While the non scientific, generously funded environmentalists prattle on about their concern for the planet, they are often callously indifferent to the consequences their imposed laws, reflecting these concerns, have on the real people living on the planet. Closing coal mines and coal based power generating plants resulting in lost jobs and more expensive power, diverting corn production from food and feed to so called bio friendly fuels causing a huge spike in food costs striking the economically vulnerable especially hard are merely unpleasant side effects to the generally affluent environmentalists.  After all, to them, the minor benefit of, maybe, marginally cleaner air is well worth it.  

So, if banning the common plastic shopping bags, a particular bête noire of the environmental hand wringers,for trendy reusable sacks, causes the deaths of a few people but saves a few animals, ban the plastic.  And that is what happens as researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Law and Economic Research have discovered. As they noted in the abstract

There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase. 

Most of those harmful bacteria are E. coli resulting in serious and increasingly, deadly, intestinal infections. Oh well.

In the paper itself the researchers further note that  

Using standard estimates of the statistical value of life, we show that the health costs associated with the San Francisco ban swamp any budgetary savings from reduced litter.  This assessment is unlikely to be reversed even if fairly liberal estimates of the other environmental benefits are included.  

Those silly researchers estimate "the statistical value of life" for a human as higher than that of mammals or ocean creatures.  

In the perverted thinking of some environmentalists though, the human deaths might actually be good news. Sure, those dramatic ER visits waste a lot of precious fuel and consume environmentally unsound medications. And washing those reusable bags to reduce the bacterial count, which few people do, consumes and pollutes the water while wasting fuel. And of course banning those plastic shopping bags forces people to purchase...plastic garbage bags.   

What to do?  Think positively say the environmentally aware--those increased deaths mean there are less people harming the delicate planet and more animals.  And that's great news for the overpopulation folks.

Uh, no thanks.  Give me a plastic shopping bag, I'll reuse it as a garbage bag while carefully disposing the others in a recycle bin and save both humans and animals.  

And I think the planet will survive.