econlife - Where a Traffic Light Could Cut Noise Pollution by Elaine Schwartz

Habitual car horn honkers could have a problem in Mumbai. If they keep honking when a traffic signal is red and the decibel levels exceed 85, the signal will reset. Rather than turning green, the red remains. Cars will have to sit for double the time and maybe more.

Some suggest that the decibel punishment will diminish noise levels in the city. Others worry that it will only get better at the five signals where the lights get longer. Elsewhere, drivers will keep honking.

Where are we going? To the tragedy of the commons.

Noise Pollution

On April 7, 2008, Mumbai had a No Honking Day. Between January 2009 and September 2019, there were just 1293 honking offenses. Now, recognizing the danger of loud noise, the city is trying harder.

Below, you can see a decibel hierarchy:

Knowing that 85 dB or more is harmful, India’s noise pollution rules include (I suspect unrealistically) a maximum of 55 dB during the day and 45 dB at night for residential areas. After all, a nearby siren can be as loud as 120 to 140 dB. A bit lower but still harmful, power lawn mowers and subway trains can be in the 90 dB range. With higher decibel levels, the downside is high blood pressure, sleep problems, stress. Birds have displayed lower birth rates and caterpillars, accelerated heart rates.

In a report on noise pollution, the World Health Organization summarized how people could be affected:

Our Bottom Line: Tragedy of the Commons

We have a tragedy of the commons when a public resource is overused or abused. Because the land or water or street has no private owner to oversee its care, individuals harm it. The result is a loud city, an overfished ocean, polluted air.

Political scientist Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) won the economics Nobel Prize for her approach to the tragedy of the commons. Calling it the problem of the commons, she said communities do voluntarily get together when they share the same goals. Her examples ranged from a pasture in Switzerland to the refrigerator at work.

Elinor Ostrom:

Meanwhile, British economist Arthur Pigou (1877-1959) proposed targeted fines that could be win win. If successful, they were supposed to create the incentive to pollute less at the same time that the fine would be used to benefit society. His key was cost. Someone had to elevate the cost of the behavior.

Arthur Pigou:

Yet another solution was offered by Nobel laureate Ronald Coase (1910-2013). He thought individuals could negotiate a mutually satisfactory solution. They just had to be aware of when each benefited.

Returning to that Mumbai traffic signal that gets longer when people raise the noise level. someone could have called it a Pigovian solution to noise pollution.

My sources and more: Thanks to Marginal Revolution for alerting me to Mumbai’s street noise problems. From there, The Times of India and the Hindustanitimes  had more of the story. Then for noise pollution facts National Geographic, WEF, and this WHO 2011 report were helpful. And finally, always ideal for economist bios, econlib had more on Ostrom, Pigou, and Coase.

Our featured image is from Pixabay.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - The Unintended Consequences of Plastic Bag Bans by Elaine Schwartz

When I walk with my friend Eli and her dog Dosa, we take our plastic bags. Originally from ShopRite or the local farm stand, the bags were filled with groceries. Now, handy for dog poop, they reside in a bin under my sink until I grab one.

In more than 240 U.S. municipalities, California, and soon New York, those bags have disappeared. Because of bag bans or bag fees, many fewer people are re-using them.

And that could be the problem.

Plastic Bag Ban Surprises

Through a DCB (disposable carryout bag) fee or a ban, we shop with many fewer lightweight plastic bags. Because paper bags and fabric totes replace them, our plastic waste plunges by millions of pounds.

But there is a problem.

Those paper bags and fabric bags have a substantial carbon footprint–more than what it took to make the DCBs. Just think of how a tree becomes paper. You are eliminating an environmentally benevolent plant, using toxic chemicals, and then doing some hefty processing and transporting. It gets even worse with a tote bag. To have a smaller global warming impact than a DCB,  your cotton bag has to be reused more than 131 times. Then, if those DCBs had become garbage hags at home, you have to use your tote as much as a whopping 393 times to offset a DCB’s global warming potential.

These are the amount of use numbers from a 2006 U.K. study that compared the global warming potential of DCBs (aka HDPEs) to reusable bags:

Furthermore, when there are no DCBs, we need more plastic garbage bags. Using data from California, one researcher reported a surge in demand for four gallon garbage bags while sales of other sizes also increased. The result was a massive consumption shift as we bought 11.5 million more pounds of garbage bags and used 40 million fewer pounds of DCBs.

You can see the pop in garbage bag sales just after the DCB ban:

At this point you could be thinking there’s got to be more and there is. We just have to look beyond the carbon footprint from greenhouse gases. When we consider all of the waste generated by plastic, we could arrive at a new conclusion. As always in economics, we have tradeoff. A ban creates more emissions but less non-biodegradable litter.

So, if you care about non-biodegradable litter, then the DCB ban is for you.

Our Bottom Line: Pigovian Taxes

A bag ban or fee could be called a Pigovian tax. Arthur Pigou developed the idea to cope with negative externalities. Defined as the harm done to an uninvolved third party when, for example, someone plays loud music in a dormitory or pollutes a stream, a negative externality needs an incentive to discourage its use. Dr. Pigou said the solution was a tax. When something becomes more expensive, people do less of it.

On a graph, the higher cost looks like this:

Bag bans and bag fees create a higher price. That price might not be in dollars but they do necessitate some costly inconvenience.

My sources and more: This Planet Money newsletter had all we need to know about the downside of the plastic bag ban. But for more detail, this paper and this U.K. study look more precisely at ban “leakage.” Lastly, the NY Times showed the regulatory side through New York’s new bag fee.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.