the food it carried can contaminate other products a shopper later carries them in and can result in spreading sickness.