Bouncing Back? Single Use Plastic Bans and the Potential for Rebound Effects

The high visibility of plastics waste in vulnerable environments, especially marine and riparian areas, is leading to an expansion of bans on plastic shopping bags and single use plastics. But are these efforts actually moving us in the right direction? Evidence suggests not, via two factors that contribute to unintended consequences: leakage and the rebound effect. Providing heavier weight, longer lived plastic shopping bags, for example, appears to be simply increasing the amount of plastic waste, as the bags are treated the same as their precursors, and other rebound mechanisms abound. This presentation will discuss current and emerging evidence of both leakage and rebound in the wake of restrictions on plastics, and the mechanisms driving them. These have implications for both assessment and projections, and we will discuss how we might approach accounting for it, and how it might be limited or mitigated.