The plastics wars are reigniting and entering the next phase. The major developments are: 1) the introduction of a bill to ban polystyrene take-out containers and tax, then ban, plastic bags; 2) polling data which show that this proposition is wildly unpopular, and that Coloradans would far prefer to instead expand recycling, to which end, 3) a bill was introduced earlier this week.

An effort to ban plastic products was arrested last year as the bill was among those summarily dispatched in the legislative house cleaning brought on by COVID. Zeal for the effort faced rapid deceleration in the months following, as restaurants were reduced almost exclusively to take-out only, and groceries essentially forbade the use of reusable bags owing to the heightened public health risks they posed. These combined circumstances appeared to have relegated the push to ban take-out containers and life-saving plastic bags to the dark recesses of policy priorities.

Well, that was then, and Frankenstein’s anti-plastic monster has been zapped back into life. The bill puts a 10-cent tax on plastic bags until finally banning them altogether. It also bans restaurants from using polystyrene containers and allows local governments to ban additional plastic products and assign higher bag taxes, if they so wish.

It is the last two provisions, especially, which are raising eyebrows and blood pressures, especially among the besieged restaurant industry, which warns that the impact on those restaurants which are still around, many of which are already on life support, could be mortal.

There seems to be pretty wide agreement on this point. The same day the bill was introduced, a poll was released by Myers Research – incidentally, a Democratic-leaning firm – which revealed just how unpopular a plastics ban is. According to the poll, 59 percent of Colorado voters oppose a ban, with a mere 39 percent favoring it. That’s not just in places like El Paso County, and the ever-rebellious West Slope (where a full 66 percent of voters registered opposition to the bill), but all along the front range and Denver suburbs (both at 59 percent opposing) and even liberal Denver, where opposition sits at 56-43 percent. Every permutation of voters they came up with – whites, Hispanics, college-educated women – had a majority opposing the ban.

The political implications were tallied as well, and tracked, as you would expect, with the policy revelations; that is, 60 percent of voters said they would be less inclined to vote for a legislator who supported a plastic bag-or-container ban. Even, again, in Denver, which is about as monolithically Democratic as any place outside of San Francisco, a majority held this opinion, with a bare 34 percent saying support for such a ban would encourage their electoral approval.

These numbers are illustrative, in ways they usually are not. Most voters are not of the single-issue variety, and few bills stand in a vacuum; but this is one which touches virtually everyone; more so than, say, the sunset on direct-entry midwives, the Department of Personnel Supplemental, or the bill regarding state architect’s authority to execute certain leases.

What this tells us is that, at least amid a pandemic, there is little appetite among the people to exact further regulations on businesses or to prioritize product bans.

What it showed that voters do support, however, in lieu of bans, is an expansion of recycling, and by substantial margins.

As luck would have it, Senate Bill 180 was introduced this week to do just that. This one creates an enterprise to fund a grant program for the express purpose of expanding recycling and composting infrastructure in the state. Colorado’s recycling rate is at a paltry 15.9 percent, a surprising figure for a state that prides itself on ecological concern. That means that most of the plastic we have already used is still out there languishing in a landfill. No ban on new use will do anything about that. Expanding the infrastructure for reworking waste plastic, on the other hand, would, and would do so without the crushing financial consequences to beleaguered small businesses.

The statisticians could get to work figuring out the relative economic and ecological costs and benefits of a constricting ban that still leaves tons of plastic in landfills, versus an enterprise that leaves the restaurants alone while taking on the Herculean effort of repurposing otherwise static waste – a better allocation of the state’s responsibilities, which points us in the right direction, and, if the polling is any indication, enjoys popular support to boot.