Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out. Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out (my favorite are the ikea bags, they are big and great for groceries - vs many grocery store offerings which are garbage).
Nutshell, it they may not be a net plus for the environment when so many poor quality bags which are more energy/resource intensive to make end up being single-use anyway.
> Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out.
Your comment is a textbook argument of perfect being the enemy of good.
Sure, some bags are thrown out. Sure, people use more than one. Sure, people can buy them if they feel they need them.
That's perfectly fine, as that's completely besides the point.
What you're failing to mention is that thanks to this push to adopt reusable bags the use of single-use plastic bags plummeted. You no longer see over a dozen single-use bags being thrown out at each and every single shopping trip. These bags aren't recyclable and disintegrate very easily, making it extremely hard to pull them out of the environment once they get there.
You're also somehow leaving out is the fact that some major supermarkets chains are making available reusable shopping bags made of natural fiber. It's not a given that you're replacing large volumes of single-use plastic with small volumes of reusable plastic, as you're also seeing small volumes of natural fabric being used.
You're also leaving out the fact that this push is taking single-use plastic out of the market but nothing forces customers to adopt the store's own offerings. Anyone is able to buy whatever type of shopping bag suits their fancy.
So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic. You're seeing drastic reductions in plastic use by eliminating perverse incentives to consume single-use plastic containers, and the adoption of substitute goods that have a far preferable environmental footprint.
There are ways to get around the "oh crap, I forgot the bags" depending on how the store does things. For example, the Aldi stores I shop at in the US have a couple of cages with empty boxes in them. The boxes on the shelves get emptied and then the employees round them up and drop them in accessible cages/crates. This allows a person to choose to either buy a paper bag, buy a reusable bag, or make due with a couple of free boxes that were going to be disposed of anyways.
The killer is grocery delivery services. They got wrapped up in the legislation, so they must deliver groceries in reusable bags. It's totally impractical to come an collect the bags again (collect, clean, sort), so instead our small office, for instance, goes through about a dozen of them a month.
everyone I know has a bag of "bag for life" bags, and yes sometimes you forget to bring them and you end up buying more. but they're definitely a net good. the amount of bags sold to people who forgot theirs is orders of magnitude than the number of bags that would be handed out when they were free.
I was shocked recently when I visited a shop in another european country and they had regular non-reusable bags, it seemed so primitive!
> Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out
there are thinner plastic ones, but even the lightest "reusable" bags we have last for months if not years. unless you're buying pineapples and throwing stars every time you shop they should last you a while.
> these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag
Put a tax on them that funds an environmental initiative, whether that be decarbonisation, trash clean-up or better landfill management.
you should shop around. I see the heavy plastic bags in the US$2-5 range. Check out Trader Joe's if you have them. I've been using the same couple of TJ bags for years.
Eddy_Viscosity2|1 year ago
Nutshell, it they may not be a net plus for the environment when so many poor quality bags which are more energy/resource intensive to make end up being single-use anyway.
chipdart|1 year ago
Your comment is a textbook argument of perfect being the enemy of good.
Sure, some bags are thrown out. Sure, people use more than one. Sure, people can buy them if they feel they need them.
That's perfectly fine, as that's completely besides the point.
What you're failing to mention is that thanks to this push to adopt reusable bags the use of single-use plastic bags plummeted. You no longer see over a dozen single-use bags being thrown out at each and every single shopping trip. These bags aren't recyclable and disintegrate very easily, making it extremely hard to pull them out of the environment once they get there.
You're also somehow leaving out is the fact that some major supermarkets chains are making available reusable shopping bags made of natural fiber. It's not a given that you're replacing large volumes of single-use plastic with small volumes of reusable plastic, as you're also seeing small volumes of natural fabric being used.
You're also leaving out the fact that this push is taking single-use plastic out of the market but nothing forces customers to adopt the store's own offerings. Anyone is able to buy whatever type of shopping bag suits their fancy.
So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic. You're seeing drastic reductions in plastic use by eliminating perverse incentives to consume single-use plastic containers, and the adoption of substitute goods that have a far preferable environmental footprint.
vlachen|1 year ago
Workaccount2|1 year ago
robertlagrant|1 year ago
Can you cite where this is happening?
dougdimmadome|1 year ago
I was shocked recently when I visited a shop in another european country and they had regular non-reusable bags, it seemed so primitive!
> Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out
there are thinner plastic ones, but even the lightest "reusable" bags we have last for months if not years. unless you're buying pineapples and throwing stars every time you shop they should last you a while.
JumpCrisscross|1 year ago
Put a tax on them that funds an environmental initiative, whether that be decarbonisation, trash clean-up or better landfill management.
maccard|1 year ago
jackcnreturns|1 year ago
[deleted]
JadeNB|1 year ago
Cents, not dollars, right?
Tagbert|1 year ago