Compared to What?
| AUTHOR | Anupam Manur |
| DATE | September 13, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | Economic Policy |
Works in Progress recently ran an essay by Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin arguing that for much of what we throw away, burying it is cheaper and cleaner than recycling it.
The reusable alternatives we reach for are often worse than the disposables they replace. Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton tote has to be reused 173 times before it beats a thin plastic bag. A steel straw needs roughly 150 uses. A ceramic mug beats a polystyrene cup somewhere around the thousandth coffee.
Plastic gets easily painted as the villain with obvious elements: carbon emitting petrochemicals, non-biodegradable permanence, and of course images of plastic around turtles. But the substitutes, such as Cotton, get no such treatment, because we don’t audit the seeming hero of the story.
In economics and policy, we have to be cautious of judging something based only on a partial equilibrium analysis. Partial equilibrium studies a single market in isolation, while general equilibrium analyzes all markets in an economy simultaneously
There are two related things at play here: The first is incomplete accounting. What is measured is the regulated product, but its replacement gets a free pass. Back to the single-use plastic bag vs a cotton tote, cotton has to be spun, woven, dyed and finished, and the bag weighs 200 grams against eight grams for polyethylene.
The second is where the world substitutes to a worse, unregulated alternative.
When Californian cities banned plastic carryout bags, people did not stop needing bags. Rebecca Taylor, writing in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, found that eliminating 40 million pounds of carryout bags produced a 12 million pound rise in trash bag purchases. Sales of small and medium bin liners went up 120 and 64 per cent. Nearly 29 per cent of the intended reduction leaked into an unregulated market, because a lot of those carryout bags had been serving as bin liners all along.
Biofuels are an equally delightful example, but working at a global scale. Europe and the US have spent two decades mandating blends and counting reduction in carbon emissions. What went uncounted ran through world crop markets. Demand for crops that can be used for blended fuel leads to greater cultivation of those crops in the scarce land. Divert land to fuel feedstock and food production moves somewhere else, and that somewhere else is frequently forest or peat. Once this indirect land-use change is included, several of these fuels look worse than the petroleum they displaced.
The aviation version is instructive because the policy was written by people who had already learnt this lesson. Sustainable aviation fuel rules deliberately privilege waste feedstocks, used cooking oil above all, precisely to avoid the land-use problem. Demand duly exploded. American imports of used cooking oil went from under 200 million pounds a year to over three billion pounds in 2023, more than half from China. European consumption doubled between 2015 and 2022 and the continent now imports most of what it burns.
Two things followed. The obvious one is fraud: when waste oil trades at a premium, virgin palm oil starts arriving in barrels labelled as waste, and regulators in Europe and the US are still trying to work out how much. The less obvious one is that the fraud is not even necessary for the policy to fail. Transport & Environment makes the point that an exporting country which ships out its genuinely used oil has to fill its own cooking oil demand with something, and that something is usually fresh palm oil. Read Pranay’s account of this.