Comment by duggan
4 days ago
I don't remember energy use being the problem with plastic bags?
It was plastic bags being absolutely everywhere in the environment. Streets, parks, trees. Wrapped around anything sticking out of the ground. On your face on a windy day.
Pollution is the problem with plastic. Probably health, too, now that microplastics are being recognized as an issue.
Every winter in my city, once the leaves all fell, our trees would be draped in shredded plastic bags. Banning single use plastic bags has done a significant amount to beautify this place.
When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere, and also in awe at how clean the city was. Never did the two thoughts cross each other in her head
> When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere
The first part I kind of get, humans get used to stuff they get, and get frustrated when it disappears without them really understanding why, it's kind of understandable.
But why would she be outraged about recycling bins being more readily available? Are the recycling bins like really ugly/disgusting, or why would they upset someone? Sounds like being upset about there being too many libraries or something.
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They were also so damn cheap that clerks would bag EVERYTHING without asking, so they not only covered the streets like you describe, but often after offering no actual utility to begin with.
People used to love giving out plastic bags for one item. Who needs a bag for a single item??
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Yeap. In my pantry right now, I probably have 12 reusable bags. Some of them have been used hundreds of times (and have the battle scars and stains to prove it) while others were used once because I had to run into a grocery store unprepared. The math probably averages out to a slight advantage for reusable, and that doesn't take unique use cases into account: for example, I found every container I owned useful during a recent move.
I'm sure skeptics like the article's writers would tweak some numbers to say disposables have an advantage, so who cares? The fact is there are less gunky, sludge-riddled bags in the gutter of my downtown and that absolutely justifies the bans, despite what this article or the NY Post might argue.
My state did away with bags a few years ago, and you now never see bags blowing around or stuck on trees. It also seems everyone stopped complaining about it once we got over the hump of "remember to bring your bags".
So we are just left with a small group of old timers, who would probably bring back metal (pull) tab cans if they could, complaining about it. Ironically its the same group of people who blocked windmills because they are "unsightly".
I've had a vague thought that I wish grocery stores would kind of standardize their bags (you have to use theirs) and just put a passive RFID in them and make them more expensive, but make them nicer, with maybe specific bags for specific use cases (sturdy for fruits, lining for things that need to stay cold). So it would just be a cost that you pay as part of getting a bag ($3) and you get it fully refunded in when you bring it back.
It would mean you don't have to remember to carry the bag all day (which is fine if you drive, but a pain if you use public transit and have to carry bags everywhere). Just "check one out" if you don't have one, bring them back and they will be reused (and you credited) for returning them (or just reuse them yourself, if you want).
This may partially be driven by my mother, who has like 7 different types of bags that she takes to the local HEB. It is always a little song and dance with the bagger about which things go in which of her bags. These are true first world problems, but it just makes me consider alternatives.
Also, minor, but if the bags were actually "valuable", then it would encourage the homeless who find discarded bags to collect them and return them themselves, which helps with the "visible garbage" problem.
These are idiot thoughts of mine, but I do sometimes wonder about alternatives.
Your state has eliminated metal tab cans? Huh. What do you drink 12oz of pop out of?
I think they mean the 1970s-style "pull-tabs" that disconnected from the can. These were frequently discarded as litter, instead of put in a proper bin. I can remember seeing a lot of them in road gutters as a kid.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drink_can#Opening_mechanisms
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I think that’s about pull tabs (the old kind where you removed a small disc from the top of a can) vs pop tabs (the kind where you punch a hole into it and nothing detaches).
Decades ago they used to pull completely off the can (think Jimmy Buffet "stepped on a pop-top").
I remember a debate in Texas politics a few years ago because livestock were dying from consumption of littered plastic bags.
The state government response was to ban the ban of plastic bags.
CA did the wrong thing for like 12 years. We just finally went back to paper bags for everything. If it ends up on a road, it won't kill animals, it will eventually break apart and turn into particulates. It's what we did before plastic bags rained from the sky into all grocery stores. And the best part: if you have permanent bags you can still use them.
This seems very specific. Can you explain more? I don't follow.
There's [very] biodegradable plastics as well. I found out my local store swapped to them in a pretty amusing way. I'd collect plastic bags to use as trash bags and the like. One day I went to grab some from under my counter there was this mess of orange confetti like stuff everywhere from some of the [orange] bags that'd degraded even in just normal storage conditions.
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>The state government response was to ban the ban of plastic bags.
Anything to own the libs.
They also banned fracking bans in Denton. Then on other occasions they tout politics of "local voters know what's best for themselves".
Apparently they want to have it both ways, like spoiled children.
But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them. Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world.
Since we can't get 100% compliance in rich countries and poor countries can't afford landfills that's a good reason to not use plastic. But it's not a good reason to have plastic recycling programs.
> But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them
We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin and have that bin be cleanly collected and yet you're expecting people to bury them??
No, the solution is to massively reduce how often we use single-use plastic bags. It seems like every time I buy anything from any store its just assumed I want it in a plastic bag. Getting a single bottled drink at a convenience store? The clerk gets a plastic bag ready. Its insane.
>We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin
We can, or more precisely it depends on culture norms. Places where littering is rare do exist.
It's the town or city that does the disposal whether that's burying, recycling, dumping at sea, or whatever. Again, this article isn't about whether we should produce plastic but how we should dispose of it once its collected.
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That doesn't solve the problem of people littering. Obviously if trash gets into the trash can it ends up at the landfill.
Littering is mostly cans, disposable cups and food-related containers; not bags straight from the grocery store.
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Is this really true? I doubt it. In developing countries, there are lots of informal settlements are built along rivers. They have no municipal trash service, so a lot of garbage is burned locally (in a pit or oil drum) or is thrown in the river.
Right. This seems to be written by someone who has never been outside and seen the amount of plastic alongside roads or caught in bushes etc. And this is in a country that is supposed to be good at collecting waste.
I do. I remember arguing "you just want this requirement for aesthetic reasons, you're enforcing your aesthetic values", and getting told no, no, it's a way to fight climate change. There was also something about dolphins eating the single use bags.
Another point, to counter the " plastic bags are cheap, cotton is expensive" argument, is that most of the reusable bags are plastic too. They are way cheaper to produce than cotton bags, and earn their keep within about 5 to 10 uses as opposed to 100 or whatever the crazy figure was for cotton bags.
You can use single use plastic bag 50 times or more before it deteriorates, not the thinnest kind, but the average one. They are incredibly strong. The dedicated mult-use ones are insanely strong, but also few times thicker and more unwieldy.
Like with single use shaving razor. They don't need to be literally single use. It depends on the user. You can use it as long as it serves you.
The best thing limiting access to plastic bags did was familiarizing people with the idea of taking bags to the market.
Just a note: Razors are single use for health reasons - not reusing razor significantly reduces chances of inflammation.
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It's a conspicuous part. But energy use is still a problem. Like, maybe high-kicking people throwing trash everywhere would be cheaper solution then letting them do it, but with paper instead of PET. If we won't calculate we can't be sure
Personally I think this problem is being solved the right way from a systems perspective.
Energy production is centralized, so the benefits of it becoming cleaner is spread as soon as it arrives, whereas single-use plastic pollution is diffuse, with compounding damage.
> Streets, parks, trees
You forgot the biggest and probably the most sensitive dump: the (deep) sea.
The article goes over this. Plastic in oceans is from east asian countries without a good municipal waste system, not from developed countries.
Fixing the municipal waste system seems like the "add another system" school of engineering. As someone who works in poorly organized, poorly funded projects, I generally subscribe more to the "remove the problematic part of the existing system" school.
Getting rid of single-use wherever possible removes the broken part. I agree that we should also add more systems like proper waste disposal, but it's more complexity to count on.
Shirley, the most sensitive dump is in testicles? Microplastics in balls. Like a ball pit.