It will be interesting to see how the city’s upcoming ban on plastic bags for yard waste will affect the amount of compostable material collected in Lawrence.

Advertisements in this week’s Journal-World announced that beginning in 2005, city crews no longer will pick up leaves or grass clippings that are placed by the curb in plastic bags. Only yard waste placed in reusable cans or carts or compostable paper bags will be picked up.

The reason for the change, according to the ad, is to:

• Increase collection efficiency (That makes sense because workers have to break open plastic bags and dump their contents);
• Improve worker safety (What’s unsafe about a plastic bag?);
• Yield higher-quality compost (Will the ban on plastic bags do anything to prevent Clopyralid, an ingredient in many lawn herbicides, from contaminating the city’s compost? The problem forced the city to cancel its distribution of compost to the public this year.)

Maybe the public will rise to the occasion by purchasing and storing additional trash cans or carts or by purchasing compostable paper bags, although they are many times more expensive than plastic bags and vulnerable to failure if it happens to rain between the time they are filled and the time they are picked up. But it will be interesting to see how many people simply put yard waste in plastic bags that then will be picked up with their other trash and taken to the city landfill, exactly the result the city’s yard waste pickup was intended to discourage. Time will tell.

If the plastic bag ban works and reduces the city’s cost to pick up yard waste, maybe the savings could be used to start providing curbside collections of some other recyclable materials like, uh, plastic bags! Now that would be an interesting full-circle step in the right direction.