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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] tehlike|2 years ago|reply
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
[+] [-] InSteady|2 years ago|reply
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.
[0] https://www.metabolic.nl/news/are-organic-cotton-totes-reall...
[+] [-] legitster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noelwelsh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slg|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scblock|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chewbacha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aunche|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rendaw|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zeristor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strictnein|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raincole|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|2 years ago|reply
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...)
[+] [-] debesyla|2 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] Fluorescence|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwaway8582|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] weaksauce|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 01100011|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rballard|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tash9|2 years ago|reply
- It's a hassle.
- You can buy good compost for very little at the hardware store that's produced at industrial scales
- Landfill space is not a precious resource in most parts of the world
- Your garbage will still turn into compost, just in a landfill
Where is the upside?
edit b/c I don't know how to format things
[+] [-] SoftTalker|2 years ago|reply
Behind the scenes it almost all goes to the same landfill. It's nothing but theatre and extra costs.
[+] [-] soperj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hparadiz|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nomel|2 years ago|reply
Luckily, it was delayed, hopefully because someone saw the stupidity of it all.
[+] [-] coryrc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smileysteve|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizzafeelsright|2 years ago|reply
Forcing private companies into charging people that happen to prefer carry their plastic packages in plastic bags to avoid extra plastic is silly.
Same with the straws.
There is no progress. Only the illusion.
[+] [-] whartung|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drivers99|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0_____0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legitster|2 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] Dig1t|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gedy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hparadiz|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WirelessGigabit|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xkjyeah|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kkfx|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] light_hue_1|2 years ago|reply
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.
Simple.
[+] [-] gilbetron|2 years ago|reply
Plastics are awesome, it is us trying to recycle them and not bury them that is the actual problem.
[+] [-] cannabis_sam|2 years ago|reply
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.