How many plastic coated “reusable” bags that are in everyone’s closet, car, and boat were imported during the same period? These cloth / plastic / bags are full of evil chemical dyes and surfactants from manufacturing in India !
Still seems like a shift from single-use (well, often double-use) plastic bags to multiple-reuse bags is a net win. I know I use my reusable grocery bags for all sorts of activities.
This depends. Sometimes the reusable ones have so much more plastic, that you would need to use it a 100+ times to make it worth it, while at the same time, they last maybe 10, 20 uses, before the handle snaps or something.
> According to one eye-popping estimate, a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to make it a truly environmentally friendly alternative to a conventional plastic bag.
Yeah I've never been a fan of that study. They take a bunch of categories where the bags basically all have negligible impact regardless of material (ozone depletion, ionizing radiation, etc) and compare them on those without using a particularly reasonable weighting scheme. And in all those categories, none of them really have anything to do with the actual reasons we want to move away from plastic bags (terrestrial and oceanic plastic waste, microplastics in water sources, etc).
I guess I think it just sort of misses the point. It's like if they were to say "oh we should keep burning fossil fuels instead of solar because solar uses 1000x more land" but then didn't mention or compare CO2 emission.
I think that is possible. My mother has had the same cotton canvas grocery bags for ~40 years. They are faded from washing, but are still strong, and she still uses them.
The other advantage is that cotton bags do not shed as many microplastics (the thread is almost always synthetic).
Many of the "re-usable" woven plastic bags I've acquired in recent years are of extremely poor quality. I have had to re-stitch many of them, and some had to be discarded after a very short service life.
Most people are not though, for various reasons, most commonly not caring enough. Plastic bag legislatures should keep that in mind if they want to do more than pass a feel good law.
I responded to a sibling comment, but basically I think that study sort of misses the point. The reason to move away from plastic bags is due to plastic waste and microplastics, and the study doesn't touch on that really at all. Their analysis is based on stuff like ozone depletion, eutrophication, resource depletion, and other things that just aren't really meaningfully impacted by shopping bag material choice.
I don't think it's FUD exactly, I think it's just a bit of a weird analysis that focuses on the wrong things.
I use the disposable plastic bags as insulation for the windows in my apartment. I use them for trash bin bags. I use them for catching the hair when I save. Etc, etc. I'd be sad to see them go but find it very doubtful they'll ever be banned in my US state.
Same, though the "biodegradable" plastic bags stores tended to use lately would end up completely teared apart after a single use.
Also it seems like every store around only has non machine-washable reusable bags. Any meat or vegetable leaks in there and they'll quickly become disgusting.
It doesn't really matter if they work when they're ballot box poison for anyone who implements them. In western Canada there are large groups of people who are absolutely wildly outraged about plastic bag and cutlery bans. They're a constant refrain in the right wing rage farming ecosphere here, because you're exposed to the (very, very mild) negative effects of the ban almost daily, but never to the positive outcome. It's a very easy lever to pull if your goal is to paint any environmental or climate change action as pointless posturing, and it's being used as such.
Some people are just complete and utter snowflake softies. Having meltdowns over their plastic bags or whatever and then shouting “fuck your feelings” is the pinnacle of irony.
I think they're only ballot box poison in western Canada, which is not going to vote for anything other than conservative MPs regardless.
Having grown up in Western Canada, no one does more whinging and complaining than Albertans. Every little thing, from taxes to masks, is a huge imposition. But the whinging is then rationalized as "defending freedom".
The back of my house looks (and smells, in the summer) like a recycling center. The thing that really pisses me off is that after all that work it all ends lumped together more often than not, and the only thing that is really valuable (metals) is quite frequently lost because there is no separate way to collect them.
In my childhood days everything got recycled. Glass bottles, metals, paper, clothing, vegetable matter (skins, off-cuts) and so on. People made a living going door to door to collect them. Single use plastic was absolutely unheard of.
So I don't know Canada but when the ban was first bought in in Scotland a lot of people, albeit still a minority, had similar views but within a year or two no one really cared.
I’ve always preferred paper, and it’s a carbon sink. Instead of a plastic ban, I’d like to know my paper bags are coming from a sustainable logging operation or where the forest is being protected from fire by targeted logging operations.
Do you have a source on it being a net carbon sink? I'm skeptical bc there's a lot more effort to make and distribute paper bags than cutting down a tree
Maybe if you're only looking at the environmental impact angle. From a utility angle paper bags don't handle moisture well, the handles aren't as strong, and are more bulky than plastic bags.
Plastic bags bans work at banning plastic bags, granted. But banning plastic bags is not an end to itself, and is pointless if the end result is not reduced plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Ideally, those reductions would be commensurate with the effort involved in the ban, compared to other actions you could take with the same costs. I note this article doesn't say anything about the actual impact. It's consistent with the hypothesis that we banned plastic bags as a token gesture, because we mistake movement for progress, and now we're patting ourselves on the back while nothing is actually improved.
In my country, single use plastic bags were replaced with thicker reusable plastic bags that many people discard after a single use. So the total volume of produced/discarded plastic probably increased despite the number of bags used probably going down. I don't have sources other than anecdotal evidence based on behaviours I observe.
The goal is to eliminate trash in the environment. Thin plastic bags get discarded carelessly, then catch in the wind and get strewn around a wide area.
Plastic bag bans have been sufficiently successful that people have forgotten this was a problem.
If the goal was reduced emissions, these bans were an abject failure. Single use plastic bags are really efficient from an energy use perspective. Their replacements take significantly more energy to produce and the re-use is unlikely to ever balance out, as they often require hundreds or thousands of uses to be equivalent to a single use bag.
same thing happened here. it became illegal for grocery stores to give out single use plastic bags here so now they just give out thicker bags that they call multi-use.
the replacement bags are usually made out of another type of plastic that needs to be reused 100+ times minimum to make the trade off worthwhile, which is rarely the case.
Superficial is good in this case. One of the worst things about plastic bags is that they end up wrapped around every roadside bush in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America.
I’ve never seen one of those beefy reusable carrier bags blowing around on the side of a road.
Why does this comment feel like someone trying to vice-signal about their lack of care for the environment while attempting to manipulate the people who do by making up complete nonsense? No, reusable shopping bags are not worse for the environment than disposable ones.
It is literally a type of religious ritual to the Earth gods.
The point is not that it helps or doesn't help, the point is "we have to do something!"
Just like it is obvious from a breakdown of the data that is beyond stupid to send one giant diesel burning truck to pick up "garbage" then another giant diesel truck to pick up tin cans and cardboard at a net energy loss. Of course, it is impossible to stop this even if it would be rational thing to do.
This is a preposterous talking point, I wish people would stop parroting it.
Reusable bags carry as much weight and volume as multiple disposable bags. And yes, you can use them hundreds of times. I have used mine every week for years and years.
Disposable plastic grocery bags are wasteful and pointless, and those defending them so virulently come across as bafflingly pathetic.
Hilarious. Wait until people think critically about what solar panels and lithium ion batteries (for their "green" EVs and homes) demand has done to the environment.
"Commissioned by the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, the report acknowledges that the total number of plastic bags declined by 60% since the ban—as its backers hoped. But because shoppers still had to carry their groceries home, they needed alternatives. Mostly that meant switching from the thin plastic film bags to the heavier, reusable bags now sold in many supermarkets.
The problem is that most of these alternative bags are made of non-woven polypropylene, which takes much more plastic to make and isn’t widely recycled. And what about the supposed climate benefits? Well, the study finds that, owing to the larger carbon footprint of the heavier, non-woven polypropylene bags, greenhouse gas emissions rose 500%.
The problem is compounded by the way people use these bags. Though intended to be reused many times, the report says 90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times. So they are piling up in landfills and homes. Think of your own behavior in misplacing bags around the house or forgetting to bring them when heading out for groceries."
Misplacing bags in your home is unlikely to continue indefinitely. If nothing else you would run out of room.
So it’s likely for someone to have many bags used a few times and lost and the remainder get used a great deal. Therefore what’s important is the average amount of reuse not simply what happens to individual bags. A single bag used 1,000 times makes up for a 9 used a 2-3 times.
It's really not easy for me to compute how many times each of my canvas bags has been used. But it's probably about 200 on average, since I've been doing this for over a decade and I've only had one canvas bag fail to death.
I'd bet 1000 uses is within the realm of possibility, but you'll probably need to do some repairs along the way.
Oh, I wasn't thinking about canvas bags. What I was thinking about, and what the law is about, is the thick plastic bags I've seen at e.g. Safeway checkout that they charge 10 cents for.
Buying these thick plastic bags seems to be what the checkout line guides people to do. Buying a canvas bag would require extra effort. People generally take the path of least resistance.
Yes, from time to time you realize that the entire box full of reusable bags isn't going to be reused. Then you take one of them, stuff it with the others until it's full, and stash that as the "maybe I'll reuse those".
Then you take another one, fill that one with the rest, and put it in the trash.
> Though intended to be reused many times, the report says 90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times. So they are piling up in landfills and homes.
I could see people forgetting these bags at home for a while as they adjust to their new normal, but the idea that they’re going to be buying these new bags ever other trip to the store because they’re piling up in a room at home for years is hard for me to believe.
Given that the conclusion of that article depends on people never getting good at reusing those bags and instead throwing them away or letting them accumulate forever at home, I have a hard time taking it seriously.
>>the report says 90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times. So they are piling up in landfills and homes.
>but the idea that they’re going to be buying these new bags ever other trip to the store because they’re piling up in a room at home for years is hard for me to believe.
What's likely happening is that they go out to buy something, forgot their bag, and is forced to buy a reusable bag. If enough people are forgetful, the "90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times" seems very plausible to me.
Some companies offer compact reusable bags that can be stored in a coat pocket. For example:
https://seatosummit.com/products/ultra-sil-day-pack - I've had a few different versions of this bag for years. There are also cheaper/bigger/different versions of the same sort of thing you can find online for "packable daypack".
https://nanobag.com/products/nanobag - I have heard good things about these, but I prefer a backpack because it allows me to be hands-free, or to use my hands to hold more items.
However, I would start by carrying a lightweight "single-use" plastic bag, and simply re-use it. Plastic bags are not as strong as these premium bags, but they hold up well enough to be useful in most scenarios.
Thank you, these look amazing, I'm going to get one! They don't entirely solve my problem because they don't get large enough (for the smaller sizes, the larger sizes are too large when folded) but they'll be useful to have.
The problem is one more unique to being a walker in a city. You're out and about, maybe just walking to the park or something so you brought nothing with you, but the park you like is a 15 minute walk from your apartment.
Near the park there's a great bakery. You see they're having a nice sale on a box of a dozen croissants, and their croissants are the best in the city. So do you:
- Grab a couple boxes, and a reusable bag to carry them in?
- Walk 15 minutes home to get your bag, then 15 minutes back, then 15 minutes back home (45 minutes total) just so you don't pay $3 for a bag?
- Carry around a bag all the time even though you had no intention to buy anything when you left, and use it only a few times over the hundreds of time you leave your apartment?
I’m not the person you asked, but I’d do none of the above. I’d buy the boxes and carry them. They’re presumably perfectly ordinary parallelepipedical cake boxes, perfectly suited for carrying in your hands. There’s no need for a bag.
This is certainly an option (as is not buying the pastries), but it gets pretty uncomfortable over a 15 or even 10 minute walk, because you have to keep the boxes level. You can't just hold them by your side.
It's even worse if you have to e.g. jump on a crowded subway.
And now you know for next time: “there’s a great bakery near the park that I like, better come prepared”. You now have two reasons to go there. Take a disposable plastic bag (hint: they are and always were reusable) folded in your pocket.
This not a hypothetical. I learned pretty fast to always bring a mostly empty backpack with me to the park. I pack a couple of beach towels, maybe bring a jacket, and an e-reader. Sometimes I may not lay down on the grass, or not read. Or I may meet with someone and have a towel at the ready for them. But I have multiple options and none of them is a burden.
Carrying an almost empty backpack for a recreational activity takes zero effort, and it can be used to carry groceries on the way back if I want. Each of the things I carry in it is the result of a previous time where I didn’t have it. People in this thread are acting as if this is an intractable problem. It’s not. Every time you’re faced with a problem of this nature think “what could I do to avoid this next time?” then do that.
If I had to bring a backpack or purse† everywhere I don't think I'd want to live in a walkable city anymore. It makes the experience of walking substantially less pleasant.
† Or whatever the latest euphemism is for a purse carried by a man
You don’t have to bring it everywhere. I gave you a specific example of somewhere you may want to bring it, and why.
Looks like you’re not willing to endure any inconvenience, however minor, to avoid buying the plastic bag and being a bit friendlier to the environment. That’s your prerogative, but let’s not pretend these “problems” don’t have simple solutions.
My feeling is that these laws are mostly advocated for and passed by people who own and drive cars, even as they make life harder mostly for people who don't drive cars. This is despite the fact that driving a car clearly releases orders of magnitude more carbon than some disposable plastic bags.
If more people were willing to give up their cars (or accept something like a 100% extra tax on gasoline to be put towards carbon removal efforts), I would be more open to arguments to give up my plastic bags.
Put another way: I would like legislation which makes walkable, car-free living as easy and painless as possible. Disposable plastic bags make car free living more pleasant, so they shouldn't be banned unless there is a very strong case for significant and meaningful carbon savings.
I don’t drive either, so I should be inclined to agree with you. But when I’m drowning due to the effects of climate change, it won’t do me any good to turn to the person drowning next to me and tell them it’s their fault.
Yes, we should pass better laws. Yes, we don’t have them now. But when (if) we do, I’d rather have a fighting chance than it being too late because the water is already up to my neck.
Yes, except that I'm not convinced these laws reduce emissions, and I'm concerned they do the opposite. I realize the study being cited around this thread [1] was commissioned by the plastic industry and is thus suspect, but just based off of watching people in the checkout line at the grocery store, I see far too many shoppers buying "reusable" bags for me to believe they're actually being reused enough times. [2]
The inconveniences I'm describing are personal gripes, but I don't believe they only apply to me! On the contrary, I think they explain all the not-reused reusable bag sales. You can say "these people should just do X Y and Z", but unless they actually do that, plastic bag bans aren't helping the environment.
(If we're exclusively discussing my personal carbon emissions, I used to reuse every single one of my shopping bags as trash bags. Now I buy separate plastic trash bags instead, so my emissions have gone up.)
And then there's the other way they harm the environment: we need more people to give up their cars and move to cities (or form new walkable cities). If you make city life less convenient, fewer people will do that.
> If we're exclusively discussing my personal carbon emissions
No worries, we definitely aren’t.
Unfortunately I have an early flight tomorrow so won’t be able to continue the conversation. Still, thank you for the discussion. Have a nice <your time of day>.
> Disposable plastic bags make car free living more pleasant
Nonsense. I haven't owned a car for years, nor have I used anything other than a reusable bag for years. Disposable bags are awful for carrying because they tear so easily and can't be carried on your shoulder.
usually when i'm walking in a city, i'll have a coat with pockets or a small bag with me, containing things like a water bottle, a snack, an extra layer, a book, maybe laptop. it's not hard to fold up a small cloth tote and carry that too.
As I was saying, this is not the hassle it seems like it is being made out to be. Setting that aside, a box seems like just as good a vessel to carry as a bag, so in this specific case, I really don't understand the issue. If this place has such good pastries and you know, you can plan ahead and pay full price.
If this really is somehow life changing savings on pastries I mean, yeah, taking some extra time walking won't do any harm.
If you don't already carry a backpack or other bag, you don't have anywhere to put grocery bags. It's not like they fit in your jeans pocket.
And I do a lot (the majority?) of my grocery shopping spur of the moment. Basically when I'm on my way home and realize I have extra time and it's not so late that the grocery stores have closed. And my life is such that knowing whether I'll have time to shop that evening is entirely unpredictable.
Can you please link me to something I can buy? I've never found something both small enough when folded to be pocketable and big enough when expanded to be useful.
In your jeans pocket? Not unless you want to look... well let's just say that bulging pockets on your butt, or on the front of your pant, are not a good look... not to mention not being particularly comfortable.
They aren't heavy, but they are big/bulky. You can't just stuff them in a pocket. Ironically, the "bad" plastic bags (thicker and bigger than standard US grocery bags, but still a single layer of soft plastic film) could be folded into a pocket, while the new "reusable" ones can't, making it harder to actually reuse them.
> What spur of the moment shopping are you talking about?
Groceries. It's common around here to shop often but in small quantities, because the grocery store is likely somewhere on the footpath from work to home, from work to public transit, or from public transit to home.
Which means you're either carrying the bulky bag with you all day, or using single-use bags. Or, of course, you could buy a car to follow the "stop whining just throw a few in your trunk" suggestions always posted /s
They aren't heavy, but they are big/bulky. You can't just stuff them in a pocket. Ironically, the "bad" plastic bags (thicker and bigger than standard US grocery bags, but still a single layer of soft plastic film) could be folded into a pocket, while the new "reusable" ones can't, making it harder to actually reuse them.
This is incorrect. There are reusable bags that fold into pocket sized. Ikea has them, among other brands. Now that you know, I'm sure you'll reevaluate your outlook on them, right?
Additionally, if you're coming back from work, you probably already have a bag to carry stuff you need for work that you can use to carry a "spur of the moment" amount of groceries or other bags. However, this sounds more like a regular occurrence you are neglecting to prepare for rather than a spur of the moment thing.
I'm also in a city without a car (and am proud of it), and also struggle with this. One thing that helped me a lot is to buy a few ultra lightweight packable bags. Ones that can be packed into a pocket in themselves. Then I put these in every backpack I normally carry with me. It helps that I rarely leave the apartment without a backpack.
mine mostly is. It's a tight pack for carrying my laptop and similar paraphernalia. It's not really means for storing more than a few small pieces of groceries
(note: this is rendered null anyway because I do need to drive everywhere in my suburb).
Our city banned single-use plastic bags. The result is you can have paper bags for 5 cents each, or you can buy re-usable plastic bags for $1-$2.50 each (usually tilted towards the higher end.) Nobody is forcing you to buy re-usable plastic, and it's expensive enough to dissuade people from buying too many.
BTW, the biggest outcome is that I use fewer bags in general, and just don't take a bag when I don't need one.
For some reason, a lot of retailers around me in New York seem to only sell the "reusable" bags, with no option for paper. I don't know why, it's very annoying.
My other problem is I can't reuse paper bags as trash bags (because even a tiny amount of liquid will leak through). So now I have to buy plastic trash bags, which sucks because I do in fact care about the environment.
As far as I can tell, that's a retailer decision and not something mandated by the state or city.
But the real problem with single-use plastic bags is that they blow out of dumpsters and landfills. They're incredibly bad for the environment, in ways that re-usable bags and even larger trash bags are not.
The paper bags aren't that reliable though. They're fine if you're just carrying the groceries to/from your car, but then you're also likely to already have a bunch of bags/baskets laying in the car. They also suck for cold stuff (eg milk), as the condensation quickly renders them useless.
I'm confused, in all the places that I'm aware of (3 countries) supermarkets sell paper bags for cases like these.
Moreover if it is such an issue for you why don't you buy one of these soft thin fabric bags that essentially roll up into their own little bag and are small enough to always carry around?
Sure, the disposal side of the story is probably better, but as I understand they require more energy to produce than plastic bags (at least the old thin ones), and anecdotally they get reused way less, partly due to frequent tears, but also ironically because people instinctively shove them straight in the recycling when they get home
Certainly in Canada where one time use plastic bags are banned the supermarkets do not provide paper bags. They will sell you reusable bags which are larger (and therefore more resource intensive to produce) which are often not reused. I have a huge collection of them at home.
I've got some colleagues who live in apartment buildings in an area of Canada that's like that.
About half a year ago, they were telling me about how they're seeing more and more of those thicker bags in their buildings' large shared garbage dumpsters, rather than the much thinner plastic bags that used to be used for bundling garbage back when they were still readily available.
I wouldn't be surprised if it has gotten worse since then, as people have gradually used up the thin plastic bags they'd previously collected and used for bundling garbage.
> If enough people are forgetful, the "90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times" seems very plausible to me.
Sure, and this definitely happened in my region of Canada where plastic bags were banned already, but eventually people will stop forgetting once their closet fills with too many reusable bags.
We need supermarkets to provide places where people can donate or sell their excess reusable shopping so other people can pick them up and use. That should put a big dent in the necessity for people to make use of new bags if they didn't bring their own reusable bags
Really? Why? I have a bunch of thick Sainsburys bags that I bought probably 5 years ago and I still use them for shopping every week - they will have been used probably 200 times each, easy. No idea why I'd throw them out.
I just use them like trash bags /bin liners. I have fabric reusable ones I just forget or are unable to bring half the time.
Re: throwing them out vs recycling them, our bags you can only recycle at the store themselves...so just a bit too much friction to bother with. I can't recall ever seeing or hearing of anyone recycling them that way either.
Exact same thing here. I reused the thin plastic bags as trash can liners. And I use the new, thicker ones, the same way. I'm contributing exactly the same number of bags back into the environment, they just have a whole lot more plastic in each bag.
> the idea that they’re going to be buying these new bags ever other trip to the store because they’re piling up in a room at home for years is hard for me to believe.
One of the things that pushed me away from using Instacart was that they'd always bring groceries in the heavyweight bags.
I reuse them now that I stopped using Instacart, but I certainly collected a whole pile of them.
Super anecdotal but when i first moved to Austin Tx and went to a Walmart, they told me i had to pay for plastic or paper bags. I was completely thrown off and the cashier told me they did a "ban" on plastic bags, and that many people buy the "tougher" plastic bags and resuse them.
A week or so later i had bought resuable bags, like 2-3, and would always leave them in my car. It became 2nd nature to me almost instantly. Since them I've always used reusable tote bags until they break. I even have one from a party i threw more than 6 years ago that belonged to someone esle lol
Ive since move back home to a city that has no plastic ban and im literally the only person who brings tote bags into stores. The only downside now is i can sometimes look sketch as hell but yea idc i support resuable bags hopefully more people can minimize their plastic footprint in plastic bags or other ways
If I’m driving in my car, no problem. But I often go to the store by foot from somewhere else and am unprepared. The disposable bags are only like 8 cents anyways.
In the UK, Waitrose sell a re-usable bag or £1 ($1.25). It's a good quality bag and you're not going to throw it away.
Not sure on the actual data but other grocery stores have gradually increased the price of re-usable bags to the point where they are cost enough to make you think twice about paying for them.
Seeing people awkwardly carrying random items back home without a bag is not uncommon.
Maybe I’m an outlier but I have another 3-4 of these bags of bags at home with reusable bags. Most people I talk to have the same.
I do refill my car with them occasionally, but I either forget to bring them or do grocery shopping at unanticipated times and don’t have a bag with me.
They do pile up though even if you use them. I've never purposely purchased one of these bags, but have acquired way too many of them just from getting deliveries or picking up things I order in advance. I've disposed of so many of them after only a single use because I don't have room and will never use them.
On top of that, I've made the problem even worse because they are just horribly bulky to carry around if you aren't driving to the places you shop. Due to this bulk I went out and purchased some nice thin nylon bags that are easily pocketable so I actually use them. But they came in a package of like 30 when I've needed maybe 5 of them including the ones I've given to people.
My reply will probably be lost in all the comments, but when they banned plastic bags here, many stores (Target, Safeway etc) introduced fairly thick plastic bags that they sell for 10c. The way they get around it is they label them as "reusable" - because they're quite sturdy/thick.
But other than being thicker and stiffer, they look just like the old plastic bags.
Most people I know don't know they're reusable (and probably don't care). So they use them as single use bags. It's only 10 cents.
Textbook case of unintended consequence of regulation.
> Though intended to be reused many times, the report says 90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times. So they are piling up in landfills and homes. Think of your own behavior in misplacing bags around the house or forgetting to bring them when heading out for groceries.
I have a hard time believing it's 90%. Seriously?
They aren't that cheap and it's easy to keep track of them.
People aren't buying new reusable bags because they lost them. They're buying because they went to a store and forgot to bring a bag, and therefore forced to buy a "reusable" bag, even though they already have 10 at home.
> They aren't that cheap and it's easy to keep track of them.
I think some folks may be thinking of different types of reusable bags. Where I live the "default" reusable bags at the grocery store, which are basically pretty similar to disposable but bigger with thicker plastic, are 29 cents. They do sell hardier bags that you can by that are like $1.25. But I think tons of folks throw away those $.29 bags after one or two uses.
Here, they're only 8 cents each -- not much incentive to treat them as reusable. Plus these "reusable" plastic bags are magnets for dirt and difficult to clean.
Heavy duty plastic bags might work great if you always keep them in your car.
But I live in NYC where you carry everything by hand -- and people certainly aren't always carrying empty bags with them, the way you might if you had a trunk.
There are two supermarkets I go to where they don't have paper bags, but will charge you $0.25 to $0.45 for a heavy duty plastic bag (two sizes).
I'd say that about a third of the time the person in front of me buys between 1 to 3 of them.
So at least at those locations, the overall usage of plastic has gone way, way up compared to the old thin plastic bags.
Maybe the narrative is obscuring something with statistics. If reusable doesn't really make plastic use go up, and that bag bans are effective in reducing plastic use, the industry opposing them has an incentive to make it look like they are ineffective. They're using the same tactics the tobacco industry used to counter the facts about cigarettes.
Yes, which is why they'd have a interest in publishing studies that make bag bans look useless or counterproductive, because they want to persuade people not to pass or to repeal bans.
When I go grocery shopping, I'm buying probably 20 pounds of veggies, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, etc. along with bulky items like tortilla chips. If you use the woven plastic bags that you carry in your hands (like the old plastic bags but twice the size), you need 4 -- two for each hand.
There are also the jumbo super-heavy bags you get from e.g. FreshDirect where you only need one and you sling it over your shoulder, but those things are huge even folded up and I don't want to be carrying around one of those regularly. Folded, they're thicker than my laptop...
Do you not plan to go grocery shopping or do you always do it on the spur of the moment?
I'm not sure what the issue is. If you need to pick up something small from the store on the way somewhere you can definetly get a small always carry on you bag that will fit in a pocket.
When you're going to actual go grocery shopping just bring the bigger reusable bags. If the purpose of the journey is shopping it's not inconvenient to carry those bags and you'll have to carry the grocies back anyhow.
I get that it's less conventient to have to remember a bag but it's not some insurmountable task and it does seem to reduce the amount of plastic bags that get caught by the wind and blow around as trash.
Spur of the moment -- my schedule is always changing. I know I need to go sometime during the week but it's totally going to depend on when I happen to have free time on the way home, and I generally won't know that until I'm heading home. It might be Tuesday, or it might not be till Friday.
Always having a bunch of bags on me just isn't a thing, not when you walk and take the subway everywhere and don't want to be lugging around a backpack when you go out for drinks and have nowhere to put it when you're standing around a bar.
I'll take the big bag when it's on the weekend and I'm making a special trip to the supermarket, but there isn't always an opportunity for that either.
Yeah, at $0.50 I’m just going to buy a few and throw them away after. It’s not worth $1.50 of my time to shlep a bag to the grocery store. You’d have to make the bags a lot more expensive to influence primary behavior.
When I went to Germany for the first time in around 2009 they didn't have any bags at the grocery store checkout. You either carried you shopping in your arms or took one of the cardboard boxes they brought out from the deliveries, if there were some left.
You remember your own bags after that.
At that time in the UK free disposable bags were in full force. Although i do remember when i was young we used to take shopping home in cardboard boxes stacked at the front of the store in the same way as they had in Germany still.
> It’s not worth $1.50 of my time to shlep a bag to the grocery store.
We keep a few reusable bags in the way-back of the (cross-over) vehicle; it's now a habit to grab the bags as we're getting out of the car in the grocery-store parking lot. Then after we get home and put the groceries away, we return the bags to the way-back of the car before closing the garage door.
There are a number of bag that pack down to self enclosed things smaller than a phone. When I lived in Chicago, and rarely drove anywhere, I had two of them in my coat pocket.
Summer time I was always biking anyway, and used my backpack.
> There are a number of bag that pack down to self enclosed things smaller than a phone.
Are the bags of a reasonable size when expanded? Can you please link me? I've never found anything both big enough to be useful and small enough to keep in my pants pocket at all times.
Ijust linked above. I never used these specifically, but similar. Plenty big enough (definitely better for carrying things than disposable plastic bags)
They fold flat and wouldn't cause much bother in a pocket but I personally don't like anything at all in my pockets. I keep them in my satchel and they are unnoticeable in one of those flat pouch sections that are pretty useless for anything even as slim as a wallet or phone.
They won't last forever but good for a few years so far. They have survived when I have stocked up on canned goods.
In my experience, higher-end national chains offer paper bags for $0.05 each (Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, etc.) and don't sell the $0.50 plastic ones at checkout, while the local chains (FoodTown, Associated, etc.) only sell the plastic ones and don't offer paper.
Couldn't imagine buying a damned plastic bag every single time I went shopping for groceries. I've been using the same fabric bags for 15 years. It is such stupidity, being to lazy to pack a bag, that humanity wastes resources on.
>It is such stupidity, being to lazy to pack a bag, that humanity wastes resources on.
It's spending resources for convenience. It's not fundamentally different than buying coffee at starbucks (therefore necessitating a plastic lined paper cup).
wow where'd those goalposts just go? I was over here, at "buying at Starbucks *necessitates* (OP's term) using a plastic lined, paper cup". Which is false.
The OP (who was not me) should not have said "necessitates". However, I don't think the distinction is significant given how few Starbucks customers use reusable cups.
why would you cite a "study" that's commissioned by an industry trade group where their entire purpose for existing and for which they are paid millions of dollars is to ensure that plastic bags are not banned?
oh right, it's odd numbered days that HN is all "There's a reproducibility crisis! 85% of studies are complete garbage!" this is an even numbered day, HN is all "this study done by a fully biased source that's by definition a conflict of interest is fully iron clad and irrefutable!"
know your days on HN when each version of reality is in effect!
If you go Whole Foods and watch a checkout station, what percent of purchases will reuse a bag vs buy a bag. I think the ratio of reuse:buy will be less than 3:1.
I've thrown away a ton of polypropylene bags because stuff leaked or you just accumulate too many.
Those bags are so thick that throwing away one is like throwing away 500 of the other super thin plastic bags. There's no way the equation makes sense for most people no matter how much we want to believe it.
You throw them because something leaked. Why not clean it with a cloth?
I've used the same 3 long lasting plastic bags for the weekly shop for around 4 years now. I take a couple of thinner ones I reuse when just going to get a few things. Ive had some of those for years as well.
I'm in the UK, we went to Canada last year. It was crazy how much disposable plastic i saw walking out the doors of Costco and other large grocery stores. Also, Costco put milk in a plastic bag in Canada! Why not a rigid plastic container that can be recycled?
How much does it cost to clean the cloth? How much time and effort relative to the cost of the bag?
This is why targeting specific products to reduce consumption is stupid. Just hit all fossil fuels with higher and higher taxes if you want less fossil fuel consumption. Or all products an externalities tax if you want less waste.
When the inside has gotten coated with sticky chicken salmonella juices because of a leaking package, and the bottom has gross dirt from sitting on the sidewalk and subway, and the bag is made of a woven plastic so that the juices and dirt seep in...
...it's entirely understandable that you just trash it rather than attempt to clean it. This is what you carry food and fresh produce in, after all.
Sure if it is horrible it might be necessary, if warm water and disinfectant spray don't sort it out. We have not had our grocery shopping leak that badly that I can remember.
It really depends on the supermarket. If they sell the expensive chicken that comes sealed in rigid plastic from the "manufacturer", it doesn't leak. But that's double the price. When you're buying the normal-priced chicken that the supermarket apportions out into those yellow styrofoam trays that they then seal in plastic themselves... ugh. Chicken juice everywhere.
I see, meat packaging is different in the UK. Styrofoam trays are not used in any major stores, they all use the same rigid sealed containers, even the cheap options.
Butchers cutting meat for you is much less common in store now, those that do have a butchers counter wrap it in a plastic bag which seals it pretty well. Small independent shops might do it differently.
I think in general those styrofoam trays are not used much because they can't be recycled. You still find them used by some takeaway food places though.
Because cleaning it is a PITA and I've accumulated dozens of them when I went shopping and didn't have a bag/didn't have enough bags and was forced to buy another heavy "reusable forever" bag because the lighter options were either banned or removed to appear more green.
I don't think you should throw away polypropylene bags because they got a little dirty. They're easily washable.
That said, the main benefit of these heavier bags is that they tend not to blow out of dumpsters and landfills in the wind, the way thin single-use plastic bags do. A bit of plastic in a landfill isn't great, but entire forests and waterways choked with plastic bags is vastly worse. E.g.,: https://www.frontiersman.com/opinions/spectrum-plastic-bags-...
There's no way the average person is washing their grocery bags in the clothes washer.
Sounds like that could coat your washer with microplastics that might end up in your clothes and against your skin all day. That may not be the best idea.
Pretty much any synthetic fabric, which includes most fitness wear, is going to fill your laundry and washer with microplastics. However the real problem occurs in the dryer, which heats the stuff and produces dust. Running some relatively solid plastic bags through a washer (only) is probably 999 on a list of 1000 things to worry about regarding microplastics in your home.
As far as what “the average person will do,” I’ve never personally had a hygiene problem with reusable plastic bags that couldn’t be solved with a sponge or a Lysol wipe in 30 seconds. But if the OP is really suffering with large numbers of dirty bags, a gentle wash with detergent is the simplest and most effective answer. At a certain point, it feels like this discussion is more about preferences re: reusable bags and less about trying to solve problems.
That "study" was commissioned by a trade group whose sole purpose is to lobby against plastic bag bans, and whose members consist of entities who have a direct profit motive in disposable plastic bag sales.
This is, almost literally, equivalent to citing a press release by Big Oil as evidence against anthropogenic climate change.
That's reason to be suspicious, but not a reason to dismiss it outright. Trials for covid vaccines were done by the manufacturers, who certainly have a profit motive in claiming they're safe and effective. Do you dismiss those trials for similar reasons?
> Trials for covid vaccines were done by the manufacturers, who certainly have a profit motive in claiming they're safe and effective. Do you dismiss those trials for similar reasons?
One is a set of clinical trials, conducted with prepublished scientific methodology peer reviewed, independently evaluated by a regulatory agency, and subsequently independently studied by independent researchers. The other is a self-published press release.
Anyone who tries to draw an equivalence between the two either has no idea how the scientific method actually works, or is simply not arguing in good faith.
This is about as biased a report as one can get! An opinion piece by a Rupert Murdoch editorial staff citing a threatened industry conducting research on itself.
I’m highly skeptical of the idea that people are throwing away their reusable bags after 2-3 uses.
They’re also hand-waving away the concept of alternative lower carbon disposable materials, because it’s a plastic bag industry association.
My guess is it's something like that famous "daycare late fee" study that was widely discussed after Freakonomics reported on it, https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/what-makes-people-do-what-t.... Essentially, the fee wasn't high enough to cause parents to need to be on time, instead the fee was more like something to pay off their guilt, so adding the fee caused more lateness in parental pickups. I.e. before there was a late fee, parents would feel somewhat guilty if they were late. After the late fee, they didn't feel bad - after all, they were basically paying to be late.
My suspicion with these kinds of bags, which are very cheap and honestly feel just a bit sturdier than disposable baggs, is that the same dynamic is at play. People feel like "I'm a good environmentalist for reusing this bag once or twice" and then toss them.
Me. I've tried again and again, but they all wind up in a pile at home. I forget to empty them and take them. They're never in the car when I need them.
I probably have had twenty to thirty reusable bags. Most of them get thrown away.
Not everyone is built the same way. I think this is hard/impossible for people with ADHD to manage.
FWIW, I have ADHD, and once I amassed like 30 of these things, I kept as many as possible stuffed inside one of them in my car. Then, I had like 30 opportunities between then and when I ran out to remember to bring all my bags to the car again. It worked out well. Now my grocery store has a give-a-bag, take-a-bag stand which is even better.
The scenario is this: you show up to the grocery store and you don’t have a reusable bag today. Maybe you forgot to re-stash it in your car after bringing in groceries last time, maybe you walked there and don’t carry a bag on you.
If you live in a state with a single-use bag ban, your options are: buy a reusable bag for 50 cents, or travel 15 mins round trip to grab one of your bags.
Once you get home, you note that you already have a dozen reusable bags so you throw it away and stash one of your existing ones for next time.
I use reusable bags a lot, and did even before single-use ones were taxed, but maybe 5% of the time, I show up to the grocery store having forgotten one. I’m almost certain if I were in a state with a single-use ban my footprint would be higher (especially because I normally use paper bags when I forget, which have a negligible environmental impact).
IMO, the entire ban was a gift to the plastics industry. I’m sure the margins on these reusable bags are much higher.
I live in CA where we have a ban on single-use plastic bags. We still have single-use paper bags. So your footprint would be the same here, not higher.
That makes sense and I’d support that. In New York and New Jersey all single-use bags are banned and I’m almost positive it’s counterproductive. Especially in NYC where many people aren’t using cars to grocery shop and can’t keep a bag stashed
Yikes. I occasionally forget bags, and appreciate that we can get paper bags here for 20-25 cents. I also reuse those paper bags once or twice, and then use them for collecting compost on my countertop, and then throw the whole bag in the big city compost bin. This system means I don't need to clean or line a proper countertop compost container.
We absolutely should price reusable bags higher then.
If I forget my bags and I don't have many groceries I'll just not use bags at all. Otherwise I'll use paper, which isn't great but it's not adding to plastic trash.
Also plastic bags are generally around a $1. I'm not throwing those away, economic reasons and on principle.
The plastic bags in places like NYC are usually 25-50 cents. It’s stupid to force those on people when paper bags exist and barely have an effect on the environment. Also, half the grocery stores in the US only stock things like spinach in plastic containers or bags. There’s much lower hanging fruit than banning single-use paper bags.
I think one thing that may be misunderstood is that many of these chains have "reusable" bags that are very hefty plastic bags but are not the very durable reusable bags made of cloth/canvas or materials, the ones which are basically tote bags. I think the people who buy these more expensive bags tend to use them more than 3 times. But the ones that cost 99 cents at the register end up getting repurchased everytime someone forgets their bags. It took me a while to get into the habit and I know I have about 60 of those accumulated from the last 10 years of occasionally forgetting them. The bags I do reuse tend to get used many many times, but the rest might get used just once, because I already have a pile of them. If i remember my bags, I take the nice ones. If I forget, I have to buy new hefty "reusable" bags.
This seems like a setup to counter the bag bans by the plastic industry.
It’s not like paper bags, which are incredibly compostable and recyclable, didn’t exist before this entire plastic nonsense came to fruition. And they are readily available, domestically produced and work great.
All we need are better handles because they aren’t great for carrying long distances and break catastrophically instead of stretching like plastic. Not great.
This is an interesting attempt by the industry most affected by the bans[1] to reframe the problem. Plastic bag bans address the nature of the system by applying a systemic solution, taking the responsibility off the individual.
Here we see the industry lobbying group trying to reframe it to put the responsibility – fault, really – back on the individual.
The report more-or-less is saying that the systemic solution doesn't work because individuals are irresponsible. The WSJ editorial doesn't even try to hid its bias. "Think of your own behavior", it says.
1 The ARPBA is connected to the Society of the Plastics Industry, an industry trade group.
That all makes sense to me, but I'd just add that another issue not discussed there is litter. I used to live downtown by a big grocery store, and close to the store there was a creek that ran by. Before the bag ban there were always tons of plastic grocery bags in the creek and along its banks. After the ban, I'm not saying the creek was pristine (it is an urban creek in a major American city, after all), but there was way, way less plastic bag litter after the ban, and it made the walkway that ran alongside the creek much nicer.
Never a fan of suggested "solutions" that are laughably implausible. Even if you support public canings for everyone ever caught dropping a plastic bag, can we not pretend that something like that could ever be implemented in the Western world? Plastic bag bans can.
I was referring to a legal solution to plastic bag littering, which is what "broken windows theory" refers to.
The differences in littering in, say, Japan, have nothing to do with legal differences, because they're cultural. Cultures differ, and they have benefits and downsides. Trying to implement a legal solution to bag littering in the US would work about as well as trying to implement a legal solution in India to get people to stay within their lane when they drive.
A lot of times litter is not from littering. A home trash can's lid blows open in a strong wind and litter flies out. Trash escapes from an urban trash can. Trash flies out of the back of a garbage truck, etc.
The biggest cause in my neighborhood is the pickup process itself: the machine lifts the can in the air, turns it upside down, shakes it, and hopes that it all makes it into the truck.
A lot of smaller stuff doesn't make it in, especially disposable plastic bags, which are basically little parachutes.
I don't know, I haven't spent much time there and have only visited 3 major cities. But in each it was evident that they prioritize cleanliness and order, so I might guess that they generally use cans with better lids.
At around 9pm in downtown Tokyo I stopped to watch a clean up crew scrubbing something of the sidewalk. So perhaps it's partly due to where their tax money goes.
To be clear, I asked this question because I was considering the claim "a lot of times litter is not from littering." It occurred to me that, if this were true, you would expect culture to have less of an effect on the amount of litter in a particular city.
I suppose tax dollars and trash can technology would also be a plausible explanation, but it leaves me less convinced.
The D Foundation had our annual conference a few years ago in Ogden, Utah. There was something unusual about the city, something it took me a while to figure out.
There was an almost complete lack of litter.
I don't know how the city did it, but I was impressed, and it made the urban landscape much nicer.
I bought rather large plastic totes. Way better than bags. Not as easy to store, mind you, but that’s actually beneficial cause it makes me bring them back out to the car. Forgetting my reusable bags was a major problem.
Still a wide success for the Environmental Theater: focus all attention on plastic bags (why so specific? plastic is used in way, way too many things already), which is used by consumers. It doesn’t matter if the use of plastic is reduced.
Just spin the wheels and point fingers. It’s much simpler than solving environmental problems.
Along those lines: instead of banning plastic bags, or bottles, or straws, or whatever, why not simply ban plastic altogether? People managed to do without until the 1950s. Is there any use case for which there are no alternatives?
That's very interesting finding. I can see how people buy the reusable bags more frequently than might be originally though. I often forget that I brought my bags in from my car and have to mentally remember to keep a couple in my trunk for the times when I'm out shopping. To be honest, because I have a car, when I forget, I just forgo the bag entirely and load everything in my trunk anyways.
I've settled on using the catering bags from Panera because they
- come with catering orders anyway
- are incredibly heavy duty, I've used them dozens of times and they still are in great shape
- are very large
- usually just get trashed after the lunch
My workplace caters lunches once a week or so, and so there's been plenty of bags leftover at the end so...
edit a quick look on ebay shows that there's a secondary market for the bags where they go for around $10 each.
This is a lobby group. Their goal is to produce and sell as much plastic as they can. The more people reuse plastic bags, the less money they make. Their argument is worth as much as that of the tobacco lobby. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, just that they sure won’t quote any ideas or statistics in favour of reuse.
Don’t forget, folks: “recyclable” is an extremely low bar. Most things are recyclable. But many recyclable products are still so expensive (and energy-hungry) to actually recycle that the term is borderline meaningless.
Reuse trumps recyclable by a wide margin and anybody telling you otherwise is either working in a very narrow set of industries (eg paper) or malicious.
Pointing out that research was paid for by an organization that has an inherent conflict of interest is an extremely valid argument. It doesn't necessarily mean that the research was biased or shoddy, but it absolutely should cause us to take their conclusions with a healthy helping of salt.
You will still need to point out the actual ignored facts or false claim to substantiate the bias claim, otherwise it is an extremely cheap argument that everyone else could use the same argument as most people represent some interest group.
It's not really about the claim being "true" or "untrue". It's about being clear from the outset, based on their obvious conflicts of interests, that this organization is only going to report on study outcomes that benefit their perspective, even if they are true. For example, given all the evidence I've seen on this topic, I believe all of the following are highly likely to be true:
1. Disposable plastic bag bans significantly reduce plastic bag litter and its effects on urban quality of life and the environment.
2. Most reusable plastics bags are only used once or few times before they are discarded.
3. Given #2, the amount of fossil fuels used to produce the reusable bags makes them a net negative in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
The basic problem with all discourse these days is that depending on your "side", you only talk about the items that benefit your viewpoint. American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance only talks about #2 and #3. At least the group referenced in the original article agrees that the current situation leads to more plastic being generated and should be corrected:
“Grocery stores, restaurants and retail shops should not be permitted to distribute plastic film bags of any thickness at checkout. Stores should be required to charge a fee of at least 10 cents for single-use paper bags. A 10-cent paper bag fee will limit the expected increase in paper bag use after a bag ban is imposed and may even reduce paper bag consumption altogether.”
It doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think where they are coming from as long as yourself follows on logic and facts. Almost every one in such a discussion is biased. You can still point out what they ignored or misled than merely stating a universal argument when you disagree.
The point isn't that the original commenter doesn't like them, it's that this is a lobbying group. As such, they have no credibility on this topic. So, in any discussion involving them, everything they say needs to be looked at as a ploy in support of their agenda, because it is their job to do that. To treat their word the same as anyone else's on this topic would be very stupid.
If I remember correctly, the effects of that study were driven by grocery delivery. People would have the bags pile up due to a lack of a bag-return process. (Please double check, though.)
>Though intended to be reused many times, the report says 90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times.
This is easily fixed. I know because I fixed myself and if I can change this behavior anyone can.
I've been using the same three cloth bags to carry my groceries once per week for over ten years.
That's, at a bare minimum (because they hold more), 1,560 plastic bags not used.
How does the carbon carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions of 1,560 plastic bags compare to the three "Earthwise EXTRA LARGE Grocery Bag Beach Shopping Tote HEAVY DUTY 12 oz Cotton Canvas Multi Purpose 20" x 14" PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA (Natural)" that I purchased for $13.99 for in 2012?
Yes, it took me a while to get in the habit of using them. A frustratingly long time. But it happened.
My county recently banned ALL plastic bags so for the occasional drug store or gas station purchase that used to come in a plastic bag I purchased a packable tote that stuffs down to the size of a pack of playing cards and keep it in my center console of my car.
That habit was established instantly.
I know for an unassailable and irrefutable fact that bans work because I am a volunteer watershed steward. It is my job to poke around storm drains and shorelines in my little section of the Chesapeake Bay to make sure they are clean. Less than 90 days (four big cleanup pushes per year) after a styrofoam ban was enacted several years ago the amount of styrofoam I was personally responsible for picking up off the shoreline plummeted from "a depressingly large shit-ton" down to almost nothing.
This sounds great, but there’s just something about a shopping experience with plastic bags that just warms my heart. Life is a human experience, and localities shouldn’t legislate away all the fun.
I’m old enough to remember when, even outdated at the time, one would see people carry (or push, or pull) a basket between shops or stalls engaging with others. To me that was a better human experience than currently experienced at a supermarket.
In terms of cleaning up roadside litter in my area, I would anecdotally agree. But echoing the other comments, the alternative reusable bags I get mostly just wind up being shoved in the closet or thrown away when the handles inevitably rip on the 3rd use. At least the old style bags were waterproof enough double as handy trash can liners.
Sure, banning plastic bags means that there are less plastic bags. But that's a low bar to meet to call the result a success.
For example, did the ban reduce the total amount of plastic produced? Plausibly, no it did not.
From the report:
> Because of the loophole in California’s bag ban allowing the use of thicker plastic bags, the amount of plastic bags discarded per person (by weight) actually increased in the years after the implementation of the ban.
Did the ban on plastic make a meaningful reduction in co2 emissions? Did it make people happier? Did it make a meaningful improvement to the environment?
> Did the ban on plastic make a meaningful reduction in co2 emissions? Did it make people happier? Did it make a meaningful improvement to the environment?
Those are the questions to ask.
Instead, many people focus on behaviour control fantasies & gotchas.
This is a joke. I go to my store and now they give you beefier “reusable” plastic bags. There is many times more plastic in these bags than the old ones.
The point is that you aren't reusing them. Comments like this are after they banned people smoking indoors, complaining "all this did was make us walk outside, which is a huge waste of time."
The point is to change behavior. If you're choosing not to change your behavior, that's fine. Most people are changing their behavior.
This is such a red herring. The entire country is wearing polyester and other plastic clothing that breaks down and sheds microplastics in EVERY single laundry cycle into the water. Millions of cars driving every single day wear down tires shedding microplastics into the air, soil, and ground. Millions of packages with styrofoam padding are breaking down into tiny spherical plastic balls as we speak. We're absolutely systemically fucked and plastic bags and straws are genius levels of distraction from these unsolvable modern conveniences.
Once I went on vacation to a tropical island. I went to a grocery store on the island. I didn't bring a bag because I was a doofus who had not previously lived or traveled to a tropical island.
There were no plastic bags. There were no paper bags. There was no option to pay money to get a reusable grocery bag like we see in the US. If you were a doofus like me who didn't bring some kind of bag, you only had two options. One was to miraculously carry your stuff home without bags. The other was to use the cardboard boxes that used to contain produce, if there were any left over.
We carried our groceries back to the hotel in a cardboard box that previously contained fruit.
It was a minor hassle in the moment, but I also realized that's how it should be everywhere. There are probably already enough bags in the world for all the carrying that humans need to do. Of course bags wear out, so we need to keep producing some amount of bags, but not many. Most stores should simply not have any kind of bag whatsoever. If you don't bring something of your own, you should be mostly SoL.
People on tropical islands don't really use cars. I don't think most of the readers on HN understand the level of sacrifice required from everyone to avoid the worst of what's coming. It's going to require a lot more from everyone than using reusable bags while shopping or avoiding straws/using metal ones.
I agree these environmental laws are simply green washing. But if people think these generate too much resentment they're wholly unprepared for what the moment requires. Like not eating meat with every single meal every single day of the week. Not having two cars per family regardless of whether they're ICE or not. Eliminating short-haul flights and restricting international travel.
US consumers are used to overconsuming. Correcting for that will feel like a punishment to most. I don't see an alternative besides telling people to treat it like a world war. "Victory gardens" and all.
>I don't think most of the readers on HN understand the level of sacrifice required from everyone to avoid the worst of what's coming. It's going to require a lot more from everyone than using reusable bags while shopping or avoiding straws/using metal ones.
To be frank, I don't think we will avoid the worst of what's coming. Because a lot of it isn't in control of consumers but from business emissions.
e.g. wouldn't mind the ability to stop using my car tomorrow if I had reliable bus schedules that weren't separated by an hour per stop, but I have no faith that the transportation for my city will ever fix that in a timely matter. There's also negative inventive from stuff like ride-shares to want to fix that. WFH is another way to cut down on emissions to compute but instead companies are hunkering back down because they gotta justify their sunk cost on buildings.
That's 2 of some dozen problems that could prevent the worst but whose cards aren't completely in the hands of the person. It just feels so hopeless.
that's not business emissions though, that's a government problem
change in government comes from people. capable government looks at real societal problems and shapes the future of the state to address them. of course public transport is a huge one, especially in the US
> People on tropical islands don't really use cars.
They do and do so extensively in some places.
I have been to Wallis and Futuna islands, two very small islands in the Pacific being French overseas territories where the transportation around each island is exclusively by car and locals drive around all the time. They would only walk to the nearest fale and drive at all other times. Petrol was expensive (that was around EUR 2.5 a litre approximately a decade ago) but the French government nearly entirely subsidises it due to the two islands' economies being too small to cover extra costs.
I would be fine with this outcome (even as someone who would find it personally annoying), but it's not the reality we live in today. You'd have to actually mandate this by law.
The half measures we currently have are the worst of both worlds. They inconvenience people and increase fossil fuel emissions.
Costco seems to have perfected it by rarely having enough boxes at the cash, so forward-thinking customers do their job for them by grabbing boxes from the product shelves.
I think selling fully reusable cloth bags would be the right thing to do, but otherwise I agree that stores shouldn't offer single-use plastic bags any more.
In NZ after the single-use plastic bag ban some people argued against only having high quality reusable bags available by saying "but I keep forgetting my reusable bags, and I so I keep having to buy more! Now I have 15 cloth bags at home - this is far more wasteful than when we had single-use plastic bags."
But those complaints came in the first few weeks after the ban, and they dried up soon enough. Everyone learns eventually that they need to take their bags with them - at least I hope nobody is sitting at home now, five years after the ban, with 1000 reusable cloth bags.
P.S. I've found jute bags the best value for money. They seem to really last forever whereas the thin cloth type start wearing out after a while.
In Canada this is an issue. The 'reusable' bags aren't cloth -- they're still a weave made from plastic. And it can be tied to culture and availability. It's much easier to 'remember' your bags if you're making a dedicated trip to the grocery store from home. But, if you want to spontaneously stop in after work, for example, you would have had to remembered a bag before you left home or had one on you at all times. We should be encouraging the type of city design that allows for (and encourages!) this type of spontaneous shopping. We should figure out the bagging system to match. Recyclable/compostable paper bags seem like a good thing.
All of my of my on-the-go shopping without thinking about it beforehand have much smaller quantities than the one I specifically think about (especially because in Germany I usually take some bottles with me to deposit at the store), for that a smaller, foldable bag in my backpack has served me very well.
I always thought the plastic bags deal was not seeing the forest through the trees. Most food comes in heavy plastic. The food is consumed in a day or so, and the plastic lasts FOREVER. Forcing the companies to use paper or glass packaging, or having reusable returnable containers would have a bigger impact than banning those thin plastic bags.
The main issue there, imo, is that plastic is the main technology used to protect and seal food items, thereby making them last longer without spoiling. A good part of the world's food trade and economy now relies upon it. There would be mass starvation without it.
Plastic has saved humanity insane amounts of energy over the short term, and has contributed to our population growth. The resulting environmental debt is mindbendingly massive, and I'm not convinced that the corporate world will willingly pay it. It will be paid though, one way or another, because Laws of Physics, entropy etc.
A bring your own bag/bottle/container store would be cool. Everything would be shipped in bulk to the grocery store, and people would take what they want in their own containers.
Some such outlets do exist. Its also reminiscent of older style open-air food markets. But globally speaking, the short term charms of plastics clearly won the economic race. The same cheap, low effort, high resistance elements that make plastics such an environmental problem are also the factors which dictated its use.
True, but who says laws stop there in the coming years? I sincerely hope these things will come aswell. Banning non reusable plastic bags however is a good and easy start.
The problem at least where I live in Europe is that people stopped
buying grocery plastic bags, which is good.
But they were frequently re-used as garbage bags.
Now people instead buy plastic garbage bag rolls.
So even if the consumption of plastic shopping bags has decreased,
the consumption of plastic garbage bags has greatly increased.
Might well be easier to recycle the garbage bags.
One could hope.
Anecdotally, people in my life used to buy plastic garbage bags and use shopping bags as garbage bags (or dog poop bags) in smaller-sized garbage bins. Also anecdotally, despite the fact that I almost always grocery shop with reusable bags, I still somehow have plenty of plastic bags under my sink at any given time to use in my smaller trash bins. There are plenty of non-grocery places I get plastic bags: CVS, take out meals, Home Depot. These more than fill my need for small plastic garbage bags.
Where we live they don’t give free bags at CVS or other stores. I think restaurants may have an exception for take out, but those bags often get sauce spilled all over the inside, making them unsuitable for saving or reuse (except immediately, as a trash bag).
> Where I live (Silicon Valley), paper and plastic bags were both subject to the same treatment. In Menlo Park you can buy bags when you shop for $.25 each. The plastic bags at Safeway are much thicker (i.e., use more plastic, and are hypothetically reusable more times) than before. The paper bags are the same as before, but now you pay for them (the revenue goes to the store).
Thin grocery (and garbage) bags are sheet polyethylene, the plastic of which is just as recyclable as milk bottles. They are not accepted in many curbside recycling programs because the separation tech is not designed for them, not because the plastic itself is not recyclable. They are recyclable (and frequently recycled) via dedicated collection points. (Most of our grocery stores have them.)
They are recyclable. But because of their low weight, high amounts of contamination, and constant ability to get stuck in conveyor belts... Thin plastic bags are more trouble than they are worth.
It's like Aluminum foil. Recycling plants are paid per ton of recycled material, and it takes lots and lots of aluminum foil before a ton of Aluminum is saved up.
Except plastic is way harder to recycle than Aluminum (requires higher purities).
It depends of course, on where you are and what type of recycling schemes are available. As a general rule, “don’t put plastic bags in with your regular recycling” is correct. But we have a very successful ‘soft plastic’ recycling scheme in New Zealand that results in useful products (I have 52 fence posts made with thousands of recycled milk bottles and plastic bags).
I never bought trash bags before these bans went into effect. Now it’s one of our subscribe and saves.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the net effect was that we are using more plastic now than before, even though we use reusable bags most of the time when we go shopping.
grocery bags are made from newly produced plastic (sametimes clean recycled ak highest grade, because food requirements).
Garbage bags, on the other hand, are made from the lowest possible grade recycl, which can't be recycled.
Littering is the problem solved by charging for or banning free carrier bags, not usage of plastic bags. If your rubbish goes to landfill, don't expect a reduction in rubbish bags as a component. They're very light though.
IMO it's better to incinerate them. That's what Switzerland does. I think it largely works, as long as you have enough routes to take dangerous chemicals (electronics and batteries mostly, heavy metals) out of the the waste pipeline.
There’s been some research showing the effect you’re seeing is real.
> We estimate that CGB [carryout grocery bag] regulations lead to an average increase in purchased plastics of 127 pounds per store per month, ranging from 30 to 135 (37–224) pounds for 4-gallon (8-gallon) trash bags.
As a regular diver in the Baltic ocean, my experience is aligned with the finding that the ban on plastic bags and utensils did have a real noticeable effect. Before the ban I saw trash every dive. Now it is much less common, closer to 1/10 of how it was before.
Nowadays the most common trash I see are beer cans.
So the solution to plastic bags, is heavier and sturdier plastic bags. Does anyone think this is a bit of a farce. I like the heavier bags, just feels bad to throw them out, since they keep piling up, I'll have to. My dog likes tearing them apart.
I associate reusable bags with communism, since I literally had to use reusable bags living in a communist country. And I now associate their introduction with a parallel decline of living standards, and inflation in Canada. Much like I experienced in a communist country which my parents escaped from.
This association is not just me, but many fellow Canadians equate the carbon tax with it as well. Since most likely the decline in affordability of life, people going hungry and cold will lead to voting people out that brought in these policies. Will the people that brought in these policies resolve to do away with democracy to keep them in place. It's something I'm not excited to see. So having a plan B to escape just like my parents did, would seem prudent at this point.
I associate re-usable bags with caring about not wasting things. You seem to value the ability to waste things. You do not seem to think it's worth preventing your dog from destroying your bags. You do not seem to exercise care to actually re-use the bags, since you say they are piling up in your home. If the standard of living is facing such a precipitous decline that you are potentially planning an escape, why would you casually throw away useful items, and continue to spend money on new items when you don't actual need to? What would you think of a person that leaves their car idling at all times and complains that they are oppressed by an increase in gas prices?
The bags are my property, I worked for them. The collectivists fail to understand this very important part. If you want to re-use yours, you're free to do so. Mandating me to do so, is opposite of personal freedom.
At this point in time, Canadians are getting taxed on taxes.
If you fail to see that this is unsustainable, maybe you'll understand that for all the taxes you're paying, should you get sick, the government will more quickly offer to end you than to give you an MRI. In fact, they just passed a law that promises to jail for 10 years anyone that try's to dissuade you from letting them end you.
So it has been my experience that the collectivists don't really care about human life, as much as they say they care.
Collectivist utopias never are...
So I am looking, like many fellow Canadians, for a second home, in case things deteriorate any further.
Personal freedom is weighed against the freedom of others. That is why you cannot dispose of your waste in a water reservoir that supplies drinking water. The life of any product has an impact on shared resources that your work has not earned. Policies that aim to protect these shared resources are a logical solution for people who care about their country and the people in it.
yes, but I already paid taxes for the recycling plant & the garbage dump, taxes on the oil that made the bag, the store I purchased the bag from, and I paid money for the bag.
At what point will the bag be finally mine, and I just be able to bag my groceries in peace ?
No really, what do you people want from me?
The more taxes I pay for things like this, the more I empower people that think like you, to just hire more ideologically alined people to fill government and academia positions. It's worse than a clergy take over.
The war on plastic bags (in the USA) was dumb. They are a tiny tiny percentage of plastic pollution and paper bags actually take up more space at the landfill and a LOT more energy to manufacture to the same strength and usability. The truth is even more so for canvas bags. I live where the war never happened and I just stuff them under the cabinet until it gets full and then I take them to the grocery store where they are properly recycled, and the store reports how that happens.
Sure, if you recycle them then that makes it much better for the environment. The problem is most people don't recycle them.
Not so sure on the energy usage, if feels like the manufacturing and recycling chain would be more energy intensive than creating something that can be reused for years.
>paper bags actually take up more space at the landfill
and are biodegradable
>a LOT more energy to manufacture
which could be done with renewables
But again, the point of all this is to get people to reuse bags in the long run. If you just assume that people will mindlessly always need bags at every store they visit, you're missing the point. It's a simple cultural change, and it has to start somewhere, and it will always be imperfect, and older generations will always be uncomfortable with it.
Like others here have mentioned, I reused the grocery store thin bags for lining small bathroom trash cans or when scooping cat litter. Now I need to buy special trash bags instead so no environmental savings. I also have a ridiculous number of the reusable bags as I forget to bring them when going to the store sometimes, or end up stopping by the store unexpectedly.
One thing I never figured out was why they made the original bags so thin that in the end, the clerk needed to double-bag everything.
one thing which doesn't seem to mentioned here is that paper bags are not a one-to-one replacement.
a plastic bag is a useful item that is used over and over again.
a paper bag is an awful noisy, loud and inflexible item that is immediately discarded after use. even people that would be willing to use them more than once (i am definitely not), cannot do that due to how easy they get torn.
so, instead of buying a handful plastic bags per year, i now have to buy hundreds of paper bags.
even accounting for improved recyclability, is it really a net-benefit if the amount of required items (paper vs plastic) increases for a factor of around 20 - 40?
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] thread> According to one eye-popping estimate, a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to make it a truly environmentally friendly alternative to a conventional plastic bag.
I guess I think it just sort of misses the point. It's like if they were to say "oh we should keep burning fossil fuels instead of solar because solar uses 1000x more land" but then didn't mention or compare CO2 emission.
Source: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
(First time I've posted hoping I'm wrong and get down voted and yelled at for spreading FUD, haha. But I've seen this figure a lot)
The other advantage is that cotton bags do not shed as many microplastics (the thread is almost always synthetic).
Many of the "re-usable" woven plastic bags I've acquired in recent years are of extremely poor quality. I have had to re-stitch many of them, and some had to be discarded after a very short service life.
Most people are not though, for various reasons, most commonly not caring enough. Plastic bag legislatures should keep that in mind if they want to do more than pass a feel good law.
I don't think it's FUD exactly, I think it's just a bit of a weird analysis that focuses on the wrong things.
Is this based on your feelings/sentiment, or do you have some hard data to back up this baseless assumption?
Also it seems like every store around only has non machine-washable reusable bags. Any meat or vegetable leaks in there and they'll quickly become disgusting.
Having grown up in Western Canada, no one does more whinging and complaining than Albertans. Every little thing, from taxes to masks, is a huge imposition. But the whinging is then rationalized as "defending freedom".
In my childhood days everything got recycled. Glass bottles, metals, paper, clothing, vegetable matter (skins, off-cuts) and so on. People made a living going door to door to collect them. Single use plastic was absolutely unheard of.
In my country, single use plastic bags were replaced with thicker reusable plastic bags that many people discard after a single use. So the total volume of produced/discarded plastic probably increased despite the number of bags used probably going down. I don't have sources other than anecdotal evidence based on behaviours I observe.
if your goal is to eliminate plastic, or fossil fuel emissions, I'm not convinced these bans have been effective.
Edit: Apparently this is commissioned by the plastic industry. It does match my anecdata of how many people I see buying "reusable" bags at the supermarket check out, combined with https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
Plastic bag bans have been sufficiently successful that people have forgotten this was a problem.
What country?
This is what superficial activism looks like.
I’ve never seen one of those beefy reusable carrier bags blowing around on the side of a road.
"a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to make it a truly environmentally friendly alternative to a conventional plastic bag."
The point is not that it helps or doesn't help, the point is "we have to do something!"
Just like it is obvious from a breakdown of the data that is beyond stupid to send one giant diesel burning truck to pick up "garbage" then another giant diesel truck to pick up tin cans and cardboard at a net energy loss. Of course, it is impossible to stop this even if it would be rational thing to do.
"we have to do something!"
Reusable bags carry as much weight and volume as multiple disposable bags. And yes, you can use them hundreds of times. I have used mine every week for years and years.
Disposable plastic grocery bags are wasteful and pointless, and those defending them so virulently come across as bafflingly pathetic.
Require the stores to offer a free paper bag, and allow them to offer an upsell to a handled paper bag.
"This shift from plastic film to alternative bags resulted in a nearly 3x increase in plastic consumption for bags, which is not widely recycled."
https://www.freedoniagroup.com/press-releases/freedonia-repo...
"Commissioned by the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, the report acknowledges that the total number of plastic bags declined by 60% since the ban—as its backers hoped. But because shoppers still had to carry their groceries home, they needed alternatives. Mostly that meant switching from the thin plastic film bags to the heavier, reusable bags now sold in many supermarkets.
The problem is that most of these alternative bags are made of non-woven polypropylene, which takes much more plastic to make and isn’t widely recycled. And what about the supposed climate benefits? Well, the study finds that, owing to the larger carbon footprint of the heavier, non-woven polypropylene bags, greenhouse gas emissions rose 500%. The problem is compounded by the way people use these bags. Though intended to be reused many times, the report says 90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times. So they are piling up in landfills and homes. Think of your own behavior in misplacing bags around the house or forgetting to bring them when heading out for groceries."
So it’s likely for someone to have many bags used a few times and lost and the remainder get used a great deal. Therefore what’s important is the average amount of reuse not simply what happens to individual bags. A single bag used 1,000 times makes up for a 9 used a 2-3 times.
> It shall be capable of carrying 22 pounds over a distance of 175 feet for a minimum of 125 uses.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
I'd bet 1000 uses is within the realm of possibility, but you'll probably need to do some repairs along the way.
Buying these thick plastic bags seems to be what the checkout line guides people to do. Buying a canvas bag would require extra effort. People generally take the path of least resistance.
Or are you expecting a different result?
Yes, from time to time you realize that the entire box full of reusable bags isn't going to be reused. Then you take one of them, stuff it with the others until it's full, and stash that as the "maybe I'll reuse those".
Then you take another one, fill that one with the rest, and put it in the trash.
I could see people forgetting these bags at home for a while as they adjust to their new normal, but the idea that they’re going to be buying these new bags ever other trip to the store because they’re piling up in a room at home for years is hard for me to believe.
Given that the conclusion of that article depends on people never getting good at reusing those bags and instead throwing them away or letting them accumulate forever at home, I have a hard time taking it seriously.
>but the idea that they’re going to be buying these new bags ever other trip to the store because they’re piling up in a room at home for years is hard for me to believe.
What's likely happening is that they go out to buy something, forgot their bag, and is forced to buy a reusable bag. If enough people are forgetful, the "90% of the new reusable bags are used a mere two or three times" seems very plausible to me.
• I'm walking to work / home / a social outing / etc, with no intention of going shopping.
• I pass by a store on the way.
• I now need a bag.
Could I always bring a bag with me when I go out? Yes, but I try to travel as light as possible because I'm walking.
• What spur of the moment shopping are you talking about?
https://seatosummit.com/products/ultra-sil-day-pack - I've had a few different versions of this bag for years. There are also cheaper/bigger/different versions of the same sort of thing you can find online for "packable daypack".
https://nanobag.com/products/nanobag - I have heard good things about these, but I prefer a backpack because it allows me to be hands-free, or to use my hands to hold more items.
However, I would start by carrying a lightweight "single-use" plastic bag, and simply re-use it. Plastic bags are not as strong as these premium bags, but they hold up well enough to be useful in most scenarios.
Near the park there's a great bakery. You see they're having a nice sale on a box of a dozen croissants, and their croissants are the best in the city. So do you:
- Grab a couple boxes, and a reusable bag to carry them in?
- Walk 15 minutes home to get your bag, then 15 minutes back, then 15 minutes back home (45 minutes total) just so you don't pay $3 for a bag?
- Carry around a bag all the time even though you had no intention to buy anything when you left, and use it only a few times over the hundreds of time you leave your apartment?
It's even worse if you have to e.g. jump on a crowded subway.
This not a hypothetical. I learned pretty fast to always bring a mostly empty backpack with me to the park. I pack a couple of beach towels, maybe bring a jacket, and an e-reader. Sometimes I may not lay down on the grass, or not read. Or I may meet with someone and have a towel at the ready for them. But I have multiple options and none of them is a burden.
Carrying an almost empty backpack for a recreational activity takes zero effort, and it can be used to carry groceries on the way back if I want. Each of the things I carry in it is the result of a previous time where I didn’t have it. People in this thread are acting as if this is an intractable problem. It’s not. Every time you’re faced with a problem of this nature think “what could I do to avoid this next time?” then do that.
† Or whatever the latest euphemism is for a purse carried by a man
Looks like you’re not willing to endure any inconvenience, however minor, to avoid buying the plastic bag and being a bit friendlier to the environment. That’s your prerogative, but let’s not pretend these “problems” don’t have simple solutions.
If more people were willing to give up their cars (or accept something like a 100% extra tax on gasoline to be put towards carbon removal efforts), I would be more open to arguments to give up my plastic bags.
Put another way: I would like legislation which makes walkable, car-free living as easy and painless as possible. Disposable plastic bags make car free living more pleasant, so they shouldn't be banned unless there is a very strong case for significant and meaningful carbon savings.
Yes, we should pass better laws. Yes, we don’t have them now. But when (if) we do, I’d rather have a fighting chance than it being too late because the water is already up to my neck.
The inconveniences I'm describing are personal gripes, but I don't believe they only apply to me! On the contrary, I think they explain all the not-reused reusable bag sales. You can say "these people should just do X Y and Z", but unless they actually do that, plastic bag bans aren't helping the environment.
(If we're exclusively discussing my personal carbon emissions, I used to reuse every single one of my shopping bags as trash bags. Now I buy separate plastic trash bags instead, so my emissions have gone up.)
And then there's the other way they harm the environment: we need more people to give up their cars and move to cities (or form new walkable cities). If you make city life less convenient, fewer people will do that.
---
1: https://www.freedoniagroup.com/press-releases/freedonia-repo...
2: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
No worries, we definitely aren’t.
Unfortunately I have an early flight tomorrow so won’t be able to continue the conversation. Still, thank you for the discussion. Have a nice <your time of day>.
Nonsense. I haven't owned a car for years, nor have I used anything other than a reusable bag for years. Disposable bags are awful for carrying because they tear so easily and can't be carried on your shoulder.
As I was saying, this is not the hassle it seems like it is being made out to be. Setting that aside, a box seems like just as good a vessel to carry as a bag, so in this specific case, I really don't understand the issue. If this place has such good pastries and you know, you can plan ahead and pay full price.
If this really is somehow life changing savings on pastries I mean, yeah, taking some extra time walking won't do any harm.
"Honey, can you get eggs on your way home? We just ran out"
And I do a lot (the majority?) of my grocery shopping spur of the moment. Basically when I'm on my way home and realize I have extra time and it's not so late that the grocery stores have closed. And my life is such that knowing whether I'll have time to shop that evening is entirely unpredictable.
Search term was "pocket shopping bag"
In your jeans pocket? Not unless you want to look... well let's just say that bulging pockets on your butt, or on the front of your pant, are not a good look... not to mention not being particularly comfortable.
> What spur of the moment shopping are you talking about?
Groceries. It's common around here to shop often but in small quantities, because the grocery store is likely somewhere on the footpath from work to home, from work to public transit, or from public transit to home.
Which means you're either carrying the bulky bag with you all day, or using single-use bags. Or, of course, you could buy a car to follow the "stop whining just throw a few in your trunk" suggestions always posted /s
This is incorrect. There are reusable bags that fold into pocket sized. Ikea has them, among other brands. Now that you know, I'm sure you'll reevaluate your outlook on them, right?
Additionally, if you're coming back from work, you probably already have a bag to carry stuff you need for work that you can use to carry a "spur of the moment" amount of groceries or other bags. However, this sounds more like a regular occurrence you are neglecting to prepare for rather than a spur of the moment thing.
(note: this is rendered null anyway because I do need to drive everywhere in my suburb).
BTW, the biggest outcome is that I use fewer bags in general, and just don't take a bag when I don't need one.
My other problem is I can't reuse paper bags as trash bags (because even a tiny amount of liquid will leak through). So now I have to buy plastic trash bags, which sucks because I do in fact care about the environment.
But the real problem with single-use plastic bags is that they blow out of dumpsters and landfills. They're incredibly bad for the environment, in ways that re-usable bags and even larger trash bags are not.
Moreover if it is such an issue for you why don't you buy one of these soft thin fabric bags that essentially roll up into their own little bag and are small enough to always carry around?
Like these https://www.ulsterweavers.com/collections/roll-up-bags
About half a year ago, they were telling me about how they're seeing more and more of those thicker bags in their buildings' large shared garbage dumpsters, rather than the much thinner plastic bags that used to be used for bundling garbage back when they were still readily available.
I wouldn't be surprised if it has gotten worse since then, as people have gradually used up the thin plastic bags they'd previously collected and used for bundling garbage.
Sure, and this definitely happened in my region of Canada where plastic bags were banned already, but eventually people will stop forgetting once their closet fills with too many reusable bags.
Have seen these "reusable bags" that the store gives you? They are basically the same as before, just a lot thicker and more plastic.
They are not nice woven bags or something. People then seem to keep using them as trash can liners.
Re: throwing them out vs recycling them, our bags you can only recycle at the store themselves...so just a bit too much friction to bother with. I can't recall ever seeing or hearing of anyone recycling them that way either.
https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=l&ai=DChcSEwjk8p3YqZKEAxVQZZE...
https://www.northjersey.com/gcdn/presto/2019/06/07/PNJM/74a3...
One of the things that pushed me away from using Instacart was that they'd always bring groceries in the heavyweight bags.
I reuse them now that I stopped using Instacart, but I certainly collected a whole pile of them.
A week or so later i had bought resuable bags, like 2-3, and would always leave them in my car. It became 2nd nature to me almost instantly. Since them I've always used reusable tote bags until they break. I even have one from a party i threw more than 6 years ago that belonged to someone esle lol
Ive since move back home to a city that has no plastic ban and im literally the only person who brings tote bags into stores. The only downside now is i can sometimes look sketch as hell but yea idc i support resuable bags hopefully more people can minimize their plastic footprint in plastic bags or other ways
Not sure on the actual data but other grocery stores have gradually increased the price of re-usable bags to the point where they are cost enough to make you think twice about paying for them.
Seeing people awkwardly carrying random items back home without a bag is not uncommon.
I do still buy a lot of bags and I sometimes do not have one on me.
Maybe I’m an outlier but I have another 3-4 of these bags of bags at home with reusable bags. Most people I talk to have the same.
I do refill my car with them occasionally, but I either forget to bring them or do grocery shopping at unanticipated times and don’t have a bag with me.
On top of that, I've made the problem even worse because they are just horribly bulky to carry around if you aren't driving to the places you shop. Due to this bulk I went out and purchased some nice thin nylon bags that are easily pocketable so I actually use them. But they came in a package of like 30 when I've needed maybe 5 of them including the ones I've given to people.
But other than being thicker and stiffer, they look just like the old plastic bags.
Most people I know don't know they're reusable (and probably don't care). So they use them as single use bags. It's only 10 cents.
Textbook case of unintended consequence of regulation.
Here's an example from WinCo:
https://peopleinparks.com/2019/02/07/dear-reusable-winco-bag...
I have a hard time believing it's 90%. Seriously?
They aren't that cheap and it's easy to keep track of them.
I think some folks may be thinking of different types of reusable bags. Where I live the "default" reusable bags at the grocery store, which are basically pretty similar to disposable but bigger with thicker plastic, are 29 cents. They do sell hardier bags that you can by that are like $1.25. But I think tons of folks throw away those $.29 bags after one or two uses.
Heavy duty plastic bags might work great if you always keep them in your car.
But I live in NYC where you carry everything by hand -- and people certainly aren't always carrying empty bags with them, the way you might if you had a trunk.
There are two supermarkets I go to where they don't have paper bags, but will charge you $0.25 to $0.45 for a heavy duty plastic bag (two sizes).
I'd say that about a third of the time the person in front of me buys between 1 to 3 of them.
So at least at those locations, the overall usage of plastic has gone way, way up compared to the old thin plastic bags.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/25/new-je...
And most people drive there. In NYC it might be even worse than just tripling.
In the NYC I've been to (and large city I live in), everything is carried in a back pack, laptop bag, shoulder bag, etc.
But a lot of people aren't stashing 2 or 4 reusable grocery bags in their laptop bag. And people often aren't carrying any bag at all.
When I go grocery shopping, I'm buying probably 20 pounds of veggies, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, etc. along with bulky items like tortilla chips. If you use the woven plastic bags that you carry in your hands (like the old plastic bags but twice the size), you need 4 -- two for each hand.
There are also the jumbo super-heavy bags you get from e.g. FreshDirect where you only need one and you sling it over your shoulder, but those things are huge even folded up and I don't want to be carrying around one of those regularly. Folded, they're thicker than my laptop...
I get that it's less conventient to have to remember a bag but it's not some insurmountable task and it does seem to reduce the amount of plastic bags that get caught by the wind and blow around as trash.
Always having a bunch of bags on me just isn't a thing, not when you walk and take the subway everywhere and don't want to be lugging around a backpack when you go out for drinks and have nowhere to put it when you're standing around a bar.
I'll take the big bag when it's on the weekend and I'm making a special trip to the supermarket, but there isn't always an opportunity for that either.
You remember your own bags after that.
At that time in the UK free disposable bags were in full force. Although i do remember when i was young we used to take shopping home in cardboard boxes stacked at the front of the store in the same way as they had in Germany still.
We keep a few reusable bags in the way-back of the (cross-over) vehicle; it's now a habit to grab the bags as we're getting out of the car in the grocery-store parking lot. Then after we get home and put the groceries away, we return the bags to the way-back of the car before closing the garage door.
So it's not a big deal.
Summer time I was always biking anyway, and used my backpack.
Are the bags of a reasonable size when expanded? Can you please link me? I've never found anything both big enough to be useful and small enough to keep in my pants pocket at all times.
https://www.ulsterweavers.com/collections/roll-up-bags
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zuimei-Reusable-Waterproof-Lightwei...
They fold flat and wouldn't cause much bother in a pocket but I personally don't like anything at all in my pockets. I keep them in my satchel and they are unnoticeable in one of those flat pouch sections that are pretty useless for anything even as slim as a wallet or phone.
They won't last forever but good for a few years so far. They have survived when I have stocked up on canned goods.
In my experience, higher-end national chains offer paper bags for $0.05 each (Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, etc.) and don't sell the $0.50 plastic ones at checkout, while the local chains (FoodTown, Associated, etc.) only sell the plastic ones and don't offer paper.
I have no idea why.
It's spending resources for convenience. It's not fundamentally different than buying coffee at starbucks (therefore necessitating a plastic lined paper cup).
know your days on HN when each version of reality is in effect!
Those bags are so thick that throwing away one is like throwing away 500 of the other super thin plastic bags. There's no way the equation makes sense for most people no matter how much we want to believe it.
I've used the same 3 long lasting plastic bags for the weekly shop for around 4 years now. I take a couple of thinner ones I reuse when just going to get a few things. Ive had some of those for years as well.
I'm in the UK, we went to Canada last year. It was crazy how much disposable plastic i saw walking out the doors of Costco and other large grocery stores. Also, Costco put milk in a plastic bag in Canada! Why not a rigid plastic container that can be recycled?
How much does it cost to clean the cloth? How much time and effort relative to the cost of the bag?
This is why targeting specific products to reduce consumption is stupid. Just hit all fossil fuels with higher and higher taxes if you want less fossil fuel consumption. Or all products an externalities tax if you want less waste.
When the inside has gotten coated with sticky chicken salmonella juices because of a leaking package, and the bottom has gross dirt from sitting on the sidewalk and subway, and the bag is made of a woven plastic so that the juices and dirt seep in...
...it's entirely understandable that you just trash it rather than attempt to clean it. This is what you carry food and fresh produce in, after all.
Butchers cutting meat for you is much less common in store now, those that do have a butchers counter wrap it in a plastic bag which seals it pretty well. Small independent shops might do it differently.
I think in general those styrofoam trays are not used much because they can't be recycled. You still find them used by some takeaway food places though.
That said, the main benefit of these heavier bags is that they tend not to blow out of dumpsters and landfills in the wind, the way thin single-use plastic bags do. A bit of plastic in a landfill isn't great, but entire forests and waterways choked with plastic bags is vastly worse. E.g.,: https://www.frontiersman.com/opinions/spectrum-plastic-bags-...
Sounds like that could coat your washer with microplastics that might end up in your clothes and against your skin all day. That may not be the best idea.
As far as what “the average person will do,” I’ve never personally had a hygiene problem with reusable plastic bags that couldn’t be solved with a sponge or a Lysol wipe in 30 seconds. But if the OP is really suffering with large numbers of dirty bags, a gentle wash with detergent is the simplest and most effective answer. At a certain point, it feels like this discussion is more about preferences re: reusable bags and less about trying to solve problems.
This is, almost literally, equivalent to citing a press release by Big Oil as evidence against anthropogenic climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recyclable_Plastic_Ba...
One is a set of clinical trials, conducted with prepublished scientific methodology peer reviewed, independently evaluated by a regulatory agency, and subsequently independently studied by independent researchers. The other is a self-published press release.
Anyone who tries to draw an equivalence between the two either has no idea how the scientific method actually works, or is simply not arguing in good faith.
I’m highly skeptical of the idea that people are throwing away their reusable bags after 2-3 uses.
They’re also hand-waving away the concept of alternative lower carbon disposable materials, because it’s a plastic bag industry association.
I'm deeply skeptical of this. Who buys a reusable bag then tosses it? I've only ever thrown away one or two that got rips.
My guess is it's something like that famous "daycare late fee" study that was widely discussed after Freakonomics reported on it, https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/what-makes-people-do-what-t.... Essentially, the fee wasn't high enough to cause parents to need to be on time, instead the fee was more like something to pay off their guilt, so adding the fee caused more lateness in parental pickups. I.e. before there was a late fee, parents would feel somewhat guilty if they were late. After the late fee, they didn't feel bad - after all, they were basically paying to be late.
My suspicion with these kinds of bags, which are very cheap and honestly feel just a bit sturdier than disposable baggs, is that the same dynamic is at play. People feel like "I'm a good environmentalist for reusing this bag once or twice" and then toss them.
I probably have had twenty to thirty reusable bags. Most of them get thrown away.
Not everyone is built the same way. I think this is hard/impossible for people with ADHD to manage.
If you live in a state with a single-use bag ban, your options are: buy a reusable bag for 50 cents, or travel 15 mins round trip to grab one of your bags.
Once you get home, you note that you already have a dozen reusable bags so you throw it away and stash one of your existing ones for next time.
I use reusable bags a lot, and did even before single-use ones were taxed, but maybe 5% of the time, I show up to the grocery store having forgotten one. I’m almost certain if I were in a state with a single-use ban my footprint would be higher (especially because I normally use paper bags when I forget, which have a negligible environmental impact).
IMO, the entire ban was a gift to the plastics industry. I’m sure the margins on these reusable bags are much higher.
If I forget my bags and I don't have many groceries I'll just not use bags at all. Otherwise I'll use paper, which isn't great but it's not adding to plastic trash.
Also plastic bags are generally around a $1. I'm not throwing those away, economic reasons and on principle.
It’s not like paper bags, which are incredibly compostable and recyclable, didn’t exist before this entire plastic nonsense came to fruition. And they are readily available, domestically produced and work great.
All we need are better handles because they aren’t great for carrying long distances and break catastrophically instead of stretching like plastic. Not great.
The "study" cited was literally conducted and written by the plastic industry, so that's exactly what it is.
AKA the lobbying group for plastic bag manufacturers, a group whose entire purpose is opposing plastic bag bans, quoted by the WSJ editorial board.
This is about as bad a source as one could possibly imagine.
1 The ARPBA is connected to the Society of the Plastics Industry, an industry trade group.
it says a lot that we simply dismiss "don't break stuff" as am impossibility in the western world. Wonder what the Easter world does so differently.
The differences in littering in, say, Japan, have nothing to do with legal differences, because they're cultural. Cultures differ, and they have benefits and downsides. Trying to implement a legal solution to bag littering in the US would work about as well as trying to implement a legal solution in India to get people to stay within their lane when they drive.
A lot of smaller stuff doesn't make it in, especially disposable plastic bags, which are basically little parachutes.
At around 9pm in downtown Tokyo I stopped to watch a clean up crew scrubbing something of the sidewalk. So perhaps it's partly due to where their tax money goes.
I suppose tax dollars and trash can technology would also be a plausible explanation, but it leaves me less convinced.
https://livejapan.com/en/in-tokyo/in-pref-tokyo/in-shibuya/a...
And as you see with the design of their cans they aren't just holes with some plastic top loosely strewn on it.
But yes, I'd chalk up a society used to carrying their trash until they find a sparsely spaced trash can "culture".
There was an almost complete lack of litter.
I don't know how the city did it, but I was impressed, and it made the urban landscape much nicer.
Still a wide success for the Environmental Theater: focus all attention on plastic bags (why so specific? plastic is used in way, way too many things already), which is used by consumers. It doesn’t matter if the use of plastic is reduced.
Just spin the wheels and point fingers. It’s much simpler than solving environmental problems.
I've settled on using the catering bags from Panera because they
- come with catering orders anyway
- are incredibly heavy duty, I've used them dozens of times and they still are in great shape
- are very large
- usually just get trashed after the lunch
My workplace caters lunches once a week or so, and so there's been plenty of bags leftover at the end so...
edit a quick look on ebay shows that there's a secondary market for the bags where they go for around $10 each.
This is a lobby group. Their goal is to produce and sell as much plastic as they can. The more people reuse plastic bags, the less money they make. Their argument is worth as much as that of the tobacco lobby. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, just that they sure won’t quote any ideas or statistics in favour of reuse.
Don’t forget, folks: “recyclable” is an extremely low bar. Most things are recyclable. But many recyclable products are still so expensive (and energy-hungry) to actually recycle that the term is borderline meaningless.
Reuse trumps recyclable by a wide margin and anybody telling you otherwise is either working in a very narrow set of industries (eg paper) or malicious.
In this case, which part of the statement in the above claim is not true?
1. Disposable plastic bag bans significantly reduce plastic bag litter and its effects on urban quality of life and the environment.
2. Most reusable plastics bags are only used once or few times before they are discarded.
3. Given #2, the amount of fossil fuels used to produce the reusable bags makes them a net negative in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
The basic problem with all discourse these days is that depending on your "side", you only talk about the items that benefit your viewpoint. American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance only talks about #2 and #3. At least the group referenced in the original article agrees that the current situation leads to more plastic being generated and should be corrected:
“Grocery stores, restaurants and retail shops should not be permitted to distribute plastic film bags of any thickness at checkout. Stores should be required to charge a fee of at least 10 cents for single-use paper bags. A 10-cent paper bag fee will limit the expected increase in paper bag use after a bag ban is imposed and may even reduce paper bag consumption altogether.”
This is easily fixed. I know because I fixed myself and if I can change this behavior anyone can.
I've been using the same three cloth bags to carry my groceries once per week for over ten years.
That's, at a bare minimum (because they hold more), 1,560 plastic bags not used.
How does the carbon carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions of 1,560 plastic bags compare to the three "Earthwise EXTRA LARGE Grocery Bag Beach Shopping Tote HEAVY DUTY 12 oz Cotton Canvas Multi Purpose 20" x 14" PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA (Natural)" that I purchased for $13.99 for in 2012?
Yes, it took me a while to get in the habit of using them. A frustratingly long time. But it happened.
My county recently banned ALL plastic bags so for the occasional drug store or gas station purchase that used to come in a plastic bag I purchased a packable tote that stuffs down to the size of a pack of playing cards and keep it in my center console of my car.
That habit was established instantly.
I know for an unassailable and irrefutable fact that bans work because I am a volunteer watershed steward. It is my job to poke around storm drains and shorelines in my little section of the Chesapeake Bay to make sure they are clean. Less than 90 days (four big cleanup pushes per year) after a styrofoam ban was enacted several years ago the amount of styrofoam I was personally responsible for picking up off the shoreline plummeted from "a depressingly large shit-ton" down to almost nothing.
Single use plastic may be more friendly environmentally.
For example, did the ban reduce the total amount of plastic produced? Plausibly, no it did not.
From the report: > Because of the loophole in California’s bag ban allowing the use of thicker plastic bags, the amount of plastic bags discarded per person (by weight) actually increased in the years after the implementation of the ban.
Did the ban on plastic make a meaningful reduction in co2 emissions? Did it make people happier? Did it make a meaningful improvement to the environment?
Those are the questions to ask.
Instead, many people focus on behaviour control fantasies & gotchas.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-07/most-plastic-bags-gon...
It's not completely clear from this article if the measurement includes the thicker bags, but my guess is yes.
The point is to change behavior. If you're choosing not to change your behavior, that's fine. Most people are changing their behavior.
There were no plastic bags. There were no paper bags. There was no option to pay money to get a reusable grocery bag like we see in the US. If you were a doofus like me who didn't bring some kind of bag, you only had two options. One was to miraculously carry your stuff home without bags. The other was to use the cardboard boxes that used to contain produce, if there were any left over.
We carried our groceries back to the hotel in a cardboard box that previously contained fruit.
It was a minor hassle in the moment, but I also realized that's how it should be everywhere. There are probably already enough bags in the world for all the carrying that humans need to do. Of course bags wear out, so we need to keep producing some amount of bags, but not many. Most stores should simply not have any kind of bag whatsoever. If you don't bring something of your own, you should be mostly SoL.
Yeah, because driving back to your house to get a bag and then driving back is so much better for the environment than a using a few 0.1mm thin bags.
I agree these environmental laws are simply green washing. But if people think these generate too much resentment they're wholly unprepared for what the moment requires. Like not eating meat with every single meal every single day of the week. Not having two cars per family regardless of whether they're ICE or not. Eliminating short-haul flights and restricting international travel.
US consumers are used to overconsuming. Correcting for that will feel like a punishment to most. I don't see an alternative besides telling people to treat it like a world war. "Victory gardens" and all.
To be frank, I don't think we will avoid the worst of what's coming. Because a lot of it isn't in control of consumers but from business emissions.
e.g. wouldn't mind the ability to stop using my car tomorrow if I had reliable bus schedules that weren't separated by an hour per stop, but I have no faith that the transportation for my city will ever fix that in a timely matter. There's also negative inventive from stuff like ride-shares to want to fix that. WFH is another way to cut down on emissions to compute but instead companies are hunkering back down because they gotta justify their sunk cost on buildings.
That's 2 of some dozen problems that could prevent the worst but whose cards aren't completely in the hands of the person. It just feels so hopeless.
change in government comes from people. capable government looks at real societal problems and shapes the future of the state to address them. of course public transport is a huge one, especially in the US
Businesses ultimately only exist to provide to consumers. Even those that sell directly to businesses of governments wouldn’t exist without consumers.
Consumers are either going to have to jump now or fall later.
They do and do so extensively in some places.
I have been to Wallis and Futuna islands, two very small islands in the Pacific being French overseas territories where the transportation around each island is exclusively by car and locals drive around all the time. They would only walk to the nearest fale and drive at all other times. Petrol was expensive (that was around EUR 2.5 a litre approximately a decade ago) but the French government nearly entirely subsidises it due to the two islands' economies being too small to cover extra costs.
This line in particular is an extreme totalitarian view, good grief.
Bonus: way easier to get everything inside at home.
The half measures we currently have are the worst of both worlds. They inconvenience people and increase fossil fuel emissions.
But those complaints came in the first few weeks after the ban, and they dried up soon enough. Everyone learns eventually that they need to take their bags with them - at least I hope nobody is sitting at home now, five years after the ban, with 1000 reusable cloth bags.
P.S. I've found jute bags the best value for money. They seem to really last forever whereas the thin cloth type start wearing out after a while.
Plastic has saved humanity insane amounts of energy over the short term, and has contributed to our population growth. The resulting environmental debt is mindbendingly massive, and I'm not convinced that the corporate world will willingly pay it. It will be paid though, one way or another, because Laws of Physics, entropy etc.
The smartest species is also the stupidest.
Now people instead buy plastic garbage bag rolls.
So even if the consumption of plastic shopping bags has decreased, the consumption of plastic garbage bags has greatly increased.
Might well be easier to recycle the garbage bags. One could hope.
> Where I live (Silicon Valley), paper and plastic bags were both subject to the same treatment. In Menlo Park you can buy bags when you shop for $.25 each. The plastic bags at Safeway are much thicker (i.e., use more plastic, and are hypothetically reusable more times) than before. The paper bags are the same as before, but now you pay for them (the revenue goes to the store).
They are recyclable. But because of their low weight, high amounts of contamination, and constant ability to get stuck in conveyor belts... Thin plastic bags are more trouble than they are worth.
It's like Aluminum foil. Recycling plants are paid per ton of recycled material, and it takes lots and lots of aluminum foil before a ton of Aluminum is saved up.
Except plastic is way harder to recycle than Aluminum (requires higher purities).
I wouldn’t be surprised if the net effect was that we are using more plastic now than before, even though we use reusable bags most of the time when we go shopping.
I too use plastic bags as rubbish bags.
I can say that despite the ban on plastic shopping bags there is never any shortage of plastic bags.
Admittedly I use small plastic bags but it's virtually impossible to buy food that doesn't use plastic bags - I use them.
IMO it's better to incinerate them. That's what Switzerland does. I think it largely works, as long as you have enough routes to take dangerous chemicals (electronics and batteries mostly, heavy metals) out of the the waste pipeline.
> We estimate that CGB [carryout grocery bag] regulations lead to an average increase in purchased plastics of 127 pounds per store per month, ranging from 30 to 135 (37–224) pounds for 4-gallon (8-gallon) trash bags.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-022-00646-5
Many of us don't agree with that at all.
Nowadays the most common trash I see are beer cans.
At this point in time, Canadians are getting taxed on taxes. If you fail to see that this is unsustainable, maybe you'll understand that for all the taxes you're paying, should you get sick, the government will more quickly offer to end you than to give you an MRI. In fact, they just passed a law that promises to jail for 10 years anyone that try's to dissuade you from letting them end you. So it has been my experience that the collectivists don't really care about human life, as much as they say they care. Collectivist utopias never are... So I am looking, like many fellow Canadians, for a second home, in case things deteriorate any further.
At what point will the bag be finally mine, and I just be able to bag my groceries in peace ?
No really, what do you people want from me?
The more taxes I pay for things like this, the more I empower people that think like you, to just hire more ideologically alined people to fill government and academia positions. It's worse than a clergy take over.
Not so sure on the energy usage, if feels like the manufacturing and recycling chain would be more energy intensive than creating something that can be reused for years.
and are biodegradable
>a LOT more energy to manufacture
which could be done with renewables
But again, the point of all this is to get people to reuse bags in the long run. If you just assume that people will mindlessly always need bags at every store they visit, you're missing the point. It's a simple cultural change, and it has to start somewhere, and it will always be imperfect, and older generations will always be uncomfortable with it.
One thing I never figured out was why they made the original bags so thin that in the end, the clerk needed to double-bag everything.
a plastic bag is a useful item that is used over and over again.
a paper bag is an awful noisy, loud and inflexible item that is immediately discarded after use. even people that would be willing to use them more than once (i am definitely not), cannot do that due to how easy they get torn.
so, instead of buying a handful plastic bags per year, i now have to buy hundreds of paper bags.
even accounting for improved recyclability, is it really a net-benefit if the amount of required items (paper vs plastic) increases for a factor of around 20 - 40?