In Baltimore, elected officials face a host of important issues: city schools have numerous problems, crime continues to plague city residents, taxes are high and so is poverty. But council members and the mayor are focusing on what is surely one of the city’s least-pressing problems – shopping bags.

Under a bill that is almost certain to pass, soon Baltimore shoppers will be unable to get a plastic bag for most of their purchases. And if they want another bag from the store, including a paper bag, they will have to pay 5 cents for this privilege.

Why does Baltimore need this ban? It’s for the environment, of course! Backers claim that it is needed to clean up city streets. But that’s just not true. When Montgomery County was considering its bag tax, I wrote a blog post explaining the flawed reasoning behind it. As I pointed out then, there is little reason to think that this type of law will help the environment.

The evidence continues to accumulate that the environmental benefits of these bans continue to be oversold. Here’s what Christine Mangu-Ward of Reason magazine reports regarding how plastic bags affect litter:

The 2009 Keep America Beautiful Survey, run by Steven Stein of Environmental Resources Planning, shows that all plastic bags, of which plastic retail bags are only a subset, are just 0.6 percent of visible litter nationwide… In D.C., a 2008 analysis prepared for the city's Department of the Environment by the Anacostia Watershed Society found that plastic bags were only the third-largest contributor to litter in the river, after food wrappers and bottles and cans.

Christian Britschgi, also of Reason magazine, sums up some recent research on what happens in the wake of a bag ban:

Far from weening us off hazardous single-use plastics, these bans may actually be encouraging people to instead use thicker garbage bags or other less-than-green alternatives.

So says a study from the University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor. She looked at retail scanner data on the purchase of garbage bags in cities before and after they implemented their bag bans. She found that while plastic bag bans got rid of their target, they did not eliminate people's need for plastic bags in general: They still needed something to line their garbage cans or pick up after their pets. Prior to bag bans, this could mean just reusing the bags you carried your groceries home in. After the bans, folks turned to purchasing garbage bags, which are much more plastic-intensive.

They bought lot of them. Taylor's study found that after the imposition of a bag ban, sales of small garbage bags (defined as 4-gallon-sized bags) increased by a full 120 percent, medium garbage bags (8 gallons) by 64 percent, and tall bags (13 gallons) by 6 percent.

This makes sense to me. When we had small children, we reused our plastic bags to wrap diapers. Now we have a dog, and we reuse plastic bags when we take her out. And when the kids forget their lunchboxes at school, guess what they take the next day? Lunch in a reused plastic store bag. Ban these bags, and you just force people to buy other plastic bags – plastic bags that then end up in the landfill, the incinerator, or the streets.

Baltimore, like many large cities, obviously has a trash problem. But this bag ban will do little to fix the garbage issues plaguing the city. Instead, this plastic bag ban bill is another prime example of politicians taking an action to “do something,” even if that “something” will have no tangible effect. This bill sounds nice and it provides good soundbites and photo ops. But if you expect Baltimore to be cleaner because of its enactment, you are likely to be disappointed. Just like you should be disappointed that this is what the city’s elected officials are doing with their time rather than focusing on finding real solutions to the city’s many problems.