4 ms·

Another issue that nobody talks about: how to pick up dog poop without plastic bags.

simplexion 11y ago
Without plastic bags.
ptaipale 11y ago
Well, you don't (hopefully) need a shopping-bag size plastic bag for dog poop. For dog poo, I buy dedicated poo bags which cost a few cents each and are biodegradable (and blackened, so you don't need to admire the content as with clear bags). Over here (Finland), the shopping bags we use cost 20 cents each. That is not a tax, but money that the shops collect to their pockets and have thus conveniently avoided any specific plastic bag tax. The grocery shopping plastic bags are typically something like 15-20 litres in volume and can carry perhaps 10 kg of groceries if you're careful. After carrying home, people often use them for household waste, and then they go with the contained waste to landfill or nowadays incineration. Small, thin bags are free (for instance for packing vegetables) but they are useless for carrying anything in the sense of a shopping bag; they're just there for cleanly keeping different items apart within a shopping bag. Myself, I often use a small blue IKEA bag for groceries (when kids were teenagers, we bought so much stuff that we actually used a large IKEA bag which might weigh perhaps 30 kg for a week's main shopping round...). Or a rucksack or a bike bag if I go to shop on the bike. However, if I don't have one with me, I'm quite happy to get a thinner single-use bag instead of having to buy yet another more robust bag (of which we have many). Plastic bags are around 0,2 % of household waste; not very much, but I prefer to avoid even that if possible. Fortunately our local Greens finally suffered a complete defeat and we now have a waste incineration system instead of an ideological system of much talk about recycling and a landfill (even if the amount of waste we produce is generally lower than in the US; in most of Europe the figure is somewhere around 1 kg per person per day; in California it is 2 kg per person per day). Making a plastic bag takes about 40 % less energy than making a paper bag, BTW.

Without plastic bags.

Well, you don't (hopefully) need a shopping-bag size plastic bag for dog poop. For dog poo, I buy dedicated poo bags which cost a few cents each and are biodegradable (and blackened, so you don't need to admire the content as with clear bags). Over here (Finland), the shopping bags we use cost 20 cents each. That is not a tax, but money that the shops collect to their pockets and have thus conveniently avoided any specific plastic bag tax. The grocery shopping plastic bags are typically something like 15-20 litres in volume and can carry perhaps 10 kg of groceries if you're careful. After carrying home, people often use them for household waste, and then they go with the contained waste to landfill or nowadays incineration. Small, thin bags are free (for instance for packing vegetables) but they are useless for carrying anything in the sense of a shopping bag; they're just there for cleanly keeping different items apart within a shopping bag. Myself, I often use a small blue IKEA bag for groceries (when kids were teenagers, we bought so much stuff that we actually used a large IKEA bag which might weigh perhaps 30 kg for a week's main shopping round...). Or a rucksack or a bike bag if I go to shop on the bike. However, if I don't have one with me, I'm quite happy to get a thinner single-use bag instead of having to buy yet another more robust bag (of which we have many). Plastic bags are around 0,2 % of household waste; not very much, but I prefer to avoid even that if possible. Fortunately our local Greens finally suffered a complete defeat and we now have a waste incineration system instead of an ideological system of much talk about recycling and a landfill (even if the amount of waste we produce is generally lower than in the US; in most of Europe the figure is somewhere around 1 kg per person per day; in California it is 2 kg per person per day). Making a plastic bag takes about 40 % less energy than making a paper bag, BTW.