Do news editors read the article before they write the headline?

News.com.au ran an article yesterday with this headline:

Plastic bag ban: Critics warn it isn’t helping Australia reduce waste

The major supermarkets’ bag ban has kept billions of single-use plastic bags out of landfill in the last year, but critics say the policy isn’t working.

Yet the actual study by the economist (from America, but now in Sydney) showed this:

Using quasi-random policy variation in California, I find the elimination of 40 million pounds of plastic carryout bags is offset by a 12 million pound increase in trash bag purchases—with small, medium, and tall trash bag sales increasing by 120%, 64%, and 6%, respectively. The results further reveal 12–22% of plastic carryout bags were reused as trash bags pre-regulation and show bag bans shift consumers towards fewer but heavier bags. With a substantial proportion of carryout bags already reused in a way that avoided the manufacture and purchase of another plastic bag, policy evaluations that ignore leakage effects overstate the regulation's welfare gains.

So a net benefit of 28 million pounds less plastic in bags thrown out in California is meant to be showing us the ban isn't working here??  

And if people want to argue about the thickness of resuseable bags being an environmental problem in waste tips - I find this remarkably ironic, given that the same people are likely the ones who have recently taken to arguing that recycling any plastic is all a crock and we should just bury it all.

I think it extremely likely that thicker bags are not so readily going to end up in the ocean, which is where the great concern over lightweight bags, which are more easily windblown and resemble food to too many sea creatures, has been coming.  Thicker bags, simply by the way they are going to be re-used for groceries until they break, are more likely to end up in the tip, and stay there.   That would be my strong, common sense, hunch, at least.

If you want a genuine study as to the environmental impact of the change, you would need to be looking at whether it has made a difference to beach, river and ocean pollution, and where the thicker bags are ending up.