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One thing I’m always curious about is why we are so concerned with plastic waste. My local grocery store recently switched to paper bags. So I got curious. Tur

One thing I’m always curious about is why we are so concerned with plastic waste. My local grocery store recently switched to paper bags. So I got curious. Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags. This is impossible since they are made of paper. Aluminum and glass bottles require several hundred times more energy to produce as well (between 170-250x). Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. Plastic waste really isn’t a big problem unless you’re talking about developing nations. North America is responsible for about 3% of mismanaged plastic waste. Asia and Africa account for 86% of it. Don’t get me started on plastic straws. They make up 0.03% of plastic waste in the ocean. If we want to make a difference here we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways. The Yangtze and Ganges are releasing plastic into the ocean at a rate far greater than all of North America combined, and our response is to expend huge amounts of energy produced by fossil fuels trying to recycle our plastic instead of burying it in a landfill where it is unlikely to pose a major ecological threat. Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem.

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MattGaiser 5y ago
Mostly because it is clearly visible and enduring pollution I think.
beached_whale 5y ago
A large chunk of the recycled materials in Canada and the US is not recycled domestically and a majority of that is sent to countries with inadequate controls. So the culpability starts with the users/manufacturers.
- vimy 5y ago
  I often see this claim but never any evidence for it. How do we know it’s Western plastic being dumped in rivers instead of their own thrash?
  - beached_whale 5y ago
    That doesn't matter. Until the countries have processes and infrastructure in place to properly handle it, it should not be sent there as that is relying on inadequate laws to reduce costs. And here we are. But here is an article that talks to some of it, single source so grain of salt. https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2019/3/6/157000-shipping-containers-of-us-plastic-waste-exported-to-countries-with-poor-waste-management-in-2018 https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2019/3/6/1570...
jvanderbot 5y ago
OK, the greenhouse-gas argument is correct, but misses the point of plastic recycling. The point is not oil use, it is plastic use and plastic pollution. If you've ever been to a beach in some countries that's completely covered in plastic bags, you'll instantly feel differently about disposable plastic, which just seems to blow in the wind and float up to the beaches. If oil were free and environmentally friendly, I'd ask them to burn more of it to give me a solution to plastic -- not more plastic. Glass is sand -- throw it in the deep ocean or pile it up I don't care. Aluminum is recycled because it is cheaper than mining new aluminum. That's a win. Still, your comment is spot on. Many, many environmental initiatives have feel-good effect (Straws!?) and many, many legislation efforts are not based on sound math. However, _trying_ to recycle plastic is noble enough, especially if we're trying some fairly advanced methods. A sound recycling method that produces usable fuel would go a long way for those third world countries. I can think of no greater incentive for recycling than a little cash in the pocket of those who collect and return. Hell, every Tuesday some poor soul comes and steals all the aluminum cans out of our recycling bins for precisely this reason. Imagine if plastic were equally reimbursed.
- relax88 5y ago
  The beaches covered in plastic bags are exactly my point. The problem is plastic waste being mismanaged. Recycling is not a solution to mismanaged waste streams, and yet for some reason everyone loves talking about recycling plastics and nobody talks about ensuring that the other 80% of plastics that aren’t recycles or burned are properly disposed of in landfills. The entire reason glass and aluminum are reimbursed is that they are orders of magnitude more energy intensive to produce. If the current recycling technology can’t make a profit recycling plastic bags then the solution is making sure each and every piece of that plastic is properly disposed of in an engineered landfill.
  - 3grdlurker 5y ago
    > everyone loves talking about recycling plastics Who's everyone? I've read more about economists and environmental scientists outright calling out recycling, and then proposing a complete abandonment of plastic altogether.
yarky 5y ago
I'm not an expert, but a plastic bag takes longer to disappear naturally than a paper bag. Your energy accounting and waste source/destination issues are just the top of the iceberg. The elephant in the room is the plastic.
- skohan 5y ago
  Yeah and haven't microplastics been found in basically every organism by now? I feel like this is something which we may look back on like lead in 30 years.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Radioactive particles from nuclear testing are in every organism too. Just because something exists doesn't mean it's a disaster. You'd need science to back up a feeling like yours otherwise you're probably just regurgitating what popular opinion has indoctrinated you with and that's whatever's widely emotionally satisfying to believe.
    - skohan 5y ago
      Oh sure, I'm just speculating. But if you always waited for concrete evidence to conclude that something might be a risk, you would have may have been wearing hats coated in mercury in the 19th century, and eating of uranium-infused plates in the early 20th century.
the_mitsuhiko 5y ago
> Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags But that’s okay. Energy is not the issue with bags but the fact that they don’t decompose. Using more energy to switch to something that decomposes is a good enough deal.
- relax88 5y ago
  A plastic bag in a landfill is less harmful to the environment than a paper bag that costs 43x more energy to produce. The former is trapped underground in a location engineered to prevent seepage and runoff, and will be sitting there for a thousand years where it only poses a threat to the bacteria and worms in the landfill. The latter required a tree to be cut down and used 43x more energy, and therefore it’s waste is in the atmosphere warming our planet.
  - mdorazio 5y ago
    Multiple misconceptions here: 1) We don't cut down old growth trees to make paper products - we cut down fast-growth trees that are farmed for exactly this purpose. Cutting down these trees is not a problem, and in fact pulls some carbon out of the atmosphere because the trees captured it and the paper product end of life is usually getting buried where the carbon is mostly trapped. 2) You're ignoring that renewable energy can be used for production. 3) You're also ignoring that common plastics start with oil, which isn't just used for making plastic products. If you see a bunch of plastic bottles, you should also be thinking about the other oil products associated with them that got burned and turned into GHG.
    - relax88 5y ago
      The paper industry ranks #5 in carbon intensity and is responsible for something like 9% of global CO2 emissions. Do you honestly think that industry uniformly manages their forestry in an environmentally friendly manner? You could use renewables but the fact is that most of the input energy into paper mills is natural gas co-generation because you need both heat and electricity. Petrochemicals are used in 90% of the regular every-day items we live our lives with. Clothing, furniture, our homes, cars, personal belongings… banning single use plastics isn’t going to change that. I’d rather plastic waste in landfills than more CO2 emissions.
Voloskaya 5y ago
> Plastic waste really isn’t a big problem unless you’re talking about developing nations. North America is responsible for about 3% of mismanaged plastic waste. Asia and Africa account for 86% of it. Because North America sends all its plastic to be recycled in Asia. See Canada-Philippine waste dispute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Philippines_waste_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Philippines_waste_dis...
- refurb 5y ago
  Unless it’s our plastic waste that’s ending up in the ocean I’m not sure this matters.
  - Voloskaya 5y ago
    It is. > The United States generated the largest amount of plastic waste of any country in the world (42.0 Mt). Between 0.14 and 0.41 Mt of this waste was illegally dumped in the United States, and 0.15 to 0.99 Mt was inadequately managed in countries that imported materials collected in the United States for recycling. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I haven't seen any reliable data yet on what portion of the plastic waste that ends up in the water originates in NA/Europe and what portion comes from the population of Asia and Africa themselves. But given that several billion people live there and one-time plastic use is really widespread (just travel there and see), plus the waste management systems are subpar, I would be very surprised if local waste wasn't a majority of those 86 per cent. Have you been to places like the Philippines? Everything comes wrapped in plastic and waste plastic is not really managed at all. IDK about Indonesia or India, but perhaps HN users from there can chime in.
  - Voloskaya 5y ago
    https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288 > The United States generated the largest amount of plastic waste of any country in the world (42.0 Mt). Between 0.14 and 0.41 Mt of this waste was illegally dumped in the United States, and 0.15 to 0.99 Mt was inadequately managed in countries that imported materials collected in the United States for recycling.
3grdlurker 5y ago
> North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. Yeah, about that, North America ships garbage to China and to poor countries in Southeast Asia to be burned there, or to be dumped in a forest/farmland next to low-income rural communities. > we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways I don't know why you say that like it's easy, but in the first place, maybe plastics just shouldn't be forced upon developing nations as conditions of trade if we already know that they don't have the infrastructure to manage it, in the first place? > The Yangtze and Ganges are releasing plastic into the ocean at a rate far greater than all of North America combined, and our response is to expend huge amounts of energy produced by fossil fuels trying to recycle our plastic instead of burying it in a landfill where it is unlikely to pose a major ecological threat. I never understood this line of reasoning, to be honest. So you have a ton of problems, some bigger than others. Why does the fact that you have bigger problems in your backlog negate working on the smaller, quicker wins first? Also you keep talking about "North America" as if it's a single, sovereign, unified country that has no conflicting interests. > Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem. Didn't we already make ourselves feel better by arguing ourselves into what is effectively indifference about the problem of pollution?
- relax88 5y ago
  Agree on your first two points. That’s what I mean about helping developing nations. We shouldn’t be exporting billions of pounds of plastic waste to places that cannot ensure proper disposal. By focusing resources on waste management and international cooperation we would be focusing on 90% of the ocean plastics problem instead of directing our resources at well managed waste streams that do little environmental damage by comparison. Being pragmatic is very different than being indifferent. At the end of the day a plastic bag in a landfill is a way better outcome than a plastic bag in a waterway, and also arguably better than spending 43-250x more energy mostly from fossil fuels producing paper/glass/aluminum instead. When there are no perfect solutions, you must choose the least harmful.
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tonmoy 5y ago
I personally think you are spot on. I am yet to find any major environmental issue with landfill plastics or any health issues with micro plastics - especially compared to the harm caused by GHG. If using paper bag produces significantly more GHG compared to plastic then using our green political resources to reduced plastic use not only detracts us from focusing our resources into something more useful, but it may be more harmful by producing more GHG in the long run.
noxer 5y ago
Its the same reason as allays, some kind of subsidies. Created by politicians who are fooled/bribed by lobbyists. Same reason the US replaces certain % of fuel with bio-fuel. It does make any sense. It pollutes more to create the bio-fuel than if you would use normal fuel. Its also not carbon neutral and it destroys incredible amount of land and the soil and even fossil water is used up sometimes. Obligatory PENN & TELLER: BULLSHIT S02EP05 Recycling https://www.bitchute.com/video/j0Hd6UfA4MKo/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/j0Hd6UfA4MKo/
trainsplanes 5y ago
Have you gone to a beach lately? I don't live in the US but it's certainly not a developing country. Beaches are absolutely covered in plastic waste and it's noticeably worse each time I go. Forests are steadily becoming filled with plastic that either gets tossed there or blown there. Animals eat garbage and die. It's horrible. Assuming I live a very long life and die in 70 years, that plastic will still be there. New plastic will be there as well. America and the EU "manage" their plastic waste by literally shipping it to other countries, then blaming them for mismanaging it. Most was sent to China, then it was banned by China.[1] Now the EU and US ship it to other countries, claim they manage their plastic, and blame new countries. The US and EU have yet to manage their plastic, though. They're just dumping it on their neighbor's property. My worry about paper bags is that, corporations doing what they do and going for the lowest bidder, they'll be made with clear-cut rainforest wood from Indonesia and Malaysia instead of sustainable sources. I'm sure a lot are. I just reuse bags and never use paper or anything unless it's forced upon me. I bought some durable bags 5 years ago. I keep a couple in my vehicle, a few at home, and others in other places so I almost always have a bag with me.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  I live in NYC, we actually have tons of beaches here in the metropolitan area, and they're certainly not covered in plastic waste. Nor are our forests -- the hiking trails around here are great. And I'm talking about the single most populated metropolitan area in the US. Sure there are a few strewn candy wrappers or something, but there really isn't any big problem. It's all quite nice. What country do you live in that your beaches are so bad?
  - 4r4r4r 5y ago
    Hong Kong. Beaches are littered with plastic garbage including bottles, bags, and wrappers for about 5 meters off shore. After that its microplastics. This is across the street from the Ferrari showroom.
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    Not GP but Maybe Somalia? Yeah the hysteria about environmental degradation in the USA is among some online people who don't even bother to go outside is absurd. Within 50 miles of NYC are pristine woods, mature second growth trees, deer and black bear. And yeah near the road side you may see a plastic bottle every couple hundred feet. The sky is not falling.
delfinom 5y ago
>Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. You have read FAR too much into propaganda my friend. We ship our plastic waste to the third world you are saying mismanages it. You are a degenerate like the rest of Americans.
- dang 5y ago
  Nationalistic attacks and name-calling will get you banned on HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with (or belong to). No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
morpheos137 5y ago
Added to what you said is the fact that the most commonly used plastics like polyethylene are biological inert. Thus most plastic is about as harmful as sand which only really harms life in a mechanical way if at all. I think it is a mass hysteria fueled by social media. Plastics are not bad for the environment in of themselves and certainly not worse than chopping down trees to make paper or burning coal to make glass. Solar produced polyethylene could be a terrific carbon sink if there was not a mass hysteria about "plastics." It is so fascinating how the general public can demonise something they don't even understand. "Plastic" in general is harmless to the environment. That is because it is chemically inert. Plastics are used every day in medical proceedures and medical devices. Plastics provide habitats for small organisms. Ever find a discarded plastic bottle that has been sitting in the woods for years? Usually it is teeming with life, from algae to spiders, to worms and other invertabraes.
- GordonS 5y ago
  I don't disagree with everything you're saying here, but some plastic products (especially bags, polystyrene boxes and small pieces of plastic) are definitely harmful to some animals, who of course form part of the environment.
superflit 5y ago
Because the US is not the problem. The lobby is So strong against US that even if we take photos, investigate where is the problem people will come and say: "The evil US made they do it." Because maybe the US Pay and ship a fraction to be recycled outside US. But still US is blame for other countries corruption too. It really does not matter. "Green" will became a hidden tax on middle class to power elite.
Trex_Egg 5y ago
The Plastics from the North America is being shipped to south and southeast Asia, probably. So what good it does to them.
titzer 5y ago
> Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. Go to any waterway in the US and you will find it. Plastic bottles, bottle caps, chip bags, cpu lids, straws, milk jugs, food containers, chewing tobacco cans, lighters, ping pong balls, syringes, milk crates, fishing line, bobbers, clothes hangers, insulation, O-rings, tires, fishing nets, pens, pen caps, grocery bags, six pack rings, chew toys, fake flowers, buckets, handles, 55 gallon drums, soccer balls, the broken plastic housing of almost any consumer product you can imagine. I have with my bare hands picked up over 500 bags of this shit off coastlines and waterways and highways on three different continents. Based on my experience, every single mile of ocean coastline and nearly every waterway is littered with plastic waste to a greater or lesser degree. The problem is so bad that unless you are in a national park a hundred miles from civilization, you cannot walk more than 100 feet along a waterway without seeing some kind of garbage, unless someone has specifically detrashed there, thoroughly, in the past week. The water is full of our junk. > Don’t get me started on plastic straws. They make up 0.03% of plastic waste in the ocean. The tone of this comment really raised my hackles. I'm not going to unload on you, but I am so tempted to right now. But holy shit, if you'd dragged 5 tons of shit out of the creek you'd not complain from behind your keyboard that they want to take your stupid straws away. I say ban all single-use plastic.
- lumost 5y ago
  I’ll be honest, I spend a lot of time outdoors in New England. Plastic waste is not nearly as endemic as you describe in North America. The only area that gets comparable to what you describe are waterways in major population centers such as the Charles river and Boston harbor. Banning single use plastic is still a great way to cut down on
  - titzer 5y ago
    It's a sliding scale, which is why I mentioned the national parks. More people = more trash. Take a little plastic bag with you next time and pick up every piece of trash you see. Suddenly it will pop out of the woodwork. Waterways collect and concentrate it.
Spooky23 5y ago
Energy is one dimension of resource utilization. Plastic bags clog sewers, kill wildlife and generate a lot of rubbishy. Paper bags are reusable, made of a renewable material, and break down in weeks or months. They are a better solution.
xenocyon 5y ago
You're leading with energy use but that's really not the point. The point is that plastic takes many centuries to degrade, and we go through a lot of single-use plastic. For example, a disposable diaper takes >500 years to biodegrade. It's nice to imagine all this plastic going into walled-off landfills that protect the rest of the earth and water from being contaminated, but in practice this is a myth. US localities are seeing an unsustainably growing amount of plastic contamination in local waterways and beaches, some of it visible, some of it not. Incidentally, this doesn't mean you need to use a single-use paper bag instead of a single-use plastic bag. Instead, use a durable bag made out of any material you like. The phrase is "reduce -> reuse -> recycle". Recycling was never meant to be the foremost part of our sustainability efforts.
- dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
  > You're leading with energy use but that's really not the point. Isn't that the critical point? Of all our environmental problems, atmospheric CO2 is the biggest one, right? My assumption is that the energy used in industrial manufacturing is almost always non-renewable. If we're advocating for using paper bags over plastic bags, that means we're advocating for way more CO2 in the atmosphere. So what we should actually be advocating for is mandating that people reuse bags, bottles, and containers of all kind. It's been a long time since I've been involved in chemistry, but my understanding is that extruded polymers like plastic bags, wraps and containers are almost always synthesized from waste products of fossil fuel refinement. If it wasn't for products like plastic wraps and bags, these "waste" gasses that are polymerized into plastics would be released into the atmosphere (especially in places without environment regulation or enforcement). The production of plastics at least traps those gasses into some solid state that we can then hope to maybe possibly bury in a landfill. I know it's ugly and pretty horrible, but from a climate perspective I'd go so far as to say that I'd prefer the plastic in a body of water than in the atmosphere.
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    > Of all our environmental problems, atmospheric CO2 is the biggest one, right? We honestly don't know how bad micro-plastic is. Our experience with asbestos, another fibre that can penetrate cells, suggests "very bad" is on the list of potentials. We do know that it's in literally everything from dirt to water to air, and that it has circled the globe and got to places no human sets foot. Like soil depletion and loss of insects, it's on the list of problems which aren't trendy to focus on right now, but might end up being really serious.
capybara_2020 5y ago
Just a quick search shows how even though it might be just 3%. 3% is a huge number with the US being the biggest plastic waste generator. 3% = 1.25 million metric tons. And in 2016, more than half of all the plastic collected in the US was shipped abroad. To places that supposedly "mismanage" plastic waste. I have personally seen the impact when China banned all this waste from landing. It moved to places like Malaysia and Indonesia. I got more than a few calls to try and see if they could move that plastic from Malaysia and Indonesia to other countries. It is still a massive ongoing problem. Basically the US and a lot of western countries have outsourced pollution and then blame developing countries. This happens when discussions about CO2 emissions also comes up. When most of that pollution is generated production cheap goods for the west. Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/us-plastic-pollution https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/us-pl...
- vimy 5y ago
  > This happens when discussions about CO2 emissions also comes up. When most of that pollution is generated production cheap goods for the west. 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-importers-exporters https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
jka 5y ago
> Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem. Either way, instead of reifying the relevant facts and statistics and iterating on them (or upturning them when invalidated), we tend to debate them repeatedly, even over decades as manufacturing methods and trends in society change. (this is me pining for a system like arguman[1] with the critical mass of wikipedia to help forge these debates into more reliable, long-term results) [1] - https://github.com/arguman/arguman.org https://github.com/arguman/arguman.org
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I think like a lot of this stuff it is virtue signaling by stores and local governments. To be fair it does cut down a bit on them flying around the neighborhood though. The plastic bags in grocery stores aren't the real problem. The real problem is plastic recycling is a joke and that we need to get people more involved in reusing like we used to with glass or just using your own containers. The fact is that Asia is the one dumping 80% of the plastics into the ocean. Obviously Asia has a lot more people than North America so the amount per capita might not be all that different. We all need to adjust our ideas of consumption.
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croes 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics
moooo99 5y ago
> My local grocery store recently switched to paper bags. So I got curious. Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags. This is impossible since they are made of paper. This is true, but thats just one side you of a tradeoff you have to make. The main concern with plastic waste is the duration it takes until it degrades. Also, microplastics are an issue too. And even the plastic waste that makes it to recycling facilities is often impossible to recycle due to the material composition, its often just burned instead, releasing Co2 in the air. > Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. > Plastic waste really isn’t a big problem unless you’re talking about developing nations. North America is responsible for about 3% of mismanaged plastic waste. Asia and Africa account for 86% of it. So are most parts of Europe, but properly disposing the waste is just one part of the equation. The other more challenging part is actually getting rid of the waste we produce. And an important cornerstone of the waste strategy is to export it. In January to June 2018 the US alone exported 150,000 metric tons of plastic waste to Malaysia, 90,000 to Thailand, and a considerable amount to other nations [1]. With the EU countries, its even more extreme with 362,000 tons plastic waste being exported to Malaysia in 2020 [2]. So I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that a significant portion of the plastic waste that is sent to the ocean in developing countries is actually the export of developed nations. > Don’t get me started on plastic straws. They make up 0.03% of plastic waste in the ocean. thats true, thats just virtue signaling. > If we want to make a difference here we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways. The best way to go into the future is to just quit producing so much plastic waste. Plastic is a great material, its super durable while also being super cheap. That makes it useful for a lot of purposes, but also pretty unsuited for many others. Look at how much (unnecessary) product packaging is made of plastic. It's a material that can easily last decades and is instead used massively used to produce single use items just because of the low price. My best guess as to why plastic is so massively used: As the world moves towards renewable electricity sources and away from fossil fuels, plastic production is one of the biggest (growing) markets that will remain interested in oil. Stopping to use plastics that excessively would of course hurt that growth. [3],[4],[5] > Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem. Unfortunately, that is very often the case. I guess it's easier to make one feel better by sacrificing something like plastic straws instead of actually trying to change the own lifestyle to drive actual change. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/892470/us-exports-plastic-waste-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/892470/us-exports-plasti... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235938/annual-plastic-waste-exports-destinations-european-union/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235938/annual-plastic-w... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-petrochemicals-iea-idUSKCN1ME2QD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-petrochemicals-iea-idUSKC... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/664933/oil-demand-plastics-production-globally/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/664933/oil-demand-plasti... [5] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21419505/oil-gas-price-plastics-peak-climate-change https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21419505/oil-gas-...
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Disposable plastic versus disposable paper is the wrong choice. Buy half a dozen reusable cloth bags and leave them in your car, and you don’t need either. We’re obsessed with finding the best disposable option, trusting our ingenuity to find a way to make our conveniences responsible, rather than starting with responsible stuff and trying to make it convenient. As the article covers, we’re failing at that.
sjg007 5y ago
Ummm... the USA exports a lot of plastic recycling. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/climate/plastics-waste-export-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/climate/plastics-waste-ex...
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dheera 5y ago
Energy is only one issue. There is also that plastic is a petroleum product. Also even if "managed" well ultimately ends up in the landfills, and its resources don't get recycled by the environment for thousands of years. It also wreaks havoc on the environment if it ends up in the wrong place; paper largely doesn't.
jdavis703 5y ago
I live in the US on the coast. The top waste I see in the brackish waters are plastics and car tires. People (everyone from consumers to scavengers) tend to recycle glass and metal because they’re valuable. And paper seems to break down quickly. Paper may be bad for energy usage. But energy consumption is not the only environmental issue to be concerned about.
Chris2048 5y ago
It also ignores having to double-bag stuff, or losing produce when the bags get wet and split.
mschuster91 5y ago
> for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic Shipping trash to piss poor Asian and African countries is not adequate disposal
seventytwo 5y ago
If you want to view this from an entropy perspective, then fossil fuels are basically cheating because their use can’t be used as part of a closed system (closed with respect to the sun’s lifetime) unless we factor in the energy and time required to convert sunlight into crude oil or natural gas.
NohatCoder 5y ago
Could you provide a credible source for those 43x and 170-250x numbers? Trying to find some numbers for CO₂ in paper production, numbers vary a lot depending on source, and I assume that they also vary a great deal between different paper products and manufacturers. In any case, this paper https://www.transitionpathwayinitiative.org/publications/49.pdf?type=Publication https://www.transitionpathwayinitiative.org/publications/49.... would suggest an average of around 0.7 tons of CO₂ per ton paper produced. Meanwhile polyethylene might be cheaper and less energy intensive to manufacture (depending on how much of the refinery process you include), but it emits 3.14 tons of CO₂ per ton plastic when decomposed. A paper grocery bag might need to be a bit heavier than a plastic bag to have equal utility, so in total I guess they are not wildly different.
ssivark 5y ago
While the point about the energy consumption of paper -vs- plastic is certainly worth considering seriously, you might need to take a more careful look at your assumptions about plastic disposal. Mismanaged plastic waste in Asia/Africa and really clean numbers for North America are two sides of the same coin -- flawed accounting. The developing world certainly does not consume, or generate anywhere close to the same amount of waste, (per capita) as North America. Part of the reason North America appears to have such clean numbers for "properly disposing of[f] plastic" is that garbage is exported to poorer countries, either for "recycling" or more likely burning/landfills (thereby externalizing the accounting, and also most of the damage). Eg, see: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/30/21542109/plastic-waste-united-states-ocean-pollution-study https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/30/21542109/plastic-waste-u... and https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/702501726/where-will-your-plastic-trash-go-now-that-china-doesnt-want-it https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...
LatteLazy 5y ago
Of course, to make plastic you need oil and that either means dirty fraking or sending cash to some particularly horrendous regimes. I'm not sure how we compare human rights to polluted land to dead fish or trees to Co2E, so I won't say you're wrong. I think the lack of a single measure is why we make so little progress. I wish I had an answer...
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itronitron 5y ago
This is why I like glass deposit bottles.
8note 5y ago
Has north america stopped shipping it's plastic waste to Asia now? Otherwise, that properly disposed of American waste likely counts in Asia and Africa's mismanaged waste. Tacking somebody else's name on the problem doesn't put you in the clear
vesinisa 5y ago
> Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags. This sounds way too high. And indeed, this BBC article cites paper bags being just four times as energy intensive as plastic bags: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47027792 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47027792 That's a difference of an order of magnitude. It would be very interesting to hear where you sourced that number from. As others have pointed out, the whole equation involves also recyclablility. Plastic bags - unlike paper bags - are very hard to recycle, as this article demonstrates. Therefore efforts to reduce the amount of waste generated in the first place are preferable. Before we can begin to solve plastic waste problem abroad we need to first develop lasting and scalable solutions at home. Caricaturizing the problem to encourage people to close their eyes of the issue might make you feel better but is entirely unhelpful.
- relax88 5y ago
  It was a study from the Danish EPA on grocery bags. It wasn’t energy use but total impact actually, so I mis-remembered that a part. https://mst.dk/service/publikationer/publikationsarkiv/2018/mar/plastposer-lca/ https://mst.dk/service/publikationer/publikationsarkiv/2018/... I’m not trying to get people to close their eyes to the issue. I’m trying to get them to ask questions.
  - vesinisa 5y ago
    Thank you for providing the source. The study does not support your original claim at all. On page 79 the study specifically notes that unbleached paper bags had the best CO2 performance across all of the numerous options surveyed! The ridiculous "43 times" number was only obtained when considering "all environmental factors", not just energy use/climate change. The methodology chosen required offsetting the worst individual factor compared to conventional LDPE bags (pp. 80). For paper bags, this was "Freshwater eutrophication" (pp. 119). So this ridiculous number is only a) due to questionable methodology used in this study (clearly chosen to give plastic bags an unrealistic environmental performance), and b) because plastic production has negligible impact on nutrient content of lakes compared to forestry. The study seems to have altogether omitted to consider the impact of persistent plastic pollution on the marine environment. This is where recyclable/biodegradable materials, like paper, really do shine compared to nonbiodegradable and hard-to-recycle (TFA) plastic.
jdasdf 5y ago
> One thing I’m always curious about is why we are so concerned with plastic waste. Because of virtue signaling. That's literally it, it doesn't matter how effective or ineffective something is, what matters is that politicians (and companies) are seen to be taking a stance against pollution (regardless of how sincere or effective that stance may be)
nsonha 5y ago
> Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic As in selling it to other countries. China used to buy this shit btw, since you were wondering why they has so much plastic. Ever heard of the law of preservation of garbage? No you wouldn't have, I've just made it up.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
>If we want to make a difference here we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways. >The Yangtze and Ganges are releasing plastic into the ocean at a rate far greater than all of North America combined, It should start by developed countries not dumping their garbage in developing countries, China has banned the practice recently, But other developing countries do not have that luxury yet.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
We're obsessed with plastic waste because the main input is petrochemicals, the producers of which have a lot of political power. If they didn't, then we'd just implement what the scientists recommended all along (i.e don't use it when you don't need to, use as little as possible, recycle what you use, burn what can't be recycled for energy, charge the producers based on these externalities to incentivize changes at the top of the chain to make all the other steps easier and/or encourage consumers to choose something else). Similar to how we'd have have dealt with climate change back when crazy environmental radicals like Margaret Thatcher and Newt Gingrich accepted a) that it existed and b) there was a clear path to co-operate on fixing the problem by putting a price on carbon and enforcing global standards. But then politics happened. And now you could say, "Why are we so obsessed with climate change?" It's almost like a Trillion dollar industry has waged a highly successful misinformation campaign and made what was previously common sense a big debate. And as far as they're concerned, you thinking "well maybe these hippies are going too far and haven't thought of this drawback" is just as much of a win for them as the guy "coal rolling" a Prius because his political tribe is now pro-pollution, like some kind of absurd parody of a Captain Planet cartoon villian. For the record, recycling and burning plastic for energy are both better for the planet and economy than landfill. Well, that's the "scientific consensus" but what do those eggheads know, eh? Neither sounds good for the bottom line of fossil fuel companies and so...
sirwitti 5y ago
> Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. As someone who was struck by the magnitude of careless resource use when visiting the US this felt wrong when reading it. But I thought commenting did not help anyone. Ironically not even a day later the first link on HN is titled: "U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds" [1] [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/us-plastic-pollution https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/us-pl...
- brandmeyer 5y ago
  "generates more plastic trash..." isn't comparable to "properly disposing of plastic".
lupire 5y ago
Yangtze plastic waste includes imported plastic from North America's fake-recycling, doesn't it?

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MattGaiser 5y ago

Mostly because it is clearly visible and enduring pollution I think.

beached_whale 5y ago

A large chunk of the recycled materials in Canada and the US is not recycled domestically and a majority of that is sent to countries with inadequate controls. So the culpability starts with the users/manufacturers.

vimy 5y ago
I often see this claim but never any evidence for it. How do we know it’s Western plastic being dumped in rivers instead of their own thrash?
- beached_whale 5y ago
  That doesn't matter. Until the countries have processes and infrastructure in place to properly handle it, it should not be sent there as that is relying on inadequate laws to reduce costs. And here we are. But here is an article that talks to some of it, single source so grain of salt. https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2019/3/6/157000-shipping-containers-of-us-plastic-waste-exported-to-countries-with-poor-waste-management-in-2018 https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2019/3/6/1570...

jvanderbot 5y ago

OK, the greenhouse-gas argument is correct, but misses the point of plastic recycling. The point is not oil use, it is plastic use and plastic pollution. If you've ever been to a beach in some countries that's completely covered in plastic bags, you'll instantly feel differently about disposable plastic, which just seems to blow in the wind and float up to the beaches. If oil were free and environmentally friendly, I'd ask them to burn more of it to give me a solution to plastic -- not more plastic. Glass is sand -- throw it in the deep ocean or pile it up I don't care. Aluminum is recycled because it is cheaper than mining new aluminum. That's a win. Still, your comment is spot on. Many, many environmental initiatives have feel-good effect (Straws!?) and many, many legislation efforts are not based on sound math. However, _trying_ to recycle plastic is noble enough, especially if we're trying some fairly advanced methods. A sound recycling method that produces usable fuel would go a long way for those third world countries. I can think of no greater incentive for recycling than a little cash in the pocket of those who collect and return. Hell, every Tuesday some poor soul comes and steals all the aluminum cans out of our recycling bins for precisely this reason. Imagine if plastic were equally reimbursed.

relax88 5y ago
The beaches covered in plastic bags are exactly my point. The problem is plastic waste being mismanaged. Recycling is not a solution to mismanaged waste streams, and yet for some reason everyone loves talking about recycling plastics and nobody talks about ensuring that the other 80% of plastics that aren’t recycles or burned are properly disposed of in landfills. The entire reason glass and aluminum are reimbursed is that they are orders of magnitude more energy intensive to produce. If the current recycling technology can’t make a profit recycling plastic bags then the solution is making sure each and every piece of that plastic is properly disposed of in an engineered landfill.
- 3grdlurker 5y ago
  > everyone loves talking about recycling plastics Who's everyone? I've read more about economists and environmental scientists outright calling out recycling, and then proposing a complete abandonment of plastic altogether.

yarky 5y ago

I'm not an expert, but a plastic bag takes longer to disappear naturally than a paper bag. Your energy accounting and waste source/destination issues are just the top of the iceberg. The elephant in the room is the plastic.

skohan 5y ago
Yeah and haven't microplastics been found in basically every organism by now? I feel like this is something which we may look back on like lead in 30 years.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Radioactive particles from nuclear testing are in every organism too. Just because something exists doesn't mean it's a disaster. You'd need science to back up a feeling like yours otherwise you're probably just regurgitating what popular opinion has indoctrinated you with and that's whatever's widely emotionally satisfying to believe.
  - skohan 5y ago
    Oh sure, I'm just speculating. But if you always waited for concrete evidence to conclude that something might be a risk, you would have may have been wearing hats coated in mercury in the 19th century, and eating of uranium-infused plates in the early 20th century.

the_mitsuhiko 5y ago

> Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags But that’s okay. Energy is not the issue with bags but the fact that they don’t decompose. Using more energy to switch to something that decomposes is a good enough deal.

relax88 5y ago
A plastic bag in a landfill is less harmful to the environment than a paper bag that costs 43x more energy to produce. The former is trapped underground in a location engineered to prevent seepage and runoff, and will be sitting there for a thousand years where it only poses a threat to the bacteria and worms in the landfill. The latter required a tree to be cut down and used 43x more energy, and therefore it’s waste is in the atmosphere warming our planet.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  Multiple misconceptions here: 1) We don't cut down old growth trees to make paper products - we cut down fast-growth trees that are farmed for exactly this purpose. Cutting down these trees is not a problem, and in fact pulls some carbon out of the atmosphere because the trees captured it and the paper product end of life is usually getting buried where the carbon is mostly trapped. 2) You're ignoring that renewable energy can be used for production. 3) You're also ignoring that common plastics start with oil, which isn't just used for making plastic products. If you see a bunch of plastic bottles, you should also be thinking about the other oil products associated with them that got burned and turned into GHG.
  - relax88 5y ago
    The paper industry ranks #5 in carbon intensity and is responsible for something like 9% of global CO2 emissions. Do you honestly think that industry uniformly manages their forestry in an environmentally friendly manner? You could use renewables but the fact is that most of the input energy into paper mills is natural gas co-generation because you need both heat and electricity. Petrochemicals are used in 90% of the regular every-day items we live our lives with. Clothing, furniture, our homes, cars, personal belongings… banning single use plastics isn’t going to change that. I’d rather plastic waste in landfills than more CO2 emissions.

Voloskaya 5y ago

> Plastic waste really isn’t a big problem unless you’re talking about developing nations. North America is responsible for about 3% of mismanaged plastic waste. Asia and Africa account for 86% of it. Because North America sends all its plastic to be recycled in Asia. See Canada-Philippine waste dispute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Philippines_waste_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Philippines_waste_dis...

refurb 5y ago
Unless it’s our plastic waste that’s ending up in the ocean I’m not sure this matters.
- Voloskaya 5y ago
  It is. > The United States generated the largest amount of plastic waste of any country in the world (42.0 Mt). Between 0.14 and 0.41 Mt of this waste was illegally dumped in the United States, and 0.15 to 0.99 Mt was inadequately managed in countries that imported materials collected in the United States for recycling. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288
inglor_cz 5y ago
I haven't seen any reliable data yet on what portion of the plastic waste that ends up in the water originates in NA/Europe and what portion comes from the population of Asia and Africa themselves. But given that several billion people live there and one-time plastic use is really widespread (just travel there and see), plus the waste management systems are subpar, I would be very surprised if local waste wasn't a majority of those 86 per cent. Have you been to places like the Philippines? Everything comes wrapped in plastic and waste plastic is not really managed at all. IDK about Indonesia or India, but perhaps HN users from there can chime in.
- Voloskaya 5y ago
  https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabd0288 > The United States generated the largest amount of plastic waste of any country in the world (42.0 Mt). Between 0.14 and 0.41 Mt of this waste was illegally dumped in the United States, and 0.15 to 0.99 Mt was inadequately managed in countries that imported materials collected in the United States for recycling.

3grdlurker 5y ago

> North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. Yeah, about that, North America ships garbage to China and to poor countries in Southeast Asia to be burned there, or to be dumped in a forest/farmland next to low-income rural communities. > we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways I don't know why you say that like it's easy, but in the first place, maybe plastics just shouldn't be forced upon developing nations as conditions of trade if we already know that they don't have the infrastructure to manage it, in the first place? > The Yangtze and Ganges are releasing plastic into the ocean at a rate far greater than all of North America combined, and our response is to expend huge amounts of energy produced by fossil fuels trying to recycle our plastic instead of burying it in a landfill where it is unlikely to pose a major ecological threat. I never understood this line of reasoning, to be honest. So you have a ton of problems, some bigger than others. Why does the fact that you have bigger problems in your backlog negate working on the smaller, quicker wins first? Also you keep talking about "North America" as if it's a single, sovereign, unified country that has no conflicting interests. > Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem. Didn't we already make ourselves feel better by arguing ourselves into what is effectively indifference about the problem of pollution?

relax88 5y ago
Agree on your first two points. That’s what I mean about helping developing nations. We shouldn’t be exporting billions of pounds of plastic waste to places that cannot ensure proper disposal. By focusing resources on waste management and international cooperation we would be focusing on 90% of the ocean plastics problem instead of directing our resources at well managed waste streams that do little environmental damage by comparison. Being pragmatic is very different than being indifferent. At the end of the day a plastic bag in a landfill is a way better outcome than a plastic bag in a waterway, and also arguably better than spending 43-250x more energy mostly from fossil fuels producing paper/glass/aluminum instead. When there are no perfect solutions, you must choose the least harmful.
- 5y ago

tonmoy 5y ago

I personally think you are spot on. I am yet to find any major environmental issue with landfill plastics or any health issues with micro plastics - especially compared to the harm caused by GHG. If using paper bag produces significantly more GHG compared to plastic then using our green political resources to reduced plastic use not only detracts us from focusing our resources into something more useful, but it may be more harmful by producing more GHG in the long run.

noxer 5y ago

Its the same reason as allays, some kind of subsidies. Created by politicians who are fooled/bribed by lobbyists. Same reason the US replaces certain % of fuel with bio-fuel. It does make any sense. It pollutes more to create the bio-fuel than if you would use normal fuel. Its also not carbon neutral and it destroys incredible amount of land and the soil and even fossil water is used up sometimes. Obligatory PENN & TELLER: BULLSHIT S02EP05 Recycling https://www.bitchute.com/video/j0Hd6UfA4MKo/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/j0Hd6UfA4MKo/

trainsplanes 5y ago

Have you gone to a beach lately? I don't live in the US but it's certainly not a developing country. Beaches are absolutely covered in plastic waste and it's noticeably worse each time I go. Forests are steadily becoming filled with plastic that either gets tossed there or blown there. Animals eat garbage and die. It's horrible. Assuming I live a very long life and die in 70 years, that plastic will still be there. New plastic will be there as well. America and the EU "manage" their plastic waste by literally shipping it to other countries, then blaming them for mismanaging it. Most was sent to China, then it was banned by China.[1] Now the EU and US ship it to other countries, claim they manage their plastic, and blame new countries. The US and EU have yet to manage their plastic, though. They're just dumping it on their neighbor's property. My worry about paper bags is that, corporations doing what they do and going for the lowest bidder, they'll be made with clear-cut rainforest wood from Indonesia and Malaysia instead of sustainable sources. I'm sure a lot are. I just reuse bags and never use paper or anything unless it's forced upon me. I bought some durable bags 5 years ago. I keep a couple in my vehicle, a few at home, and others in other places so I almost always have a bag with me.

crazygringo 5y ago
I live in NYC, we actually have tons of beaches here in the metropolitan area, and they're certainly not covered in plastic waste. Nor are our forests -- the hiking trails around here are great. And I'm talking about the single most populated metropolitan area in the US. Sure there are a few strewn candy wrappers or something, but there really isn't any big problem. It's all quite nice. What country do you live in that your beaches are so bad?
- 4r4r4r 5y ago
  Hong Kong. Beaches are littered with plastic garbage including bottles, bags, and wrappers for about 5 meters off shore. After that its microplastics. This is across the street from the Ferrari showroom.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Not GP but Maybe Somalia? Yeah the hysteria about environmental degradation in the USA is among some online people who don't even bother to go outside is absurd. Within 50 miles of NYC are pristine woods, mature second growth trees, deer and black bear. And yeah near the road side you may see a plastic bottle every couple hundred feet. The sky is not falling.

delfinom 5y ago

>Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. You have read FAR too much into propaganda my friend. We ship our plastic waste to the third world you are saying mismanages it. You are a degenerate like the rest of Americans.

dang 5y ago
Nationalistic attacks and name-calling will get you banned on HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with (or belong to). No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

morpheos137 5y ago

Added to what you said is the fact that the most commonly used plastics like polyethylene are biological inert. Thus most plastic is about as harmful as sand which only really harms life in a mechanical way if at all. I think it is a mass hysteria fueled by social media. Plastics are not bad for the environment in of themselves and certainly not worse than chopping down trees to make paper or burning coal to make glass. Solar produced polyethylene could be a terrific carbon sink if there was not a mass hysteria about "plastics." It is so fascinating how the general public can demonise something they don't even understand. "Plastic" in general is harmless to the environment. That is because it is chemically inert. Plastics are used every day in medical proceedures and medical devices. Plastics provide habitats for small organisms. Ever find a discarded plastic bottle that has been sitting in the woods for years? Usually it is teeming with life, from algae to spiders, to worms and other invertabraes.

GordonS 5y ago
I don't disagree with everything you're saying here, but some plastic products (especially bags, polystyrene boxes and small pieces of plastic) are definitely harmful to some animals, who of course form part of the environment.

superflit 5y ago

Because the US is not the problem. The lobby is So strong against US that even if we take photos, investigate where is the problem people will come and say: "The evil US made they do it." Because maybe the US Pay and ship a fraction to be recycled outside US. But still US is blame for other countries corruption too. It really does not matter. "Green" will became a hidden tax on middle class to power elite.

Trex_Egg 5y ago

The Plastics from the North America is being shipped to south and southeast Asia, probably. So what good it does to them.

titzer 5y ago

> Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. Go to any waterway in the US and you will find it. Plastic bottles, bottle caps, chip bags, cpu lids, straws, milk jugs, food containers, chewing tobacco cans, lighters, ping pong balls, syringes, milk crates, fishing line, bobbers, clothes hangers, insulation, O-rings, tires, fishing nets, pens, pen caps, grocery bags, six pack rings, chew toys, fake flowers, buckets, handles, 55 gallon drums, soccer balls, the broken plastic housing of almost any consumer product you can imagine. I have with my bare hands picked up over 500 bags of this shit off coastlines and waterways and highways on three different continents. Based on my experience, every single mile of ocean coastline and nearly every waterway is littered with plastic waste to a greater or lesser degree. The problem is so bad that unless you are in a national park a hundred miles from civilization, you cannot walk more than 100 feet along a waterway without seeing some kind of garbage, unless someone has specifically detrashed there, thoroughly, in the past week. The water is full of our junk. > Don’t get me started on plastic straws. They make up 0.03% of plastic waste in the ocean. The tone of this comment really raised my hackles. I'm not going to unload on you, but I am so tempted to right now. But holy shit, if you'd dragged 5 tons of shit out of the creek you'd not complain from behind your keyboard that they want to take your stupid straws away. I say ban all single-use plastic.

lumost 5y ago
I’ll be honest, I spend a lot of time outdoors in New England. Plastic waste is not nearly as endemic as you describe in North America. The only area that gets comparable to what you describe are waterways in major population centers such as the Charles river and Boston harbor. Banning single use plastic is still a great way to cut down on
- titzer 5y ago
  It's a sliding scale, which is why I mentioned the national parks. More people = more trash. Take a little plastic bag with you next time and pick up every piece of trash you see. Suddenly it will pop out of the woodwork. Waterways collect and concentrate it.

Spooky23 5y ago

Energy is one dimension of resource utilization. Plastic bags clog sewers, kill wildlife and generate a lot of rubbishy. Paper bags are reusable, made of a renewable material, and break down in weeks or months. They are a better solution.

xenocyon 5y ago

You're leading with energy use but that's really not the point. The point is that plastic takes many centuries to degrade, and we go through a lot of single-use plastic. For example, a disposable diaper takes >500 years to biodegrade. It's nice to imagine all this plastic going into walled-off landfills that protect the rest of the earth and water from being contaminated, but in practice this is a myth. US localities are seeing an unsustainably growing amount of plastic contamination in local waterways and beaches, some of it visible, some of it not. Incidentally, this doesn't mean you need to use a single-use paper bag instead of a single-use plastic bag. Instead, use a durable bag made out of any material you like. The phrase is "reduce -> reuse -> recycle". Recycling was never meant to be the foremost part of our sustainability efforts.

dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
> You're leading with energy use but that's really not the point. Isn't that the critical point? Of all our environmental problems, atmospheric CO2 is the biggest one, right? My assumption is that the energy used in industrial manufacturing is almost always non-renewable. If we're advocating for using paper bags over plastic bags, that means we're advocating for way more CO2 in the atmosphere. So what we should actually be advocating for is mandating that people reuse bags, bottles, and containers of all kind. It's been a long time since I've been involved in chemistry, but my understanding is that extruded polymers like plastic bags, wraps and containers are almost always synthesized from waste products of fossil fuel refinement. If it wasn't for products like plastic wraps and bags, these "waste" gasses that are polymerized into plastics would be released into the atmosphere (especially in places without environment regulation or enforcement). The production of plastics at least traps those gasses into some solid state that we can then hope to maybe possibly bury in a landfill. I know it's ugly and pretty horrible, but from a climate perspective I'd go so far as to say that I'd prefer the plastic in a body of water than in the atmosphere.
- JulianMorrison 5y ago
  > Of all our environmental problems, atmospheric CO2 is the biggest one, right? We honestly don't know how bad micro-plastic is. Our experience with asbestos, another fibre that can penetrate cells, suggests "very bad" is on the list of potentials. We do know that it's in literally everything from dirt to water to air, and that it has circled the globe and got to places no human sets foot. Like soil depletion and loss of insects, it's on the list of problems which aren't trendy to focus on right now, but might end up being really serious.

capybara_2020 5y ago

Just a quick search shows how even though it might be just 3%. 3% is a huge number with the US being the biggest plastic waste generator. 3% = 1.25 million metric tons. And in 2016, more than half of all the plastic collected in the US was shipped abroad. To places that supposedly "mismanage" plastic waste. I have personally seen the impact when China banned all this waste from landing. It moved to places like Malaysia and Indonesia. I got more than a few calls to try and see if they could move that plastic from Malaysia and Indonesia to other countries. It is still a massive ongoing problem. Basically the US and a lot of western countries have outsourced pollution and then blame developing countries. This happens when discussions about CO2 emissions also comes up. When most of that pollution is generated production cheap goods for the west. Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/us-plastic-pollution https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/us-pl...

vimy 5y ago
> This happens when discussions about CO2 emissions also comes up. When most of that pollution is generated production cheap goods for the west. 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-importers-exporters https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...

jka 5y ago

> Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem. Either way, instead of reifying the relevant facts and statistics and iterating on them (or upturning them when invalidated), we tend to debate them repeatedly, even over decades as manufacturing methods and trends in society change. (this is me pining for a system like arguman[1] with the critical mass of wikipedia to help forge these debates into more reliable, long-term results) [1] - https://github.com/arguman/arguman.org https://github.com/arguman/arguman.org

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I think like a lot of this stuff it is virtue signaling by stores and local governments. To be fair it does cut down a bit on them flying around the neighborhood though. The plastic bags in grocery stores aren't the real problem. The real problem is plastic recycling is a joke and that we need to get people more involved in reusing like we used to with glass or just using your own containers. The fact is that Asia is the one dumping 80% of the plastics into the ocean. Obviously Asia has a lot more people than North America so the amount per capita might not be all that different. We all need to adjust our ideas of consumption.

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croes 5y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

moooo99 5y ago

> My local grocery store recently switched to paper bags. So I got curious. Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags. This is impossible since they are made of paper. This is true, but thats just one side you of a tradeoff you have to make. The main concern with plastic waste is the duration it takes until it degrades. Also, microplastics are an issue too. And even the plastic waste that makes it to recycling facilities is often impossible to recycle due to the material composition, its often just burned instead, releasing Co2 in the air. > Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. > Plastic waste really isn’t a big problem unless you’re talking about developing nations. North America is responsible for about 3% of mismanaged plastic waste. Asia and Africa account for 86% of it. So are most parts of Europe, but properly disposing the waste is just one part of the equation. The other more challenging part is actually getting rid of the waste we produce. And an important cornerstone of the waste strategy is to export it. In January to June 2018 the US alone exported 150,000 metric tons of plastic waste to Malaysia, 90,000 to Thailand, and a considerable amount to other nations [1]. With the EU countries, its even more extreme with 362,000 tons plastic waste being exported to Malaysia in 2020 [2]. So I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that a significant portion of the plastic waste that is sent to the ocean in developing countries is actually the export of developed nations. > Don’t get me started on plastic straws. They make up 0.03% of plastic waste in the ocean. thats true, thats just virtue signaling. > If we want to make a difference here we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways. The best way to go into the future is to just quit producing so much plastic waste. Plastic is a great material, its super durable while also being super cheap. That makes it useful for a lot of purposes, but also pretty unsuited for many others. Look at how much (unnecessary) product packaging is made of plastic. It's a material that can easily last decades and is instead used massively used to produce single use items just because of the low price. My best guess as to why plastic is so massively used: As the world moves towards renewable electricity sources and away from fossil fuels, plastic production is one of the biggest (growing) markets that will remain interested in oil. Stopping to use plastics that excessively would of course hurt that growth. [3],[4],[5] > Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem. Unfortunately, that is very often the case. I guess it's easier to make one feel better by sacrificing something like plastic straws instead of actually trying to change the own lifestyle to drive actual change. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/892470/us-exports-plastic-waste-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/892470/us-exports-plasti... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235938/annual-plastic-waste-exports-destinations-european-union/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235938/annual-plastic-w... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-petrochemicals-iea-idUSKCN1ME2QD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-petrochemicals-iea-idUSKC... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/664933/oil-demand-plastics-production-globally/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/664933/oil-demand-plasti... [5] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21419505/oil-gas-price-plastics-peak-climate-change https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21419505/oil-gas-...

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Disposable plastic versus disposable paper is the wrong choice. Buy half a dozen reusable cloth bags and leave them in your car, and you don’t need either. We’re obsessed with finding the best disposable option, trusting our ingenuity to find a way to make our conveniences responsible, rather than starting with responsible stuff and trying to make it convenient. As the article covers, we’re failing at that.

sjg007 5y ago

Ummm... the USA exports a lot of plastic recycling. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/climate/plastics-waste-export-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/climate/plastics-waste-ex...

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dheera 5y ago

Energy is only one issue. There is also that plastic is a petroleum product. Also even if "managed" well ultimately ends up in the landfills, and its resources don't get recycled by the environment for thousands of years. It also wreaks havoc on the environment if it ends up in the wrong place; paper largely doesn't.

jdavis703 5y ago

I live in the US on the coast. The top waste I see in the brackish waters are plastics and car tires. People (everyone from consumers to scavengers) tend to recycle glass and metal because they’re valuable. And paper seems to break down quickly. Paper may be bad for energy usage. But energy consumption is not the only environmental issue to be concerned about.

Chris2048 5y ago

It also ignores having to double-bag stuff, or losing produce when the bags get wet and split.

mschuster91 5y ago

> for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic Shipping trash to piss poor Asian and African countries is not adequate disposal

seventytwo 5y ago

If you want to view this from an entropy perspective, then fossil fuels are basically cheating because their use can’t be used as part of a closed system (closed with respect to the sun’s lifetime) unless we factor in the energy and time required to convert sunlight into crude oil or natural gas.

NohatCoder 5y ago

Could you provide a credible source for those 43x and 170-250x numbers? Trying to find some numbers for CO₂ in paper production, numbers vary a lot depending on source, and I assume that they also vary a great deal between different paper products and manufacturers. In any case, this paper https://www.transitionpathwayinitiative.org/publications/49.pdf?type=Publication https://www.transitionpathwayinitiative.org/publications/49.... would suggest an average of around 0.7 tons of CO₂ per ton paper produced. Meanwhile polyethylene might be cheaper and less energy intensive to manufacture (depending on how much of the refinery process you include), but it emits 3.14 tons of CO₂ per ton plastic when decomposed. A paper grocery bag might need to be a bit heavier than a plastic bag to have equal utility, so in total I guess they are not wildly different.

ssivark 5y ago

While the point about the energy consumption of paper -vs- plastic is certainly worth considering seriously, you might need to take a more careful look at your assumptions about plastic disposal. Mismanaged plastic waste in Asia/Africa and really clean numbers for North America are two sides of the same coin -- flawed accounting. The developing world certainly does not consume, or generate anywhere close to the same amount of waste, (per capita) as North America. Part of the reason North America appears to have such clean numbers for "properly disposing of[f] plastic" is that garbage is exported to poorer countries, either for "recycling" or more likely burning/landfills (thereby externalizing the accounting, and also most of the damage). Eg, see: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/30/21542109/plastic-waste-united-states-ocean-pollution-study https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/30/21542109/plastic-waste-u... and https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/702501726/where-will-your-plastic-trash-go-now-that-china-doesnt-want-it https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...

LatteLazy 5y ago

Of course, to make plastic you need oil and that either means dirty fraking or sending cash to some particularly horrendous regimes. I'm not sure how we compare human rights to polluted land to dead fish or trees to Co2E, so I won't say you're wrong. I think the lack of a single measure is why we make so little progress. I wish I had an answer...

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itronitron 5y ago

This is why I like glass deposit bottles.

8note 5y ago

Has north america stopped shipping it's plastic waste to Asia now? Otherwise, that properly disposed of American waste likely counts in Asia and Africa's mismanaged waste. Tacking somebody else's name on the problem doesn't put you in the clear

vesinisa 5y ago

> Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags. This sounds way too high. And indeed, this BBC article cites paper bags being just four times as energy intensive as plastic bags: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47027792 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47027792 That's a difference of an order of magnitude. It would be very interesting to hear where you sourced that number from. As others have pointed out, the whole equation involves also recyclablility. Plastic bags - unlike paper bags - are very hard to recycle, as this article demonstrates. Therefore efforts to reduce the amount of waste generated in the first place are preferable. Before we can begin to solve plastic waste problem abroad we need to first develop lasting and scalable solutions at home. Caricaturizing the problem to encourage people to close their eyes of the issue might make you feel better but is entirely unhelpful.

relax88 5y ago
It was a study from the Danish EPA on grocery bags. It wasn’t energy use but total impact actually, so I mis-remembered that a part. https://mst.dk/service/publikationer/publikationsarkiv/2018/mar/plastposer-lca/ https://mst.dk/service/publikationer/publikationsarkiv/2018/... I’m not trying to get people to close their eyes to the issue. I’m trying to get them to ask questions.
- vesinisa 5y ago
  Thank you for providing the source. The study does not support your original claim at all. On page 79 the study specifically notes that unbleached paper bags had the best CO2 performance across all of the numerous options surveyed! The ridiculous "43 times" number was only obtained when considering "all environmental factors", not just energy use/climate change. The methodology chosen required offsetting the worst individual factor compared to conventional LDPE bags (pp. 80). For paper bags, this was "Freshwater eutrophication" (pp. 119). So this ridiculous number is only a) due to questionable methodology used in this study (clearly chosen to give plastic bags an unrealistic environmental performance), and b) because plastic production has negligible impact on nutrient content of lakes compared to forestry. The study seems to have altogether omitted to consider the impact of persistent plastic pollution on the marine environment. This is where recyclable/biodegradable materials, like paper, really do shine compared to nonbiodegradable and hard-to-recycle (TFA) plastic.

jdasdf 5y ago

> One thing I’m always curious about is why we are so concerned with plastic waste. Because of virtue signaling. That's literally it, it doesn't matter how effective or ineffective something is, what matters is that politicians (and companies) are seen to be taking a stance against pollution (regardless of how sincere or effective that stance may be)

nsonha 5y ago

> Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic As in selling it to other countries. China used to buy this shit btw, since you were wondering why they has so much plastic. Ever heard of the law of preservation of garbage? No you wouldn't have, I've just made it up.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

>If we want to make a difference here we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways. >The Yangtze and Ganges are releasing plastic into the ocean at a rate far greater than all of North America combined, It should start by developed countries not dumping their garbage in developing countries, China has banned the practice recently, But other developing countries do not have that luxury yet.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

We're obsessed with plastic waste because the main input is petrochemicals, the producers of which have a lot of political power. If they didn't, then we'd just implement what the scientists recommended all along (i.e don't use it when you don't need to, use as little as possible, recycle what you use, burn what can't be recycled for energy, charge the producers based on these externalities to incentivize changes at the top of the chain to make all the other steps easier and/or encourage consumers to choose something else). Similar to how we'd have have dealt with climate change back when crazy environmental radicals like Margaret Thatcher and Newt Gingrich accepted a) that it existed and b) there was a clear path to co-operate on fixing the problem by putting a price on carbon and enforcing global standards. But then politics happened. And now you could say, "Why are we so obsessed with climate change?" It's almost like a Trillion dollar industry has waged a highly successful misinformation campaign and made what was previously common sense a big debate. And as far as they're concerned, you thinking "well maybe these hippies are going too far and haven't thought of this drawback" is just as much of a win for them as the guy "coal rolling" a Prius because his political tribe is now pro-pollution, like some kind of absurd parody of a Captain Planet cartoon villian. For the record, recycling and burning plastic for energy are both better for the planet and economy than landfill. Well, that's the "scientific consensus" but what do those eggheads know, eh? Neither sounds good for the bottom line of fossil fuel companies and so...

sirwitti 5y ago

> Then when you look at plastic pollution and see that for the most part North America is quite good at properly disposing of plastic you wonder why we are so obsessed with this as a problem. As someone who was struck by the magnitude of careless resource use when visiting the US this felt wrong when reading it. But I thought commenting did not help anyone. Ironically not even a day later the first link on HN is titled: "U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds" [1] [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/us-plastic-pollution https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/us-pl...

brandmeyer 5y ago
"generates more plastic trash..." isn't comparable to "properly disposing of plastic".

lupire 5y ago

Yangtze plastic waste includes imported plastic from North America's fake-recycling, doesn't it?