Remember last year's Seattle Referendum No. 1? The 20-cent bag fee?  It lost, despite a highly influential PubliCola endorsement, 53-46. The anti campaign (mostly the chemical industry) out-raised the pro campaign (mostly the Sierra club) $1.4 million to $100,000.

A 5-cent bag tax did go into effect this year in Washington, D.C., though, and the officially nonpartisan, but pretty much anti-tax ,Tax Foundation published an article this week that—looking at the D.C. tax—says bag taxes don't really help the environment and really "may just be another way for a state or city to grab general revenue."



The report: hints that bans would be better (more honest) than taxes; spends a bit too much energy trying to prove that bag taxes are taxes (Pigouvian! taxes) and not fees; and counts the fact that "bag use is greatly reduced" as a strike against the tax—because, among other things, bags serve secondary re-use purposes for things like garbage can liners.

The article also discusses the bag tax that was on the ballot in Seattle last year, referring mostly to an earlier study that said the potential green effects were greatly exaggerated. On that note, the article reports that the D.C. tax is not doing the job it was billed to do either.

The bag tax legislation enacted in Washington, D.C. was entitled the "Anacostia River Cleanup and Protection Act." Pictures of the litter-strewn river and its tributaries served as campaign posters for the new tax, and city officials promised that the law would decrease bag litter generally, and that the additional revenue would pay for environmental education campaigns and cleaning up the Anacostia River.

This list of environmental goals is far from being met, but it is actually far more realistic than was advertised in Seattle, Washington,

In Washington, D.C., how much environmental clean-up might be achieved by the bag tax? Plastic bags make up a little over 20 percent of the trash in the Anacostia River but over 45 percent of the observable trash in the Anacostia tributary streams, likely because of the vegetation (paper bags are thought to disintegrate in the river or before reaching the river). On streets, plastic bags are less than five percent of litter; paper products make up most street litter. Reducing plastic bag use might lead to the most observable effect by reducing litter in tributaries, but it can only lead to a modest reduction in total litter in the Anacostia River.