People will find this chart interesting. It compares different types of grocery bags and how many times do you need to reuse to have less environmental impact than single use plastic bag.
Color me skeptical. A single organic cotton bag requires 20,000 uses due to ozone depletion? Apparently the researchers chose one specific dataset to determine how much electricity is used for cotton irrigation, and then further assumed that all of that electricity is generated from burning natural gas. It's not the gas itself that depletes ozone at that rate, but rather two chemicals used to pipe and transport methane long distances, which escape from leaky pipe infrastructure. Gee whiz, isn't cotton terrible? [0]
If we looked at each one of the metrics, both for single use plastics and for their alternatives, would we find a similar story of absolute best/worst case scenario to paint single-use plastics as environmentally friendly?
The original article also notes that plastics industry groups jumped on the pandemic to write to regulators and grocers imploring them to ban re-usable shopping bags due to them being "virus-laden" cesspools. Which is not at all what the science suggests (we figured that one out pretty early in the pandemic as I recall).
These people are interested in one thing only: getting as much plastic into consumer markets as humanly possible. They are not operating in good faith by any stretch.
I usually bring my backpack or a duffel bag to purchase groceries or whatever, and the cashiers are absolutely uniformly grossed out by these bags. They will hardly touch them. They poke at a hem as if it were radioactive or something. Of course, this started around the time of the pandemic, when everyone was extra paranoid about germs. But it has not abated. Nobody will bag groceries into my personal bags, they just kind of shove it to the end and make me do it all myself.
It seems reasonable to be grossed out by a fabric bag? One that's empty, clean, smells normal, in excellent condition, that I launder on the regular, and nobody but me uses it?
I mean, you do know what those cashiers touch all day? Raw, unwashed produce, packages dripping liquids, boxes and cans that gathered dust on the shelf for 4 months, items that have been handled by N dozen customers and employees recently?
I suppose it's reasonable to treat a person's personal bag with suspicion, but I feel sort of insulted. Perhaps I'm not rational to be so insulted by this attitude, but they could at least pretend to be OK, for PR sake.
Then those people shall furnish single-use bags that are fit for purpose, rather than (1) forcing me to bring stuff from home (2) bagging my own stuff, when we pay bag boys to perform this skilled service for us. Fair enough?
This whole rigmarole is just another way for climate alarmists to shame the consumer and foist responsibility upon us to shell out for worthless bags that would otherwise be free. Face it, this is just another capitalist-fascist moneymaking scheme, and we're collateral damage.
I'm not sure why it's horrible; like I said, bagging groceries is a skilled task, and I've seen employees who are really, really good at it, and fast too.
In a not too distant past, grocery stores employed people who rang up our purchases and they also employed people who bagged groceries. These openings were beneficial to the job market. In fact, grocery stores have traditionally presented a lot of opportunity to people who are developmentally disabled, and I really appreciate that.
Now if groceries want to fire those cashiers and fire those bag boys and offload the labor onto the consumer, then I am sure they will be happy to pay us double wages and/or pass the cost savings on to us in the form of lower prices across the board. Unless they simply want to ramp up their paranoia, surveillance tracking, and accusations of shoplifting at the self-checkout, especially when we dare to use our own goddamn filthy bags, what do you think?
>If we looked at each one of the metrics, both for single use plastics and for their alternatives, would we find a similar story of absolute best/worst case scenario to paint single-use plastics as environmentally friendly?
The report has been out for over 5 years. I think that's enough time for people to analyze it and point out specific methodological flaws, and we should not have to rely on "there's one methodological flaw so let's assume the whole report is wrong".
>The original article also notes that plastics industry groups jumped on the pandemic to write to regulators and grocers imploring them to ban re-usable shopping bags due to them being "virus-laden" cesspools. Which is not at all what the science suggests (we figured that one out pretty early in the pandemic as I recall).
1. when did this happen?
2. In 2022-2023 I was still seeing supermarkets with cart disinfection stations, and hand sanitizer dispensers sprinkled in every public space. Clearly plenty of people missed the memo.
You may see it as just one methodological flaw but I see it differently. It is an absurd degree of worst case scenario. I would be surprised if the only metric I happened to look into also happened to be the only one with glaring bias injected into it, but I wouldn't lose my mind or anything if that just happened to be the case. At least we have that context now, so we can do with it as we please.
I don't have an exact timeframe for when surface contact was determined to be a much lower risk vector, but I seem to recall that info coming out within the first few months (early to mid spring) after the virus hit the US. At the beginning of the pandemic people were quarantining all of their groceries and/or wiping every single package down with sterilizing solution. Then we learned that the virus is not terribly transmissible from surface contact, the major risk by far is via particulates, and basically everyone stopped doing that.
Of course basic hygiene is still encouraged. Sanitizing stations for carts is just a good idea in general, I hope that option never goes away. And given how bad the average person is at washing their hands on a consistent basis, I'll take the wide availability of hand sanitizer as a win for every single communicable disease (many of which are vastly more transmissible than Covid via surface contact). Like all Covid safety measures, at this point if bags freak you out then don't touch other people's bags.
>I don't have an exact timeframe for when surface contact was determined to be a much lower risk vector, but I seem to recall that info coming out within the first few months (early to mid spring) after the virus hit the US.
I was more interested in when plastic manufacturers were lobbying businesses to ditch reusable bags. According to this new york times article[1], the CDC only acknowledged it over a year into the pandemic. If the lobbying efforts were within the period, they could have been forgiven for not keeping up with the latest scientific literature and using the official government recommendations.
>At the beginning of the pandemic people were quarantining all of their groceries and/or wiping every single package down with sterilizing solution. Then we learned that the virus is not terribly transmissible from surface contact, the major risk by far is via particulates, and basically everyone stopped doing that.
Did they stop doing that because they were keeping tabs on the scientific consensus, or did they simply get bored?
I used to reuse the plastic shopping bags as trash liners for small cans around the house. Since they have been banned I have actually had to start buying bags for home.
Yeah, that is what happened to me as well. Now I have to buy the bags anyway.
I do hunt out extremely cheap thin bags that probably use less plastic per bag than the grocery store ones as they don't need to be as durable for most of the cans. But I also use heavy real garbage bags for the kitchen trash whereas before I'd use a grocery bag and empty it more often. So I can't really tell if I'm using more total plastic or not.
We've long bought the "green" bags for trash, kitty litter, etc anyway. In theory biodegradable. We also bought some small mesh bags for fruit / vegetables, so we don't even have to use the plastic store provided ones. So I hear you that there is still a need for something for these other uses, but alternative options exist beyond the classic plastic bag.
I’ve almost completely stopped my usage of the produce bags because I realized I was just putting things in them out of habit. There’s nothing wrong with putting three broccoli crowns or a cucumber directly into your shopping cart, and this applies for most things I buy. Loose green beans or brussel sprouts are about the only thing I bag anymore.
I have some colleagues who live in apartment buildings with large shared garbage dumpsters.
They were recently saying that they've started to see more and more of the other residents using the much thicker bags now sold at checkouts for bundling their garbage, rather than the thinner plastic bags they used to use instead.
Corporations decided to give away the single-use plastic bags for nothing when this was allowed. If they wanted to increase their profits like this, they could have just stopped giving them away for free.
They’ll stop picking up the trash here if it’s not bagged in the bin.
When they raise it and turn it upside down to empty it, the wind can easily cause any loose and light stuff to blow around and not end up in the truck.
One bin probably is a small thing, but I can definitely imagine if the entire block were doing it it would start to accumulate fairly quickly.
How much do you suppose you need to be paid for picking up the spoon and putting it in your mouth? Taking out the trash should be basic self maintenance
None? It takes me not even a second to decide what bin to put it into.
Compost goes to a compost facility that generates methane from it and then sells the excess as fertilizer.
Plastics get recycled.
Reusable glass bottles get cleaned and reused, other molten down and reused.
Other gets burned, filtered, and generates electricity.
These kinds of metrics are brought up often and, while I think they are somewhat useful, the article makes it clear that they're not in line with the goal of these bans. The problem is not that it was too harmful to the climate to produce these bags. The problem is some percentage of bags become litter and pollute the environment.
I think other environmental indicators are good to consider, but simply presenting these metrics as capturing "environmental impact" is both deceptive and out of line with the goals of the bag bans as I understand them.
>The problem is not that it was too harmful to the climate to produce these bags. The problem is some percentage of bags become litter and pollute the environment.
1. Is this actually the case, or just post-hoc justification? Remember when during the pandemic, the lockdowns were justified by "just 2 weeks to flatten the curve"?
2. Most of the time I'm given a plastic bag, it's being used to carry something back to my home. Under that scenario, there's basically a 0% chance that it's going to "become litter and pollute the environment". If litter was actually the concern, you'd expect the bans to be targeted at stores where goods being sold don't end up going to homes (fast food resturants and gas stations maybe?), but that's not what we're seeing.
Can't speak for California or LA, but in Dallas we had a plastic bag ban for a short period and it was sold as a way to reduce local litter, not reduce greenhouse emissions or protect the climate.
I didn't realize how effective it was until about 6 months when I was walking Downtown and noticed a plastic bag tumbling down the street. Prior to the ban, they were a regular sight and nothing I would have taken note of.
1. I did not write these laws and cannot speak to the internal beliefs of the authors, but the campaigns I saw were about reducing waste / overall plastic production (i.e. litter) not about reducing the climate resources to produce bags.
2. I don't think what you are saying makes sense? I also take things that gas stations and restaurants give me home. Like...based on your objection there should be no litter because everyone takes things given to them home. That said - I am sure that the people who advocated for the current bag bans would absolutely support expanding them.
If the implication is that reusing bags is pointless, I'd like to point out that a so-called single use plastic bag can be reused many times. This is what I used to do before people started handing out more durable bags, and they are fine for a very long time. (Now I have a small stash of cotton bags, some of which are over a decade old.)
I reuse produce bags, ziplocks, sandwich bags, and the like by rinsing them lukewarm water and hanging up to dry, occasionally using a bit of soap as needed. It's a bit of a hassle and there is a likelihood that I am exposing my food to more microplastics via direct contact as the bags get worn from use and washing. I have no clue how quickly the bags start breaking down, it probably varies due to numerous factors. I wish there were more and better options for silicone, beeswax coated muslin, etc as alternatives. Unfortunately plain cotton bags don't keep veggies from wilting otherwise I'd go for that.
I've got a pair of giant silicone bags for this purpose but the shape and thickness means they can't hold many veggies, take up more space than they should, and are generally unwieldy. They were also $20 each, which seems a bit high (I assume because they are a specialty item in a niche market). Come on free market, solve this problem for me so I can ditch single-use plastics!
How do the cotton bags lead to freshwater eutrophication and terrestrial acidification? Is that just from the production of the bags?
I always thought moving away from single use plastic was meant to be environmentally friendly in that it reduced the pollution caused by disposing of the single use items. I thought everyone knew the production costs were higher including from an environmental perspective of things like greenhouse gas emission and water use. Sometimes different environmental goals are in conflict with each other.
Which would mean all 5 of these measures are purely about production which gives an incomplete picture. The problem with single use plastics isn't the production. That is why they became so popular. The main concern is what happens to the plastic after that single use. For example, how many microplastics does a cotton bag keep out of the ocean?
A plastic bag that is reused as a trash bag that ends up in a properly lined landfill isn't going to release microplastics in the the ocean either. The problem is that people really like sexy solutions over practical ones, so you end up with with ineffective initiatives like teaching Africans how to recycle or plastic bag bans rather than building more and safer landfills.
If the solution was as easy as telling people to reuse and dispose of single use plastic properly, we would have solved this issue decades ago. People still don't do that in high enough numbers for it to be an actual solution.
You don't have to teach anything. If someone has a better place to throw their trash than their local dump pile, they'll do it because they don't like that place either. The vast majority of river plastic comes from developing counties with poor trash infrastructure. Plastic pollution is largely a solved problem. There may be plenty of assholes who leave their garbage on the beach in the US, but when they're home, their waste still gets properly disposed of.
It makes sense to prioritize tackling low hanging fruit with solutions that we know to work rather than ones that inconvenience us and make us feel like we're doing something, but don't actually do anything. The only benefit the LA Times article mentions is that there are fewer plastic bags found on beaches, but since "reusable" grocery bags are significantly heavier than the old disposable ones, I'm not convinced it's actually any better in that aspect as well.
The LA Times' findings just take us full circle back to my original point. I thought keeping plastic bags off our beaches (and other environments) was supposed to be the primary benefit of the ban.
One heavy plastic bag may look visually less offensive than 3 lighter ones, but is it better for the environment? Would the money people spend on "reusable" disposable bags be better spent on enforcement of littering of cleanup?
Definitely interesting, but clearly shows the cheap plastic reusable bags, which hold 2-3x as much as the disposable ones, repay their environmental cost about as fast as their actual cost. Which is very quickly.
Yes, sigh, the "Save the trees argument" it never did make much sense. first and most important. trees are a renewable resource. second, the best trees for paper are from small farmed trees. not old growth forest.
The actual take away should have been, the bigger the paper industry, the more trees there will be.
If you are grasping you can bring modern carbon sequester theory into the argument. but I will admit that is too complicated a subject for me to feel comfortable leaning on it.
I feel like humans have trouble with the concept that the environment is not just one single thing, and that something can be good in one way but bad in another.
Its kind of like all those wine is good for you vs bad for you studies where both are kind of correct but in different ways.
Assume I get 4 reuses out of a paper bag, and I use 4 bags per week. I don’t think I could replace 4 bags worth of paper per month that I would have bought otherwise.
I really don't think those graphs make that case, although it seems they are trying to.
Organic cotton is ahead of plastic for greenhouse gases after 149 uses. That's a small number of uses for a cotton tote bag, which should last several years of daily wear. That means that from the 150th use you are reducing greenhouse gases every time you take the bag out, while potentially still net polluting in a couple of other ways.
But greenhouse gas emissions are by far the most critical and potentially catastrophic environment issue. If we can effectively and reliably lower greenhouse gases while causing a few extra rhino deaths or depleting the ozone layer marginally, we should enthusiastically seize that opportunity.
Given this, the "average over all pollution types" seems particularly useless and intentionally misleading here. That number literally cannot be coerced into meaning anything that should affect your decision making process.
>Organic cotton is ahead of plastic for greenhouse gases after 149 uses. That's a small number of uses for a cotton tote bag, which should last several years of daily wear.
Is it a small number? I put my bags in my shopping cart so I always wash them after each use since the carts are unsanitary. Once you start washing them after each use, the bags fall apart rather quickly. It might not be less than 149 uses, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Do you wash your clothes after wearing them? Maybe you should start wearing single-use plastic clothes since it's obviously much better for the environment.
I wash my clothes after each use. Clothing, unlike the cheap grocery bags, are usually better quality and last longer than bags. Perhaps I just have cheap bags, but they don't seem to last all that long.
That's a small number of uses for a cotton tote bag, which should last several years of daily wear.
Who uses it every day? My trips to get groceries are every week or two weeks. I'd have a decent chance of misplacing the thing before I offset its carbon. If I forgot it just once and had to turn the car around to get it I'd probably double its footprint.
There are 52 weeks in a year. After several years of weekly use you have offset the carbon.
> I'd have a decent chance of misplacing the thing before I offset its carbon.
You can keep things simply and only use it for groceries if you have trouble keeping track of things. Keep it in the same location every time, ideally by the door, always return it to it's spot immediately after unloading groceries when you get home. Don't leave a full bag of groceries at the store. You're pretty much set.
You could also go for a recycled PET reusable bag if you just can't trust yourself to hang on to a cotton bag for a few years. Still better than single-use plastics by many metrics as long as you aren't losing bags multiple times per year. And yeah, don't turn around to get your bag when you're halfway to the store; get single-use plastic on that occasion and spend a few moments gently reaffirming your habit/routine that includes grabbing the bag when you head out for groceries.
Unless you’re going to eat it, what’s the point of organic cotton? Cotton seems like something that should be optimized, for production, as much as possible.
I'll agree with you that some organic pesticides can be just as bad. however there are much stricter guidelines on when and how they are applied to qualify for organic certification. In the case of conventional, the application methodology is more about the bottom line. which in many cases means spraying way more to maximize yield.
Some of these numbers don't make sense. Unbleached paper and biopolymers definitely require a nonzero amount of energy to produce, so how can they have 0 greenhouse gas emissions? How can biopolymers have negative water use?
That looks terrible, but cotton or at least non-plastic bags have been around for a long time, right? Would bag production always have been that bad?
It feels like this is tying the manufacturing process to the materials for manufacturing. You can't make a plastic bag without plastic production, but I feel like you can make a non-plastic bag without plastic production and at lot of other modern industrial processes and chemicals.
Wonder what the fancy bags that Whole Foods sells would need. We use them all the time, but they're insulated, with a plastic inside and a zippered top.
What I want is a chart which can evaluate the consumption/spend/waste of products pre-plastic, vs, post plastic as weighted by things such as milk delivery services.. with glass pickup (soda (coke) and milk) etc) vs, single use plastic.
Even in Cebu Philippines, they still had massive glass cola re-bottling plants, as recent as today...
Why is the US so afraid of actual reuse, as opposed to trash. (oh, we invented the plastics industry...)
From my experience in Lithuania where we had a law of "plastic bags have to cost at least 1 cent" put in place few months ago:
- I see more people not using any bags at all. Previously some people would put even bananas and cabbages to bags (or some put even already packaged food items like rice or salt to extra bags "in case it rips open"). So the use overall decreased.
- shops started to offer reusable cloth bags for sale... But I don't see many people using those. I heard that some people just keep forgetting to take those to the shop.
- a lot of people just accept that 1 cent cost and move on.
- few populists political parties already "promised" to remove this tax. It's not a popular promise, but some people are attracted to that.
- overall it seems there's less bag use (my perception says it decreased by ~20%), but the difference isn't huge.
I personally don't really care about the tax because I didn't use plastic bags before anyway - I just throw everything to one cotton bag I have used for the past 10 years and it's fine to me.
You've got to charge enough for it to be a disincentive.
In the UK, I did not change my behaviour at 5p a bag but at 30p a bag I did. I keep couple of foldable bags in my laptop bag and it works great - zero downsides. It was frustrating to begin with but now, if anything it's entirely positive - less hassle relying on a shop's bags and I like the continuity of using my own - so I give such schemes a thumbs up. The resistance is about habit changes rather than actual lifestyle impact.
I live in the US and I see something similar when shopping at Aldi. They charge like 5 or 10 cents per bag, but it's enough that most people will bring their own or not use bags at all. It's a small fee, but it has a significant impact, and it's great that you can still get bags if you need them.
I'd much prefer cities and states impose a small tax like this instead of a ban. It would reduce usage without risking harmful, unintended consequences like we see in California.
speaking from personal experience of "i forgot the bags again"... it will take more than a few months for that to change. it's been many years since the switch and it's a different habit now where I generally bring or have the reusable bags in the car.
> Though plastic bags represent a fraction of plastics produced, they are a unique source of blight, according to Mark Murray, the executive director of environmental group Californians Against Waste. They blow into tree branches, clog sewer drains, wrinkle jellyfish-like in our oceans and tumble across our roads.
Right, LDPE bags are a fraction of plastics produced (and plastic trash), and they were chosen as a scapegoat, because they are highly visible. In a world where we chose to spend our (extremely) limited legislative focus on getting the biggest bang for the buck, we'd have targeted different plastic type produced by or used in different industries, which would have made more of a positive impact. Instead, we did something that made us feel good, but did nothing, and in fact ended up making the situation worse by getting people to buy and throw away far more HDPE plastics. All the information required to make a better decision existed at the time, but pretty much everybody involved ignored it and did the dumber thing.
Soon to be followed by a failed attempt at forcing organic waste recycling onto citizens...
I'm all for composting. I'm not for adding a third waste management stream all the way to single-family homes which will likely comply poorly with organic waste regulations due to the inherent disgusting inconvenience it entails. Officials are now seriously suggesting you store your food waste in the freezer to prevent smells, insects and rodents. As if we all have extra space in our freezers, extra time to deal with a third waste stream, extra space for a third trash can...
I really agree with the spirit of these proposals but I wish the folks in government would temper the idealism with pragmatism. "Doing something" isn't enough.
We've had composting in the SF Bay Area for ages -- San Francisco made it mandatory in 2009 -- and despite being someone who produces a lot of organic waste (I cook a lot), it's never been a problem for me. You don't need to store food waste in the freezer unless it's something particularly vile you wouldn't want sitting in your outdoor/garage compost bin for the week. Everyone's municipal trash bins eventually got downsized by default (you can pay more for the bigger ones still if you want) and that's almost never been a problem for me because so much waste goes into the compost bin instead of the trash. With the proliferation of compostable takeout containers, etc, my compost bin is sometimes more full than my trash bin!
I happened to be stuck in a car with someone that works for recology. I can't remember the numbers that were thrown around, but they sell an impressive amount of compost, so much so that its a net win for them financially - unlike plastic recycling.
Same story in Portland - we’ve always had a yard debris bin, that now doubles as any biodegradable food compost. Trash cans are smaller and only gets picked up once every other week. If you’re careful about food waste and recyclables, it works out just fine.
> Your garbage will still turn into compost, just in a landfill
This point is not actually true. Landfills are not built to optimize for decomposition, they're optimized for density. The high density leads to heavily anaerobic conditions below the surface, to the point where excavating a landfill can find shit like newspapers from decades ago.
Plus, composting makes more sense from a land use perspective. If you're exclusively taking compostables, and shipping out the compost, your land use limits your throughput, but for a landfill, your land use limits area under that curve, cumulative input. You fill up a landfill, then you have to make another one. They are, somewhat ironically, disposable.
I don't think so. Ever since my household started putting food waste in the ward waste bin instead of the trash bin, our trash bin has been mostly empty on any given week. A few scraps of single-use plastics that can't be recycled,
Of course, that's assuming that your recycling isn't also going into the landfill, which isn't a great assumption.
> Your garbage will still turn into compost, just in a landfill
It will compost, anaerobically, producing more methane and VOCs, and as they do, they create a sludge, that often picks up acid and other contaminants, which quick create leaks in landfills.
> The water that gets into landfill cells picks up contaminants from the waste and becomes “leachate.” What’s in the leachate depends on what’s in the landfill, but some chemicals can be counted on, such as volatile organic compounds, chloride, nitrogen, solvents, phenols, and heavy metals.
> The safeguards intended to prevent leachate from escaping a landfill cell – pipe collection systems in newer landfills and the plastic and clay liners mentioned above – fail over time. This toxic brew of “garbage coffee” leaks out of the landfill and seeps into groundwater – contaminating wells and waterbodies.
Anecdotally, 3 of 4 landfills in my area have ongoing leaks from leachate and now strictly police cardboard and other organic non household trash from the sites.
I would think heavy metals would be a much bigger issue wrt water contamination from a health point of view.
Not that the anaerobic sludge is great, but I would rather see a bigger push to recycle used electronics.
As far as methane, am in total agreement there. It's probably even better to incinerate paper products (if you are not in a subtropical region like LA).
Local supply chains are nice and tidy from an economic and GHG perspective.
Landfill fees are expensive, and the city can sometimes sell the compost, use it themselves, and offer excess to citizens to come pick up by the wheel barrel full.
Compost really isn't that cheap, at least not at my hardware store. Especially if you are filling more than the odd pot or two.
In most cities with composting programs, you can opt out. (Also, it's not that big of a hassle. People used to act like putting glass bottles in the recycling bin was arduous, too, but on the scale of human drudgery and misery it honestly doesn't rate if you just get on with it. Or don't, and just opt out).
Glass, aluminum, and cardboard are almost always profitable to recycle if the city is big enough to make it worth the infrastructure expense. It's the recycling of plastics that we were scammed into thinking made a difference. It does not. Twas a clever move on the part of plastics producers. Meanwhile most gets either a. dumped in a local landfill (after added expense and hassle of collection and sorting), b. shipped partway across the world and dumped at sea, or c. shipped all the way across the world and burned. Note, there are two specific types of plastic that can actually be profitable to recycle, Numbers 1 and 2 (PET and HDPE). The rest is pure junk.
Compost may be similarly beneficial, depending on public compliance, the market/public need for the compost product, and how efficient a particular region can make their system. It is certainly not a one-size-fits-all kind of deal, and probably is not even worth attempting in some regions.
I was told by someone who works for the waste district. Admittedly it's unverified, but he said the only stuff that is reliably recycled are the aluminum cans and steel. The market for plastics and other materials is usually such that it's cheaper to just dump it.
Your original claim was 'almost all' so if you're just talking about plastic I think I'm quite right to question what you 'heard from the garbage guy'.
In BC we've had this for decades, everyone uses it. There's decomposable bags that you can put your compost in, and when you tie them, they take care of most of the odor issue.
We already have a third waste management stream. Organic waste bins. They are green. Most people use them for leaves, branches, grass cuttings, etc. They have been available since long before this law. My property produces at least one full bin a month from everything that is growing on the property. My neighbor actually has two bins.
I'm single and barely produce a gallon of waste a week and usually less. I do actually have a counter top bin with a lid where I drop cuttings but my property is big enough that I have an actual compost pile. But I STILL use the green bin I have because I can't compost all the tree limbs and sticks and what not in any reasonable amount of time.
Generally speaking a single person's organic waste isn't even worth composting. It's like 1/100th of what a single tree on my property will shed in a season. It will enrich a compost pile because human food is rich in sugars so the worms will love it but expecting everyone to do it is silly.
I don't, but I also know that green bins are not commonplace throughout the state. Some locations have them, some do not. San Diego did not, although you were free to buy your own waste container and it would be picked-up bi-weekly. In my old town in NorCal, the city would pick up piles of green waste left on the street.
Yard waste is vastly different from food waste. Yard waste might smell a bit(wet leaves/grass mostly) but it generally doesn't attract roaches and/or rats.
Keep in mind that green waste varies greatly depending on the area and your landscape. I had a heavily planted yard of native vegetation at my old San Diego house and it produced less waste than my kitchen.
In a town near Sacramento, there was a flyer-in-the-mail plan to collect the organics every other day, to reduce stink. So, a huge truck, with single digit mpg, stopping at every house, to reduce green house gas emissions from a few cups of vegetables.
Luckily, it was delayed, hopefully because someone saw the stupidity of it all.
People are putting PFAS-laden "compostable" items in the municipal compost, it won't be long before the "organic" compost should be considered toxic waste (if not already). But we only elect "activists" and not serious people, so nobody with power is going to look into this.
Anecdotally, with composting, just a 5 gallon bucket every other week (and yes, eating at home), my trash waste is more than cut in half (and my bucket is on my deck, where it doesn't smell, so i empty the trash less)
I currently use Compost Now service, but started with Bokashi - which prevents the smells, bugs; but from a price perspective the counter top compost systems seem they would pay for themselves in less than a year compared to curbside service (our trash).
We've been banning plastic bags in (parts of) canada for a while now and honestly i love it. So much less litter just blowing everywhere. It is much nicer and worth it for that alone.
Actually there has been some progress on the straw front. It’s forced companies to find alternatives that are not paper based but still biodegradable. All of the agave based straws I’ve gotten lately have held up just as well as plastic.
It is silly plastic straws were banned but not the lids
It isn't silly. I'm a Watershed Steward on the east coast and bag bans and/or fees have irrefutably reduced the amount of plastic I have to pick out of local rivers and bays
Styrofoam as well.
People, for the most part, aren't just tossing their bags for them to end up in waterways, there is a complex and long path a bag takes from factory to landfill and at multiple steps along the way there are opportunities for them to fly away free as a bird. If you are a responsible consumer and dispose of your bag in a responsible manner, all it takes is one strong gust of wind to blow it into my river where I'll pick it up months later.
The bans and fees should be nudging people towards reusable bags.
I've been using the same four cotton reusable bags since July 2007 removing, at a minimum, 2,533 plastic bags from the waste stream-- and that's just my grocery usage. I carry an additional stuffable tote that stuffs down to the size of a deck of playing cards for convenience store purchases.
Unless your objection is rooted in a pseudo-religious libertarian "free minds and free markets" stance and your ideology cannot be changed, it is self-evident given global experience that plastic (and styrofoam) reduction programs, to include bans and fees, are effective if implemented correctly and enforced.
We use the thin bags for the cats litter box. Since we don't get them "naturally" anymore, we buy them at the office store.
I particularly hate the thicker bags we have today. We're supposed to take them back to the store for recycling (which the article says is not done), but simply the fact that we can't toss it into our curbside makes that a non-starter, so in the black bin they go.
That said, we bought a set of cloth bags years ago. Easily over 10 years ago, we use them every week, they're in great shape and I mostly prefer them to when we had the thin bags. Launder them now and again. We had a seam go on one of them, and had a tailor sew it back up. The clerks at the store identify us with them, some of them recalling back in the day when they were originally sold.
The funny thing, though, is that there's this cloth bag with a Target logo. It's half again bigger than the others, I keep it with them all, but specifically shove it in the bottom to deter its use.
Inevitably, if that bag comes out, it gets gorged with gallons of milk, bags of oranges, cinder blocks, and bowling balls -- both of them, rather than the paper towels, popcorn, bags of cotton candy, etc.
Quick stops we almost always just carry stuff out to the car, and put them into one of the cloth bags we carry all the time (assuming we forgot to bring it in in the first place). If we do get the store bags, they're single use. I just toss 'em.
I haven't seen anyone mention what's in the article: they banned one type of plastic bag and replaced it with a different type of plastic. One that has a "recyclable" (chasing arrows) symbol on it but actually gets thrown out anyway. So they didn't really ban plastic bags.
It's hard to imagine now but there used to be SO MUCH plastic bag trash blowing everywhere when I grew up (in California). People don't appreciate how much cleaner our cities and green spaces are now that there's a cost attached to this common form of disposable plastic.
Stores in our area have stopped stocking plastic bags. Lately I have been just loading armfuls of groceries into my car directly.
"Yes I am an idiot. I thought I could swing by the store on the way home from work. No I will not by a reusable bag - I already have 900 at home stuffed into a closet."
I don't know why we waste so much effort on environmental initiatives that help the least but make people annoyed the most.
Store a few bags in your car somewhere. My car always has 2-3 reusable bags tucked somewhere in there. Once I'm done bringing in whatever was in the car they get hung up by the door so the next time I go out to the car I take them back out to the car so they're always available.
Yes, I am well aware. But with kids and multiple adults sharing cars life happens. So I am still often stuck in stores without any sort of bags. I don't mind paying for them or using paper, but increasingly stores in our area have nothing except for totes.
I too usually don't use bags in the grocery store. I get most of my groceries at Walmart and use their "Scan and Go" feature (part of Walmart+).
With S&G you read the barcode from the Walmart app on your phone as you put them into your (physical) shopping cart. At checkout you scan a QR code on the checkout terminal, confirm payment in the app, and you are done.
I then push the cart out to my car and load them into the trunk. I've got some reusable bags in the trunk so if I'm going to want the groceries in bags for carrying into my house I bag them then as I load the car.
I've also got some stackable empty boxes in the trunk. If I bought a lot of groceries I might load the boxes instead, and then can use a hand truck to move them all at once to my house.
This works quite well, and checkout is way faster than scanning at the terminal.
Also, the sale is actually processed as if it was an online order. I've got bigger credit card rewards for online purchases than I do for grocery store purchases so that was a nice bonus. It's enough of a difference to cover a large part of the cost of the Walmart+ membership.
Funny antidote, but when plastic grocery bags first became available, my environmentalist sister would berate me for using paper bags, because "you can recycle plastic bags" and paper kills trees..
Yep, people forget that paper shopping bags were a huge environmental issue. Just like the anti-nuke activists, they created a much bigger problem than they solved.
This is very dubious. Unless paper bags are produced using timber from first-growth forests, growing and then cutting down the trees that were used to make them took carbon out of the atmosphere. When the paper bag decays or is burnt, they become roughly carbon neutral. But things that take carbon out of the atmosphere for a while as part of a cycle are generally good - by the time one particular paper bag has returned its carbon to the atmosphere, others have been made, and so there is some greenhouse gas reduction long term.
Paper bags are carbon-neutral. Plastic bags introduce new carbon into the environment.
Nuclear power is carbon-neutral (after the construction of the plant itself). Anti-nuke environmentalism in prior decades contributed to the continued and expanded use of coal, oil, and natural gas for power generation.
I don't really agree with the point about anti-nuke environmentalism. In the past many environmentalists were opposed to both nuclear energy (because of the risk of Chernobyl-style disasters or because of the implicit subsidy to nuclear weapons proliferation) and they were opposed to fossil fuel extraction and burning.
The people who were opposed to the environmentalist worldview were in favor of nuclear, but also in favor of fossil fuel generation and extraction (and CFCs, and leaded gasoline, and deforestation, and DDT, etc). They often very publicly argued that all these issues were bogus, that global warming could never happen, that we had nothing to worry about, that all these concerns were motivated by hatred of money or progress.
The environmentalists, on the other hand, tried hard to make a more abstract point - that we need to protect our environment and treat it as a precious good to be shared. This was obviously right.
Why should we cherry-pick one aspect of an environmentalist strategy from a very specific time and use it to blame them for "the continued and expanded use of coal, oil, and natural gas for power generation". Why aren't the numerous vocal cheerleaders of fossil fuels (who may have happened to be in favor of nuclear, but only because they generally argued that we should ignore all safety and resource depletion concerns) held to account here?
> The people who were opposed to the environmentalist worldview were in favor of nuclear, but also in favor of fossil fuel generation
Yes, I agree there were (and still are) people with that view. I said "contributed to" not "the sole cause of"
But I distinctly remember very organized activisim opposing nuclear power in the 1970s. I don't recall much if any opposing new coal plants. I'm sure there was some but they didn't make many headlines.
> I don't recall much if any opposing new coal plants.
I can't argue with your subjective recollections, but this is not by any means an accurate picture of environmentalism historically. Acid rain in West Germany (caused by burning coal) is pretty much ground zero of environmentalism as a politically organized force.
When I moved to California I tried not always buying bags. I have a ton of tote bags and would just leave them in the car but there was always the random stop at a grocery store on the way home or sometimes you just forget them and don't feel like walking back. Being a hardass on your SO about it is no way to be either. So I ended up just buying them and not thinking about it. Every once in a while I'll remember to bring bags but it doesn't always work. It ends up being an extra 30 cents on a shopping trip and most of the workers will give you free bags after you've already paid if stuff won't all fit while you're bagging.
I actually do use the bags. I end up using them for bathroom trash cans and when I'm cleaning.
I have a half acre on a hill and have a compost pile at the bottom of the hill. 15 mature trees producing a good amount of locked up carbon. My food waste in comparison is minimal but I still throw it into the pile and it produces some really nice earthy black compost. But even that is kinda annoying. Walking all the way to pile and back is a bit of a chore and my ex would never do it so it was up to me. I pretty much just have a bucket next to the sink. At the very least when I'm throwing out stuff that has spoiled it makes me feel a tiny bit better that I'm fertilizing my own land.
I'm not really sure what the solution is for people in apartments. It will smell no matter what you do.
The requirement of collecting the bags went the same way as the can policy. They are required to charge $.05 (or more) per can that they sell, but I have to drive to a completely different place, somewhere in a backlot to get my $.05 per can back.
And now in Phoenix I get plastic bags everywhere. But they're even worse. I remember in the old country we'd get plastic bags but they were actually usable as trash bags.
Now, I actually have to double bag the groceries as they tear by just pulling them off of the holder.
unpopular opinion in this US-centric forum, but just burn the bags when they end up in the trash. Much of Europe does that. Bags are just hydrocarbons and burning them completely releases nothing but CO2 and water.
Then the landfill ceases to be an issue and we can focus on CO2.
Well, CO2 is a problem, but plastic bags are already more CO2 efficient than any alternative bags given the average number of uses in their lifetime.
So two weeks ago I stopped in at the farmers market where I always shop, but I hadn't been there physically in 6 months or so. There was a sign outside proclaiming that they were abolishing single-use plastic bags, and that they were selling durable ones. The sign was dated in May.
This was entirely a surprise to me, since I shop there via Instacart, and they've had no shortage of single-use plastics to single-and-double-bag all my groceries and drop them on my doorstep. Obviously, when you use a delivery service, there's no way to provide your own durable bags. The pile-up of plastics causes much chagrin in my heart, but if I pile them on a shelf, then I can bring them back to that farmers market and shove them into the recycling bin, and let them do whatever they do with them.
I have no idea what Instacart would do if these bags were banned entirely. Perhaps the drivers would get a clue and carry their own reusables.
I suggest another reasoning: when plastic packaging start the historical advertisement was "save trees, nature with plastic", because yes, without it even if bamboo is strong and light enough, cardboard cheap enough, paper help etc at the actual rate we need simply too much resources for nature to regenerate.
Or to enlarge a bit: build homes with wood means build something recyclable at least once, environmental friendly, renewable etc BUT only if the wood demand remain below a certain threshold. Well, for packaging not just bags it's the same.
I have no massive data, nor I do not know if I can source them somewhere but I suspect that the main issue these days is that we simply need too much to avoid using plastic. So a ban can work ONLY with some other push toward less packing witch is FAR less easy.
I'm from EU where the first push toward mater-B (a kind of polymer made from corn) end up in two kind of scandals:
- it's not deteriorate easily in nature, just like nylon bags
- it's more fragile, meaning instead of using a single bag you use two to be safe, and it's production is not much sustainable
Than the ban of single-use plastic dish, glasses, spoon, forks etc substituted by bamboo ones. Sure they to not pollute once dropped in nature, but how many forest need to be cut and substituted with bamboo to sustain the demand?
The answer here is "well, just we metal/ceramic/glass stuff, wash them, reuse, we all have a dishwasher". Doing the same for fast food, supermarkets etc is FAR LESS easy specially in modern dense cities where people shop by feet nearby their home every days instead of by car once a week or less.
The bottomline: to ban plastic we need to ban the modern dense life to came back to domestic stockpile of foods and so on, to shop with cars and have a garage so we re-use many-usage packing stuff and we buy in large quantity. Witch actually is something NO LOBBY want because meaning reversing the current trend toward 15' cities and "all dependent on services" model.
There's a far simpler solution that many states and cities have adopted: a plastic bag ban.
You go to check out and your option is a crappy paper bag. That's ok for some small items, but doing your groceries with them is annoying. Everyone remembers to bring their shopping bags now.
I prefer paper bags as long as they’re constructed right. Target in Portland had some of the best until Oregon started to force companies to charge for bags, then like magic target decided to switch to cheaper bags they could make money on.
People hate this idea, but that just makes me think it has merit. Stop trying to reduce/recycle plastic use. We need to increase it. We need carbon sinks, and so lets produce more plastic, use it, then bury it in a way that prevents it from getting out. Switch production to use atmospheric carbon (or maybe just use trees) to create the plastic, switch back to never-degrade plastic formulas, and then just pull carbon out of the atmosphere, use it for plastic products, and then bury those plastic products forever.
Plastics are awesome, it is us trying to recycle them and not bury them that is the actual problem.
The point of carbon sinks is to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The process you're suggesting is:
- Pull a bunch of oil out of the ground
- Crack it into smaller hydrocarbons (using energy from burning other oil derived hydrocarbons)
- Polymerize those smaller components into plastics (using more energy from burning hydrocarbons)
- Bury the plastic
That doesn't take CO2 out of the atmosphere, every single part of the process is adding more.
For a carbon sink to be useful you need to be taking carbon that is already part of the carbon cycle and sequestering it, not pulling up carbon that has been buried for millions of years and then sending half of that into the air and the other half into a landfill.
That's not the right analysis. If the hydrocarbons in the ground don't get used for making plastic, they are very likely to be burned for energy. So waste plastic reduces the CO2 emitted by that process.
If we can't limit GHGs from burning fossil fuels for energy, we aren't going to magic our way out of this situation by producing more junk.
How are we going to get it out of the ground, transport it to petroleum processing facilities to convert it into useful forms, transfer it to manufacturing facilities (usually halfway across the world) for product creation, transport it (back across the world) to regional and then local distribution hubs, transport it from store to consumer's home, and then collect it all in order to transport it and process it further still to get it buried like you suggest?
By burning fossil fuels for energy at every link in that chain, and probably half a dozen more I couldn't think of off the top of my head.
There is also a notion that in a measly 1,500 years, humanity would probably have incredible uses for plastics and other petroleum materials beyond our wildest dreams, and have the technology and institutional wisdom to make use of them without bludgeoning our atmosphere and various biomes to death in the process. But if we are too far gone on our path of burning our planet to a crisp, and we've already pulled all the oil out the ground in the process, well, that's going to really kind of suck. I get it, from a highly idealized and abstract perspective your proposal makes some sense.
But the practical reality is that ramping up wasteful activities, even if we do so very cleverly and strategically, is not going to get us anywhere but where we already are.
I'm not arguing in favor of the GP's specific proposals, just pointing out that we should consider the displacement of fuel burning when we consider the carbon cost of plastics.
I assumed that his suggestion was not meant to be taken literally - that we should construct plastics for no use - but rather that we should think differently about the value and cost of plastics which are produced anyway.
I'm no chemical engineer, but I think the problem with that plan is cost and feasibility.
Extracting carbon from the air and converting it to hydrocarbons and plastics is neither practical nor cheap with current technology. It will also require a lot of energy even if a practical process is found.
Maybe someday, but not anything that is immediately useful.
Reducing plastic use is also not without side-effects. Other containers such as glass bottles or metal cans are heavier, which increases fuel burned in transporting goods.
For stuff like shopping bags, single-use food containers and utensils, where there are easy alternatives such as reusable bags, bans probably are most effective, but even bans are not without side effects. Remember that plastic shopping bags were the "solution" to environmentalist protests over paper bags back in the 1970s/80s.
Doesn't work because humans litter despite efforts to mitigate, and all of this plastic ends up uncollected. Paper bags break down eventually. We need less plastics in our daily lives, full stop.
Ignoring your implication that other countries are "bad people" and your country of choice is "good people", western nations ship garbage to other countries
offloading ethical/moral violations to poorer countries by paying them does not free you of responsibility, no.
It's like how child labor ends up in supply chains - at the very least once you know it's happening you bear responsibility for making sure it no longer does, or if you can't do that, you stop doing business with the wrongdoer
There is nuance. Recycling exports have declined from the US [1], and a significant amount of the recycling stream of little value (non metals) is landfilled instead now [2] [3] (a quick google search will confirm, although some of my info comes from a family friend in a mid level management position at Waste Management). With that said, waste management (the practice) is atrocious or non existent outside of the developed world [4]. And even in the developed world, people still litter [5]. So! We can't use plastic, because we are collectively irresponsible. Maybe we hope it'll end of landfilled after its useful service life, but hope is not a strategy.
Oh if solving climate change was so easy! No, that idea doesn't work at all.
For any of these ideas you need to look at the total CO2 spent vs CO2 removed. It doesn't matter that you're creating a sink (dumping plastic in a big hole) if while creating that sink you're emitting even more!
Plastic comes from oil. Oil extraction already releases a lot of CO2 to begin with. Making the hole and dumping things into it takes CO2. Not recycling means using even more oil.
Not all carbon is the same. You cannot make plastic out of a pile of carbon efficiently. If you could, we could just reduce the plastic to carbon and make new plastic.
This means that you cannot make plastic out of atmospheric carbon efficiently. You need your carbon to already make small chains (like ethylene and propylene). These small chains are then linked up to make plastics (polymers technically).
As for doing it from trees, it's not so simple! You cannot use much of the three. You need to spend CO2 to plant the trees, take care of them, water them, harvest them, process them.
This idea doesn't work at all. The best way to save CO2 is to reuse, not to use more.
If government was serious about plastic pollution reduction, they would force the bottled beverage industry to go back to glass. Otherwise, it's just political window dressing.
Coca Cola pollutes the environment with every product they make. Go after them, not the human just trying to carry groceries home.
But fossil fuel production is also hideously polluting, and ends us with the carbon from the oil in the atmosphere. Producing plastic from oil means that those molecules won't (typically) end up as greenhouse gases.
I came to this conclusion as well but I don’t see it come up in discussion. We pull carbon out of the ground as oil, make plastic bags, and then bury them in a landfill for 10,000 years. I do not care about recycling plastic bags unless it is economically viable. If we bury plastic in a safe place, that is a very good thing.
Now the real problem the article talks about is the leaky transportation and disposal process. We chose to cut usage through policy and that reduced the amount of escaped waste. Plugging the leaks is a really hard problem, lots of design and engineering work to keep loose bags in bins, trucks, and barges.
This whole “plastic ban” is just a feeble and disgusting distraction from the orders of magnitude larger environmental issues facing humanity.
But since we apparently, absolutely need to continue to burn down the house we all live in, banning plastics is seemingly a great and democratic compromise on environmental issues.
Yes, plastics are bad, but it’s like plugging a single hole in one bathtub on the Titanic, which apparently large amounts of politicians across the western world feel is a great win.
In the UK shops have to charge for bags, think it's about 10p or more for the better quality ones.
Tbh it's easier to just bring your own bags, for a big grocery shop I have 2 bags lined with foil insulation to keep cold items cool. They're super easy to pack if you're smart with your item placement and super easy to get into the car. Cost about £20 from Amazon but you can probs find cheaper ones.
There's something poetic and fitting about a California greenwashing campaign that only cares about what contains the trash, not the contents themselves.
> Who keeps the proceeds from the sale of reusable grocery bags and recycled paper bags?
The stores that sell the bags keep the money and must use it to cover the costs of providing the bags, complying with the bag ban, or encouraging the use of reusable grocery bags through educational materials or an educational campaign.
I feel like this isn't quite "companies get more profit". It basically just eliminated the old cost but didn't become a revenue stream.
Certainly it avoided the alternative where we switched to paper bags that companies paid for.
Using reusable bags is so easy; yet it seems Americans are entitled to getting free bags, they can't adapt.
It takes me 10s to stop by my pantry and grab my trusty backpack (from grade school, 25 years ago) or to remember to put bags back in my car. My backpack is better at carrying heavy items (like liquids) and more ergonomically too. But reusing thick plastic bags (from pickup, or beach locations that have banned "single use" plastic) is also easy.
Somehow, personal responsibility is difficult for the majority of Americans.
I loved the new plastic bags in California ever since they came out. Those old weak bags always ripped and tore. Had no idea the new ones were reusable! They make much better trash liners than the old ones.
The problem is basically a people’s problem. It is not that hard to keep a bunch of re-usable bags at your home/office/car and bring them with you.
People do this in countries like Germany, Sweden or the Netherlands.
But we are too fucking individualistic to bother ourselves with this minimal inconvenience. We act as if we are all entitled to maximum convenience, every other concern beyond our comfort be damned!
To be fair, that American ethos has diminished significantly in younger generations. However, the American ethos of abusing a good cause for political gain or private profit remains firmly in place.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...