I live in New Jersey, and I suspect the law of unintended consequences is going to come in hard on this one. The stores all sell cheap reusable bags so that customers don't get caught in line with nothing to carry their goods in. I've bought two so far. If the bag is in the car you obviously have to remember to take it into the store with you. If you carry the bag into your house with your groceries then you have to remember to put it back in the car. If you fail to do either of those things you'll probably buy another $.30 reusable bag at checkout, which you'll then carry into the house with your goods. I suspect people will accumulate a lot of bags, and I can't help wondering why some recycling chain involving paper bags would not have been a better solution. I'm no expert and presumably there's a reason.
That's happened to me... Right now I've got around 12 reusable fabric bags that I've had to buy at some point when I needed to buy groceries but didn't have a bag handy. I am now thinking what to do with some of them (maybe some type of LED lamp shade)
It can be worse. I live in central London and I don't even have a car. Busy lifestyle means most of the time I swing by groceries on my way back from somewhere. I don't have space in my pockets to carry bags all the time, so I end up buying them all the time. This anti-bag politics is complete bullshit.
Reusable bags for deliver are stupid if they don't get collected back into the system. Otherwise, you're just making more and more reusable containers that are effectively single-use because, well, you're not reusing them.
While I understand that it makes sense to ban plastic bags, I don't believe banning paper bags has nearly any positive impact on the environment.
It's obvious that this law is not good for the environment, consumers or grocers and is deeply unpopular. Which begs the question, where are these laws coming from? They don't even bother making simple exceptions for practicality. It's terrifying not knowing the underlying forces that are causing such a perversion to democracy.
You know what would make a real difference? If Amazon offered a lockable "delivery box" or some kind of reusable delivery packaging. By far my biggest source of packaging waste are 12x12 Amazon boxes used to package a toothbrush or something equally small.
The article (which as published today) has a factual error. The author wrote: “New York passed a law decriminalizing marijuana but never got around to issuing licenses or a legal framework to retailers.”
But New York State legalized cannabis in 2021, instead of just decriminalizing it. From The New York Times, published in March 2021 [0]: “After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs.
“Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.”
This may seem like a minor nitpick, but the factual error invites scrutiny over the accuracy of the rest of the article. The author does link sources to the other claims in the article, but I’m now by default skeptical to believe the other assertions in the article until I can evaluate whether their linked sources are legitimate.
And? Most of the reusable bags in my house are 3-5 years old. We even have a couple that we brought with us when we moved home 11 years ago. Using them hundreds of times is the whole point.
So what's the problem with this, other than it seems to inconvenience the author, and that food delivery services haven't figured something else out?
Also, most of the points made are moot, e.g.
> If there’s anything a person that orders from Whole Foods regularly needs is a dozen reusable plastic bags every few weeks and $10 added to their bill.
Anything delivered by Costco doesn't come in plastic bags, but reused boxes. Order from Costco, then, as they seem to have fixed it already.
> This is all based on a false notion of landfills being bad or the idea that we’re running out of landfill space.
Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
> Most of the trash that ends up in the ocean is coming from a handful of countries which are overwhelmed from recyclables sent from the US.
The disconnection here is palpable. If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them? Are these other countries to blame for not recycling our trash properly?
All your points are addressed in the piece. It doesn't really inconvenience me. I'll be fine. I'll pay the extra few bucks if I forget a bag. I'm fairly well off and I own a car so I can just dump the groceries directly into my trunk. It inconveniences a lot of people that don't have that luxury. Maybe an overworked parent that's coming home from work that needs to stop by a grocery store to pick up a few things. It's also a net negative for the environment since people will end up using bags worse for the environment as single use bags. This will not reduce landfill space.
The recycling point is about the fact that much of the US is greenwashing their actions by thinking they're doing some noble deed by recycling, when they're really just spending a lot of money shipping their trash to other countries that end up throwing a lot of it in the ocean when we could have a sane policy of using landfills.
If I'm understanding the article correctly the problem the author has is that single use paper bags, which are biodegradable and more easily recycled, are being banned in favor of reusable plastic and cloth bags which are considered significantly worse for the environment due to the required amount of use before they have a 'neutral' environmental impact compared to current practices.
The source they get their info from is interesting, though. (Linked below.) According to this, depending on which study you're looking at, it may actually be impossible to reuse any bags enough times that they become worth it compared to ditching them in general.
The lowest possible seems to be paper bags with 3 reuses, followed by plastic bags at around 10, then if you have a durable enough cotton bag to get through 130 uses it becomes the better option environmentally speaking. I've never known anyone that could reuse any of those bags enough to get through that many uses before they tear to the point of uselessness though.
I wonder if it would be advantageous to encourage stores and individuals to start using crates or woven bags again, which may be able to withstand the number of trips necessary to make their environmental impact neutral compared to plastic bags.
Because reusable bags also require more carbon to produce. According to the article, in order for a reusable cotton bag to save carbon compared to a single-use plastic bag, the cotton bag needs to be reused 132 times! That's a lot of shopping trips!
This law could easily end up with a net negative environmental impact.
> Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
They are not as bad as is generally thought. Landfills are essentially big compost piles, and the heat generated from decaying organic material breaks down almost everything, including most plastics. The few things that are left, such as metals, are actually valuable enough to extract in a lot of cases. The primary thing to worry about is lead contamination but this is less of an issue now that lead has been removed from most consumer products. Compare that to recycling, which is extremely energy intensive and has its own impacts on climate change, while landfills can actually generate a net positive amount of energy.
> Anything delivered by Costco doesn't come in plastic bags, but reused boxes. Order from Costco, then, as they seem to have fixed it already.
Personally I think people should avoid grocery delivery unless they really need it. In any case, many people don't have access to Costcos.
> Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
Landfills are a practical solution for waste production levels we have now. Striving to have less of them is the right thing to do but it's not happening tomorrow.
> If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them?
Sure, one solution is to take responsibility for long-term management of our wasteful consumption and put them in landfills stateside instead of shipping them around the world. Then we can reduce our waste over time and, hopefully, find ways to clean up these landfills.
Instead of a ban, wouldn't it be better to tax the heck out of single-use bags?
That' what we do in Fairfax County. At the end of check-out, you have to enter how many bags you used, and get charged a small fee for each. I wish the fee was a bit larger, to try an dissuade more people from simply paying it, but it seems better than an outright ban.
I would be interested to see if these taxes have any meaningful effect on consumer behavior
The core issue is that any tax on bags like this is a regressive tax. A tax that is big enough to make changes in how upper middle class households operate would have a highly disproportionate effect on lower middle class and those in poverty.
The result is areas like the DC metro doing things like a $0.05 bag tax. A number probably too small to change any behaviors at a relevant scale.
I don’t have a nice solution to these topics either— it’s just that these bag taxes feel like the poster child for middle of the road policies that fail to have a meaningful impact on the issue they’re seeking to address
My gym has a dispenser of plastic bags for wet swim trunks, "made from recycled ocean plastic waste". (They're thin and easily torn, but if I'm careful, I can reuse the same one for a month or two before it wears out.)
The same material could probably be used to make sturdier shopping bags if they increased the thickness and added handles. Exceptions to these anti-plastic bag ordinances should be added for this type of recycled bag, to encourage its use.
Similarly, make an exception for recycled paper bags. Just banning all disposable bags seems overly broad and counter-productive.
The article considers the environmental impact of reusable bags in terms of climate change, but I would speculate that's not how most people would frame the benefit, they'd see it as a benefit because it reduces the amount of plastic waste.
I see this trend where environmentalist writing will try to convert every "environmental" change into a single unit, some kind of "Equivalent Trees Saved". The environment is too complex for something like that. Plastic waste isn't meaningfully convertible to CO2 emissions for the purposes of environmental impact, and deforestation, oil/chemical spills, and invasive species aren't either.
Tough brown paper and cardboard is made from the trashiest of trashy recycled paper material.
All you're doing by eliminating paper bags or cardboard is reducing the number of times that a tree will benefit anyone from the time it is cut to the time it is either land-filled or burned.
If you want to see a larger fraction of paper and pulp products "go around again" then you need to do things that increases the market size of the low end products that get made with the source materials that can't be made into anything else.
I think this is in a class of what could be called “woke laws” or laws that sounds great, maybe have great intentions, but no thought was given to what happens after. The lightbulb ban, plastic bags, straws, it all sounds like things we should do, then what? I think The argument that “let the market figure it out“ has been bastardized to excuse these woke laws. The market is going to push their cost down, and that means onto the consumer. So really the only people who get hurt by these laws are the consumers, because they end up having to pay and be inconvenienced by them.
You are right, but who else could be inconvenienced by them if not the customers? The companies? They will push the costs (aka inconvenience) to the customers. So whatever gets done, the effects are felt by everybody - and this applies to everything, yes including "regular laws".
We reuse our plastic bags. As a trash can liner, or to collect dog poop. I am sure that was never considered when the ban was contemplated. Sometimes trying to "do good" gets ridiculous.
Here is another option. I know a lovely group of little old ladies doing this now. Likely there is at least a couple churches in any area with a homeless population that are likely collecting bags for this purpose.
I'd agree with this 10-15 years ago. But in the past decade the single use bags most places use are too thin and fragile, carrying most simple things puncture a hole in them. Walmart bags basically have holes in them from just opening them up.
You know what would be cool? Turning those bags into printer filament. I wonder if theyre similar types of plastic or if it is the wrong type to be extruded.
"Reuse" in the context of the 3Rs means "give new life beyond initial purpose", not "have it sit around to wait for other garbage to join it before we throw it out after a single use". Neither of your examples actually reuse the bag, just make it wait for the buddy system before sending to the landfill.
Don't hurt yourself bearing that cross of "doing good" though.
The ban is specifically on single-use bags, not all bags. I don't use paper bags for groceries and I never will. Paperbag is fragile. If it rains, one can hope to reach the destination before the bag falls apart. To replace all plastic bags with paper ones we will need to chop a lot of trees.
Plastic bags are still the best, just not single-use ones. I have a grocery bag that is made out of tightly-woven polypropylene thread. I've been using it for about 2 years now and it looks like new.
>"This law is a huge inconvenience for most people in the state. How can I tell? Because from my experience, the overwhelming majority of people choose not to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags."
Wow. Excellent analysis! Haha. Figure. It. Out. You're an adult. I keep a bag of bags in my car, and for when I walk to the grocery store, I have another bag of bags. So far my life hasn't changed much.
So prior to banning single use bags, people relied on single use bags. Who would have guessed!?
I have a spoiler alert for the future for this author: The overwhelming majority of people will start choosing to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags when they need to.
It's part of the "war on poor people". Not a coordinated action but an emergent behavior that keeps the bottom rung of society in their place, and makes sure we keep our servant class in an appropriate level of bondage
How so? I don't see the connection between generating more trash, and punishing the less fortunate.
If anything, banning plastic bags would be a better fit for the narrative. Plastic bags are water resistant, and used to be more resilient and thus more reusable than paper bags. In some Asian countries, plastic bags are used to carry food, even soup, replacing more expensive containers.
This is just a waste of time when the real culprits are the oil companies. If people are serious about this then they need to go after the real culprits, not shave a few specs from around the edges.
In the trunk of my car, I have 10 reusable bags, 5 of which are insulated. The total weight of those bags is 2.5 pounds.
Let's suppose because of bag laws, 100,000,000 cars in the U.S. are now carrying around 1 extra pound wherever they go. And that all the cars are gas. (My car's electric, but I don't want to confound the calculations).
Let's assume that the average car travels 12 miles/day (this is probably low).
The fuel cost to haul 2.5 pounds 12 miles/day 100,000,000 times/day is not insignificant. And nobody ever calculates this when comparing reusable bags to disposable bags.
> The fuel cost to haul 2.5 pounds 12 miles/day 100,000,000 times/day is not insignificant.
That's a thousandth of the weight of a small 2500lb car, but much of the inefficiency is due to drag, so the impact is not even 1:1. In absolute terms, you can successfully argue that tons of CO2 are emitted as a result, but that's extremely marginal, at less than a tenth of a percent of emissions. I'm pretty sure you know how ridiculous your argument is, but if you were that much of a hippie, you'd know that shucking your clothes, ditching your spare tire, and driving on empty would be even better for the environment.
Keep going: Why is that not partially offset by the transportation of all the single use bags ceasing? How many shipping containers full of plastic bags no longer needed to be moved in order to solve this? It's not like this hauling issue is created in a vacuum.
Further point: You don't need to keep a bunch of bags in your car all the time for every trip you ever take. The fact that this is how you choose to address the issue is personal, and not at all the only way this new paradigm can be solved.
Ok I'll bite: this is a weird comparison. Surely the 5 (!) insulated bags are the bulk of the weight?
Those ones aren't fungible with disposable bags, which don't insulate.
The weight in the car is also an irrelevancy, because just tire pressure will absolutely swamp the difference, by which I mean there would be no way to extract the cost from the noise no matter how hard you tried.
[+] [-] markbnj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orev|3 years ago|reply
In that order. Each one of those has a higher cost than the one before it.
Change takes getting used to. Yeah, you’ll forget your bags for a while, but eventually it will become a normal thing.
[+] [-] xtracto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neverminder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chetanbhasin|3 years ago|reply
While I understand that it makes sense to ban plastic bags, I don't believe banning paper bags has nearly any positive impact on the environment.
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FL410|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coastflow|3 years ago|reply
But New York State legalized cannabis in 2021, instead of just decriminalizing it. From The New York Times, published in March 2021 [0]: “After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs.
“Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.”
This may seem like a minor nitpick, but the factual error invites scrutiny over the accuracy of the rest of the article. The author does link sources to the other claims in the article, but I’m now by default skeptical to believe the other assertions in the article until I can evaluate whether their linked sources are legitimate.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/nyregion/marijuana-seller...
[+] [-] bko|3 years ago|reply
> But you can’t purchase weed without a prescription or sell it without a license until state regulators write rules for recreational use of the drug.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/new-york-has-legaliz...
[+] [-] jmcnulty|3 years ago|reply
And? Most of the reusable bags in my house are 3-5 years old. We even have a couple that we brought with us when we moved home 11 years ago. Using them hundreds of times is the whole point.
[+] [-] beej71|3 years ago|reply
The author's not wrong that it takes more effort to remember the bags, but after a few false starts, it becomes habit.
[+] [-] manuelabeledo|3 years ago|reply
Also, most of the points made are moot, e.g.
> If there’s anything a person that orders from Whole Foods regularly needs is a dozen reusable plastic bags every few weeks and $10 added to their bill.
Anything delivered by Costco doesn't come in plastic bags, but reused boxes. Order from Costco, then, as they seem to have fixed it already.
> This is all based on a false notion of landfills being bad or the idea that we’re running out of landfill space.
Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
> Most of the trash that ends up in the ocean is coming from a handful of countries which are overwhelmed from recyclables sent from the US.
The disconnection here is palpable. If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them? Are these other countries to blame for not recycling our trash properly?
[+] [-] bko|3 years ago|reply
The recycling point is about the fact that much of the US is greenwashing their actions by thinking they're doing some noble deed by recycling, when they're really just spending a lot of money shipping their trash to other countries that end up throwing a lot of it in the ocean when we could have a sane policy of using landfills.
[+] [-] THJr|3 years ago|reply
The source they get their info from is interesting, though. (Linked below.) According to this, depending on which study you're looking at, it may actually be impossible to reuse any bags enough times that they become worth it compared to ditching them in general.
The lowest possible seems to be paper bags with 3 reuses, followed by plastic bags at around 10, then if you have a durable enough cotton bag to get through 130 uses it becomes the better option environmentally speaking. I've never known anyone that could reuse any of those bags enough to get through that many uses before they tear to the point of uselessness though.
I wonder if it would be advantageous to encourage stores and individuals to start using crates or woven bags again, which may be able to withstand the number of trips necessary to make their environmental impact neutral compared to plastic bags.
Their source: https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/08/heres-how-many-times-y...
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|3 years ago|reply
This law could easily end up with a net negative environmental impact.
[+] [-] oceanplexian|3 years ago|reply
They are not as bad as is generally thought. Landfills are essentially big compost piles, and the heat generated from decaying organic material breaks down almost everything, including most plastics. The few things that are left, such as metals, are actually valuable enough to extract in a lot of cases. The primary thing to worry about is lead contamination but this is less of an issue now that lead has been removed from most consumer products. Compare that to recycling, which is extremely energy intensive and has its own impacts on climate change, while landfills can actually generate a net positive amount of energy.
[+] [-] prescriptivist|3 years ago|reply
Personally I think people should avoid grocery delivery unless they really need it. In any case, many people don't have access to Costcos.
> Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
Landfills are a practical solution for waste production levels we have now. Striving to have less of them is the right thing to do but it's not happening tomorrow.
> If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them?
Sure, one solution is to take responsibility for long-term management of our wasteful consumption and put them in landfills stateside instead of shipping them around the world. Then we can reduce our waste over time and, hopefully, find ways to clean up these landfills.
[+] [-] alistairSH|3 years ago|reply
That' what we do in Fairfax County. At the end of check-out, you have to enter how many bags you used, and get charged a small fee for each. I wish the fee was a bit larger, to try an dissuade more people from simply paying it, but it seems better than an outright ban.
[+] [-] LordKeren|3 years ago|reply
The core issue is that any tax on bags like this is a regressive tax. A tax that is big enough to make changes in how upper middle class households operate would have a highly disproportionate effect on lower middle class and those in poverty.
The result is areas like the DC metro doing things like a $0.05 bag tax. A number probably too small to change any behaviors at a relevant scale.
I don’t have a nice solution to these topics either— it’s just that these bag taxes feel like the poster child for middle of the road policies that fail to have a meaningful impact on the issue they’re seeking to address
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|3 years ago|reply
The same material could probably be used to make sturdier shopping bags if they increased the thickness and added handles. Exceptions to these anti-plastic bag ordinances should be added for this type of recycled bag, to encourage its use.
Similarly, make an exception for recycled paper bags. Just banning all disposable bags seems overly broad and counter-productive.
[+] [-] a_shovel|3 years ago|reply
I see this trend where environmentalist writing will try to convert every "environmental" change into a single unit, some kind of "Equivalent Trees Saved". The environment is too complex for something like that. Plastic waste isn't meaningfully convertible to CO2 emissions for the purposes of environmental impact, and deforestation, oil/chemical spills, and invasive species aren't either.
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|3 years ago|reply
Tough brown paper and cardboard is made from the trashiest of trashy recycled paper material.
All you're doing by eliminating paper bags or cardboard is reducing the number of times that a tree will benefit anyone from the time it is cut to the time it is either land-filled or burned.
If you want to see a larger fraction of paper and pulp products "go around again" then you need to do things that increases the market size of the low end products that get made with the source materials that can't be made into anything else.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soco|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul_f|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kcplate|3 years ago|reply
https://thesavvyage.com/turn-your-plastic-bags-into-sleeping...
[+] [-] mr-debil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0des|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gingerrr|3 years ago|reply
Don't hurt yourself bearing that cross of "doing good" though.
[+] [-] zerof1l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurusnoises|3 years ago|reply
Wow. Excellent analysis! Haha. Figure. It. Out. You're an adult. I keep a bag of bags in my car, and for when I walk to the grocery store, I have another bag of bags. So far my life hasn't changed much.
[+] [-] moate|3 years ago|reply
I have a spoiler alert for the future for this author: The overwhelming majority of people will start choosing to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags when they need to.
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manuelabeledo|3 years ago|reply
If anything, banning plastic bags would be a better fit for the narrative. Plastic bags are water resistant, and used to be more resilient and thus more reusable than paper bags. In some Asian countries, plastic bags are used to carry food, even soup, replacing more expensive containers.
[+] [-] Finnucane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurusnoises|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DarkWiiPlayer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kwatsonafter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sys_64738|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verdverm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|3 years ago|reply
Let's suppose because of bag laws, 100,000,000 cars in the U.S. are now carrying around 1 extra pound wherever they go. And that all the cars are gas. (My car's electric, but I don't want to confound the calculations).
Let's assume that the average car travels 12 miles/day (this is probably low).
The fuel cost to haul 2.5 pounds 12 miles/day 100,000,000 times/day is not insignificant. And nobody ever calculates this when comparing reusable bags to disposable bags.
[+] [-] klyrs|3 years ago|reply
That's a thousandth of the weight of a small 2500lb car, but much of the inefficiency is due to drag, so the impact is not even 1:1. In absolute terms, you can successfully argue that tons of CO2 are emitted as a result, but that's extremely marginal, at less than a tenth of a percent of emissions. I'm pretty sure you know how ridiculous your argument is, but if you were that much of a hippie, you'd know that shucking your clothes, ditching your spare tire, and driving on empty would be even better for the environment.
[+] [-] moate|3 years ago|reply
Further point: You don't need to keep a bunch of bags in your car all the time for every trip you ever take. The fact that this is how you choose to address the issue is personal, and not at all the only way this new paradigm can be solved.
[+] [-] samatman|3 years ago|reply
Those ones aren't fungible with disposable bags, which don't insulate.
The weight in the car is also an irrelevancy, because just tire pressure will absolutely swamp the difference, by which I mean there would be no way to extract the cost from the noise no matter how hard you tried.