9 ms·

New Jersey bans paper bags

40 points by bko 4y ago

version_five 4y ago
It's part of the "war on poor people". Not a coordinated action but an emergent behavior that keeps the bottom rung of society in their place, and makes sure we keep our servant class in an appropriate level of bondage
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Which in this case apparently includes people getting delivery from Whole Foods.
  - bko 4y ago
    This law is not limited to Whole Foods
  - version_five 4y ago
    Is the joke/sarcasm in your comment that poor people already can't afford Whole Foods, so them adding regressive costs is ok?
    - Finnucane 4y ago
      I merely point out that this is the example used by the writer of the article. Who seems completely unconcerned about poor people.
    - orwin 4y ago
      What's get me is 'delivery'. I don't know US brand, but if you're getting food delivered w/o buying in bulk, you aren't poor. Also, i used to be poor and we took cardboard/wood boxes to carry our vegetables, it was used to lit our fireplace. We rarely took single use plastic bags, and it was before 2005
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  How so? I don't see the connection between generating more trash, and punishing the less fortunate. If anything, banning plastic bags would be a better fit for the narrative. Plastic bags are water resistant, and used to be more resilient and thus more reusable than paper bags. In some Asian countries, plastic bags are used to carry food, even soup, replacing more expensive containers.
- kwatsonafter 4y ago
  How did you figure out our plan.
- DarkWiiPlayer 4y ago
  Nothing prevents poor people from actually re-using bags, so it seems more like a war on dumb people.
- taurusnoises 4y ago
  I know plenty of people who fall below the poverty line who appreciate not effing up the environment.
chetanbhasin 4y ago
Reusable bags for deliver are stupid if they don't get collected back into the system. Otherwise, you're just making more and more reusable containers that are effectively single-use because, well, you're not reusing them. While I understand that it makes sense to ban plastic bags, I don't believe banning paper bags has nearly any positive impact on the environment.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  At least where I live the delivery guy takes the paper bags back and also takes the aluminum cold bags. But that is Switzerland.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    It's almost like there is a severe logical flaw in the common USian approach of just banning singular things, and then hoping that "the market" will fill in a constructive solution.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      In my case it is 'the market'. Its a private company and there is no mandate not to use plastic or do any of the things they do.
      - mindslight 4y ago
        Still, that's not solely "the market". The values of the person managing the company and the perceived values of their customers (societal values) have informed that decision. If it's true that there really are no disposable bag regulations in Switzerland, then the much different outcome under the similar regulations also supports my point. If New Jersey thinks it has a problem where bags need to be reused more, then it would make sense to spell that out in law and nudge towards the overall desired solution (more reuse) rather than simply banning "disposable" (ie cheaply made) bags and hoping that people will automatically reuse more resource-costly ones.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
I think this is in a class of what could be called “woke laws” or laws that sounds great, maybe have great intentions, but no thought was given to what happens after. The lightbulb ban, plastic bags, straws, it all sounds like things we should do, then what? I think The argument that “let the market figure it out“ has been bastardized to excuse these woke laws. The market is going to push their cost down, and that means onto the consumer. So really the only people who get hurt by these laws are the consumers, because they end up having to pay and be inconvenienced by them.
- soco 4y ago
  You are right, but who else could be inconvenienced by them if not the customers? The companies? They will push the costs (aka inconvenience) to the customers. So whatever gets done, the effects are felt by everybody - and this applies to everything, yes including "regular laws".
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    I can't find any evidence that all laws hit everyone in society equally. An obvious case of this is minimum square footage laws on residential housing. They seem to show up in many areas across the south east United States. Setting a minimum square footage of 1500 sq. ft. clearly does not impact the millionaire building a 6500 sq. ft. home with a pool and a 4 car detached garage. But someone trying to purchase their first home does get impacted by it, as they probably don't need 3 bedrooms but can't find housing with anything less.
    - beej71 4y ago
      Fines are just fees when you have enough money.
verdverm 4y ago
The last sentence definitely hits home
paul_f 4y ago
We reuse our plastic bags. As a trash can liner, or to collect dog poop. I am sure that was never considered when the ban was contemplated. Sometimes trying to "do good" gets ridiculous.
- gingerrr 4y ago
  "Reuse" in the context of the 3Rs means "give new life beyond initial purpose", not "have it sit around to wait for other garbage to join it before we throw it out after a single use". Neither of your examples actually reuse the bag, just make it wait for the buddy system before sending to the landfill. Don't hurt yourself bearing that cross of "doing good" though.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    Trash bags and pet waste are two purposes for which most people would otherwise buy new plastic bags. So this definitely qualifies as a reuse. The real critique is what percentage of bags can actually be reused that way? I can see dog owners keeping up with the constant influx of shopping bags, but I would think anyone else would develop a surplus quite quickly.
  - mr-debil 4y ago
    It's definitely re-use. Otherwise they'd be purchasing another bag to dispose of dog poop.
  - tconfrey 4y ago
    Completely disagree here. Even by your definition, a bag used for groceries is being given a new life if its reused as a trash bag! The biggest saving on waste comes from a single re-use. If every plastic bag was used twice we'd need half as many. (If course a third re-use is better, only need 1/3 as many etc.)
  - 0des 4y ago
    > Don't hurt yourself bearing that cross of "doing good" though. I see the downvotes are already communicating this, but there's no need to be so cockstrong when talking to other nerds. Most people here are just normal folks like us, its easier to just chill out and talk. Your point travels further when it isn't deployed as an attack.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
So what's the problem with this, other than it seems to inconvenience the author, and that food delivery services haven't figured something else out? Also, most of the points made are moot, e.g. > If there’s anything a person that orders from Whole Foods regularly needs is a dozen reusable plastic bags every few weeks and $10 added to their bill. Anything delivered by Costco doesn't come in plastic bags, but reused boxes. Order from Costco, then, as they seem to have fixed it already. > This is all based on a false notion of landfills being bad or the idea that we’re running out of landfill space. Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more. > Most of the trash that ends up in the ocean is coming from a handful of countries which are overwhelmed from recyclables sent from the US. The disconnection here is palpable. If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them? Are these other countries to blame for not recycling our trash properly?
- bko 4y ago
  All your points are addressed in the piece. It doesn't really inconvenience me. I'll be fine. I'll pay the extra few bucks if I forget a bag. I'm fairly well off and I own a car so I can just dump the groceries directly into my trunk. It inconveniences a lot of people that don't have that luxury. Maybe an overworked parent that's coming home from work that needs to stop by a grocery store to pick up a few things. It's also a net negative for the environment since people will end up using bags worse for the environment as single use bags. This will not reduce landfill space. The recycling point is about the fact that much of the US is greenwashing their actions by thinking they're doing some noble deed by recycling, when they're really just spending a lot of money shipping their trash to other countries that end up throwing a lot of it in the ocean when we could have a sane policy of using landfills.
  - taurusnoises 4y ago
    - bko 4y ago
      > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
FL410 4y ago
You know what would make a real difference? If Amazon offered a lockable "delivery box" or some kind of reusable delivery packaging. By far my biggest source of packaging waste are 12x12 Amazon boxes used to package a toothbrush or something equally small.
a_shovel 4y ago
The article considers the environmental impact of reusable bags in terms of climate change, but I would speculate that's not how most people would frame the benefit, they'd see it as a benefit because it reduces the amount of plastic waste. I see this trend where environmentalist writing will try to convert every "environmental" change into a single unit, some kind of "Equivalent Trees Saved". The environment is too complex for something like that. Plastic waste isn't meaningfully convertible to CO2 emissions for the purposes of environmental impact, and deforestation, oil/chemical spills, and invasive species aren't either.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  Except that it doesn't. Tough brown paper and cardboard is made from the trashiest of trashy recycled paper material. All you're doing by eliminating paper bags or cardboard is reducing the number of times that a tree will benefit anyone from the time it is cut to the time it is either land-filled or burned. If you want to see a larger fraction of paper and pulp products "go around again" then you need to do things that increases the market size of the low end products that get made with the source materials that can't be made into anything else.
coastflow 4y ago
The article (which as published today) has a factual error. The author wrote: “New York passed a law decriminalizing marijuana but never got around to issuing licenses or a legal framework to retailers.” But New York State legalized cannabis in 2021, instead of just decriminalizing it. From The New York Times, published in March 2021 [0]: “After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs. “Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.” This may seem like a minor nitpick, but the factual error invites scrutiny over the accuracy of the rest of the article. The author does link sources to the other claims in the article, but I’m now by default skeptical to believe the other assertions in the article until I can evaluate whether their linked sources are legitimate. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/nyregion/marijuana-sellers-licenses-hochul.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/nyregion/marijuana-seller...
- bko 4y ago
  You're right. It was legalized although you can't legally purchase it. I'll correct the piece. > But you can’t purchase weed without a prescription or sell it without a license until state regulators write rules for recreational use of the drug. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/new-york-has-legalized-weed-heres-what-you-should-know.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/new-york-has-legaliz...
  - coastflow 4y ago
    Thanks for the responsiveness, and linking to sources for your remaining facts that are the main arguments of your article.
taurusnoises 4y ago
>"This law is a huge inconvenience for most people in the state. How can I tell? Because from my experience, the overwhelming majority of people choose not to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags." Wow. Excellent analysis! Haha. Figure. It. Out. You're an adult. I keep a bag of bags in my car, and for when I walk to the grocery store, I have another bag of bags. So far my life hasn't changed much.
- moate 4y ago
  So prior to banning single use bags, people relied on single use bags. Who would have guessed!? I have a spoiler alert for the future for this author: The overwhelming majority of people will start choosing to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags when they need to.
  - csw-001 4y ago
    This is my lived experience. I moved from a place without a bag policy to a place with a hefty bag tax. At first I was caught without my reusable bags a bunch of times - each time buying new reusable bags for my purchases (instead of wasting money on the tax)... Now I am awash in reusable bags and I almost never forget them. For me the shift was very akin to masking up during COVID-19. I found it hard and weird for about 3wks, now it's just part of going out. Leaving the house? You need a mask and your bags.
    - moate 4y ago
      I would imagine the curve of "people buying new bags because they forgot" over time is real real high over the first 6 months, with sharp drop at some point and a thin tail in the future. The idea of people frequently forgetting bags and needing to buy one at check-out just doesn't seem to jive with long term reality from what we've seen in other places that have done similar things.
jmcnulty 4y ago
"cotton bags should be used 131 times" And? Most of the reusable bags in my house are 3-5 years old. We even have a couple that we brought with us when we moved home 11 years ago. Using them hundreds of times is the whole point.
- beej71 4y ago
  Same. Our cotton bags are probably in the 200s to 1000+s now depending on the bag. The author's not wrong that it takes more effort to remember the bags, but after a few false starts, it becomes habit.
blisterpeanuts 4y ago
My gym has a dispenser of plastic bags for wet swim trunks, "made from recycled ocean plastic waste". (They're thin and easily torn, but if I'm careful, I can reuse the same one for a month or two before it wears out.) The same material could probably be used to make sturdier shopping bags if they increased the thickness and added handles. Exceptions to these anti-plastic bag ordinances should be added for this type of recycled bag, to encourage its use. Similarly, make an exception for recycled paper bags. Just banning all disposable bags seems overly broad and counter-productive.
markbnj 4y ago
I live in New Jersey, and I suspect the law of unintended consequences is going to come in hard on this one. The stores all sell cheap reusable bags so that customers don't get caught in line with nothing to carry their goods in. I've bought two so far. If the bag is in the car you obviously have to remember to take it into the store with you. If you carry the bag into your house with your groceries then you have to remember to put it back in the car. If you fail to do either of those things you'll probably buy another $.30 reusable bag at checkout, which you'll then carry into the house with your goods. I suspect people will accumulate a lot of bags, and I can't help wondering why some recycling chain involving paper bags would not have been a better solution. I'm no expert and presumably there's a reason.
- orev 4y ago
  Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. In that order. Each one of those has a higher cost than the one before it. Change takes getting used to. Yeah, you’ll forget your bags for a while, but eventually it will become a normal thing.
- xtracto 4y ago
  That's happened to me... Right now I've got around 12 reusable fabric bags that I've had to buy at some point when I needed to buy groceries but didn't have a bag handy. I am now thinking what to do with some of them (maybe some type of LED lamp shade)
- neverminder 4y ago
  It can be worse. I live in central London and I don't even have a car. Busy lifestyle means most of the time I swing by groceries on my way back from somewhere. I don't have space in my pockets to carry bags all the time, so I end up buying them all the time. This anti-bag politics is complete bullshit.
alistairSH 4y ago
Instead of a ban, wouldn't it be better to tax the heck out of single-use bags? That' what we do in Fairfax County. At the end of check-out, you have to enter how many bags you used, and get charged a small fee for each. I wish the fee was a bit larger, to try an dissuade more people from simply paying it, but it seems better than an outright ban.
- LordKeren 4y ago
  I would be interested to see if these taxes have any meaningful effect on consumer behavior The core issue is that any tax on bags like this is a regressive tax. A tax that is big enough to make changes in how upper middle class households operate would have a highly disproportionate effect on lower middle class and those in poverty. The result is areas like the DC metro doing things like a $0.05 bag tax. A number probably too small to change any behaviors at a relevant scale. I don’t have a nice solution to these topics either— it’s just that these bag taxes feel like the poster child for middle of the road policies that fail to have a meaningful impact on the issue they’re seeking to address
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    That's definitely a concern. And of course, as was noted in the link, the heavy cotton bags have their own environmental impact. It certainly feels like part of the problem is the way we've built our neighborhoods. It's inconvenient to shop regularly, so we all go weekly and buy a trunk full of food. Lots of bags. Lots of packaging. Etc.
fortran77 4y ago
In the trunk of my car, I have 10 reusable bags, 5 of which are insulated. The total weight of those bags is 2.5 pounds. Let's suppose because of bag laws, 100,000,000 cars in the U.S. are now carrying around 1 extra pound wherever they go. And that all the cars are gas. (My car's electric, but I don't want to confound the calculations). Let's assume that the average car travels 12 miles/day (this is probably low). The fuel cost to haul 2.5 pounds 12 miles/day 100,000,000 times/day is not insignificant. And nobody ever calculates this when comparing reusable bags to disposable bags.
- samatman 4y ago
  Ok I'll bite: this is a weird comparison. Surely the 5 (!) insulated bags are the bulk of the weight? Those ones aren't fungible with disposable bags, which don't insulate. The weight in the car is also an irrelevancy, because just tire pressure will absolutely swamp the difference, by which I mean there would be no way to extract the cost from the noise no matter how hard you tried.
- moate 4y ago
  Keep going: Why is that not partially offset by the transportation of all the single use bags ceasing? How many shipping containers full of plastic bags no longer needed to be moved in order to solve this? It's not like this hauling issue is created in a vacuum. Further point: You don't need to keep a bunch of bags in your car all the time for every trip you ever take. The fact that this is how you choose to address the issue is personal, and not at all the only way this new paradigm can be solved.
- klyrs 4y ago
  > The fuel cost to haul 2.5 pounds 12 miles/day 100,000,000 times/day is not insignificant. That's a thousandth of the weight of a small 2500lb car, but much of the inefficiency is due to drag, so the impact is not even 1:1. In absolute terms, you can successfully argue that tons of CO2 are emitted as a result, but that's extremely marginal, at less than a tenth of a percent of emissions. I'm pretty sure you know how ridiculous your argument is, but if you were that much of a hippie, you'd know that shucking your clothes, ditching your spare tire, and driving on empty would be even better for the environment.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
I'm betting it's some sort of elected representative.
sys_64738 4y ago
This is just a waste of time when the real culprits are the oil companies. If people are serious about this then they need to go after the real culprits, not shave a few specs from around the edges.
zerof1l 4y ago
The ban is specifically on single-use bags, not all bags. I don't use paper bags for groceries and I never will. Paperbag is fragile. If it rains, one can hope to reach the destination before the bag falls apart. To replace all plastic bags with paper ones we will need to chop a lot of trees. Plastic bags are still the best, just not single-use ones. I have a grocery bag that is made out of tightly-woven polypropylene thread. I've been using it for about 2 years now and it looks like new.

40 points by bko 4y ago

It's part of the "war on poor people". Not a coordinated action but an emergent behavior that keeps the bottom rung of society in their place, and makes sure we keep our servant class in an appropriate level of bondage

Finnucane 4y ago
Which in this case apparently includes people getting delivery from Whole Foods.
- bko 4y ago
  This law is not limited to Whole Foods
- version_five 4y ago
  Is the joke/sarcasm in your comment that poor people already can't afford Whole Foods, so them adding regressive costs is ok?
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    I merely point out that this is the example used by the writer of the article. Who seems completely unconcerned about poor people.
  - orwin 4y ago
    What's get me is 'delivery'. I don't know US brand, but if you're getting food delivered w/o buying in bulk, you aren't poor. Also, i used to be poor and we took cardboard/wood boxes to carry our vegetables, it was used to lit our fireplace. We rarely took single use plastic bags, and it was before 2005
manuelabeledo 4y ago
How so? I don't see the connection between generating more trash, and punishing the less fortunate. If anything, banning plastic bags would be a better fit for the narrative. Plastic bags are water resistant, and used to be more resilient and thus more reusable than paper bags. In some Asian countries, plastic bags are used to carry food, even soup, replacing more expensive containers.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
How did you figure out our plan.
DarkWiiPlayer 4y ago
Nothing prevents poor people from actually re-using bags, so it seems more like a war on dumb people.
taurusnoises 4y ago
I know plenty of people who fall below the poverty line who appreciate not effing up the environment.

chetanbhasin 4y ago

Reusable bags for deliver are stupid if they don't get collected back into the system. Otherwise, you're just making more and more reusable containers that are effectively single-use because, well, you're not reusing them. While I understand that it makes sense to ban plastic bags, I don't believe banning paper bags has nearly any positive impact on the environment.

panick21_ 4y ago
At least where I live the delivery guy takes the paper bags back and also takes the aluminum cold bags. But that is Switzerland.
- mindslight 4y ago
  It's almost like there is a severe logical flaw in the common USian approach of just banning singular things, and then hoping that "the market" will fill in a constructive solution.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    In my case it is 'the market'. Its a private company and there is no mandate not to use plastic or do any of the things they do.
    - mindslight 4y ago
      Still, that's not solely "the market". The values of the person managing the company and the perceived values of their customers (societal values) have informed that decision. If it's true that there really are no disposable bag regulations in Switzerland, then the much different outcome under the similar regulations also supports my point. If New Jersey thinks it has a problem where bags need to be reused more, then it would make sense to spell that out in law and nudge towards the overall desired solution (more reuse) rather than simply banning "disposable" (ie cheaply made) bags and hoping that people will automatically reuse more resource-costly ones.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

I think this is in a class of what could be called “woke laws” or laws that sounds great, maybe have great intentions, but no thought was given to what happens after. The lightbulb ban, plastic bags, straws, it all sounds like things we should do, then what? I think The argument that “let the market figure it out“ has been bastardized to excuse these woke laws. The market is going to push their cost down, and that means onto the consumer. So really the only people who get hurt by these laws are the consumers, because they end up having to pay and be inconvenienced by them.

soco 4y ago
You are right, but who else could be inconvenienced by them if not the customers? The companies? They will push the costs (aka inconvenience) to the customers. So whatever gets done, the effects are felt by everybody - and this applies to everything, yes including "regular laws".
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  I can't find any evidence that all laws hit everyone in society equally. An obvious case of this is minimum square footage laws on residential housing. They seem to show up in many areas across the south east United States. Setting a minimum square footage of 1500 sq. ft. clearly does not impact the millionaire building a 6500 sq. ft. home with a pool and a 4 car detached garage. But someone trying to purchase their first home does get impacted by it, as they probably don't need 3 bedrooms but can't find housing with anything less.
  - beej71 4y ago
    Fines are just fees when you have enough money.

verdverm 4y ago

The last sentence definitely hits home

paul_f 4y ago

We reuse our plastic bags. As a trash can liner, or to collect dog poop. I am sure that was never considered when the ban was contemplated. Sometimes trying to "do good" gets ridiculous.

gingerrr 4y ago
"Reuse" in the context of the 3Rs means "give new life beyond initial purpose", not "have it sit around to wait for other garbage to join it before we throw it out after a single use". Neither of your examples actually reuse the bag, just make it wait for the buddy system before sending to the landfill. Don't hurt yourself bearing that cross of "doing good" though.
- mindslight 4y ago
  Trash bags and pet waste are two purposes for which most people would otherwise buy new plastic bags. So this definitely qualifies as a reuse. The real critique is what percentage of bags can actually be reused that way? I can see dog owners keeping up with the constant influx of shopping bags, but I would think anyone else would develop a surplus quite quickly.
- mr-debil 4y ago
  It's definitely re-use. Otherwise they'd be purchasing another bag to dispose of dog poop.
- tconfrey 4y ago
  Completely disagree here. Even by your definition, a bag used for groceries is being given a new life if its reused as a trash bag! The biggest saving on waste comes from a single re-use. If every plastic bag was used twice we'd need half as many. (If course a third re-use is better, only need 1/3 as many etc.)
- 0des 4y ago
  > Don't hurt yourself bearing that cross of "doing good" though. I see the downvotes are already communicating this, but there's no need to be so cockstrong when talking to other nerds. Most people here are just normal folks like us, its easier to just chill out and talk. Your point travels further when it isn't deployed as an attack.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

So what's the problem with this, other than it seems to inconvenience the author, and that food delivery services haven't figured something else out? Also, most of the points made are moot, e.g. > If there’s anything a person that orders from Whole Foods regularly needs is a dozen reusable plastic bags every few weeks and $10 added to their bill. Anything delivered by Costco doesn't come in plastic bags, but reused boxes. Order from Costco, then, as they seem to have fixed it already. > This is all based on a false notion of landfills being bad or the idea that we’re running out of landfill space. Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more. > Most of the trash that ends up in the ocean is coming from a handful of countries which are overwhelmed from recyclables sent from the US. The disconnection here is palpable. If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them? Are these other countries to blame for not recycling our trash properly?

bko 4y ago
All your points are addressed in the piece. It doesn't really inconvenience me. I'll be fine. I'll pay the extra few bucks if I forget a bag. I'm fairly well off and I own a car so I can just dump the groceries directly into my trunk. It inconveniences a lot of people that don't have that luxury. Maybe an overworked parent that's coming home from work that needs to stop by a grocery store to pick up a few things. It's also a net negative for the environment since people will end up using bags worse for the environment as single use bags. This will not reduce landfill space. The recycling point is about the fact that much of the US is greenwashing their actions by thinking they're doing some noble deed by recycling, when they're really just spending a lot of money shipping their trash to other countries that end up throwing a lot of it in the ocean when we could have a sane policy of using landfills.
- taurusnoises 4y ago
  - bko 4y ago
    > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FL410 4y ago

You know what would make a real difference? If Amazon offered a lockable "delivery box" or some kind of reusable delivery packaging. By far my biggest source of packaging waste are 12x12 Amazon boxes used to package a toothbrush or something equally small.

a_shovel 4y ago

The article considers the environmental impact of reusable bags in terms of climate change, but I would speculate that's not how most people would frame the benefit, they'd see it as a benefit because it reduces the amount of plastic waste. I see this trend where environmentalist writing will try to convert every "environmental" change into a single unit, some kind of "Equivalent Trees Saved". The environment is too complex for something like that. Plastic waste isn't meaningfully convertible to CO2 emissions for the purposes of environmental impact, and deforestation, oil/chemical spills, and invasive species aren't either.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
Except that it doesn't. Tough brown paper and cardboard is made from the trashiest of trashy recycled paper material. All you're doing by eliminating paper bags or cardboard is reducing the number of times that a tree will benefit anyone from the time it is cut to the time it is either land-filled or burned. If you want to see a larger fraction of paper and pulp products "go around again" then you need to do things that increases the market size of the low end products that get made with the source materials that can't be made into anything else.

coastflow 4y ago

The article (which as published today) has a factual error. The author wrote: “New York passed a law decriminalizing marijuana but never got around to issuing licenses or a legal framework to retailers.” But New York State legalized cannabis in 2021, instead of just decriminalizing it. From The New York Times, published in March 2021 [0]: “After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs. “Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.” This may seem like a minor nitpick, but the factual error invites scrutiny over the accuracy of the rest of the article. The author does link sources to the other claims in the article, but I’m now by default skeptical to believe the other assertions in the article until I can evaluate whether their linked sources are legitimate. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/nyregion/marijuana-sellers-licenses-hochul.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/nyregion/marijuana-seller...

bko 4y ago
You're right. It was legalized although you can't legally purchase it. I'll correct the piece. > But you can’t purchase weed without a prescription or sell it without a license until state regulators write rules for recreational use of the drug. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/new-york-has-legalized-weed-heres-what-you-should-know.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/new-york-has-legaliz...
- coastflow 4y ago
  Thanks for the responsiveness, and linking to sources for your remaining facts that are the main arguments of your article.

taurusnoises 4y ago

>"This law is a huge inconvenience for most people in the state. How can I tell? Because from my experience, the overwhelming majority of people choose not to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags." Wow. Excellent analysis! Haha. Figure. It. Out. You're an adult. I keep a bag of bags in my car, and for when I walk to the grocery store, I have another bag of bags. So far my life hasn't changed much.

moate 4y ago
So prior to banning single use bags, people relied on single use bags. Who would have guessed!? I have a spoiler alert for the future for this author: The overwhelming majority of people will start choosing to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags when they need to.
- csw-001 4y ago
  This is my lived experience. I moved from a place without a bag policy to a place with a hefty bag tax. At first I was caught without my reusable bags a bunch of times - each time buying new reusable bags for my purchases (instead of wasting money on the tax)... Now I am awash in reusable bags and I almost never forget them. For me the shift was very akin to masking up during COVID-19. I found it hard and weird for about 3wks, now it's just part of going out. Leaving the house? You need a mask and your bags.
  - moate 4y ago
    I would imagine the curve of "people buying new bags because they forgot" over time is real real high over the first 6 months, with sharp drop at some point and a thin tail in the future. The idea of people frequently forgetting bags and needing to buy one at check-out just doesn't seem to jive with long term reality from what we've seen in other places that have done similar things.

jmcnulty 4y ago

"cotton bags should be used 131 times" And? Most of the reusable bags in my house are 3-5 years old. We even have a couple that we brought with us when we moved home 11 years ago. Using them hundreds of times is the whole point.

beej71 4y ago
Same. Our cotton bags are probably in the 200s to 1000+s now depending on the bag. The author's not wrong that it takes more effort to remember the bags, but after a few false starts, it becomes habit.

blisterpeanuts 4y ago

My gym has a dispenser of plastic bags for wet swim trunks, "made from recycled ocean plastic waste". (They're thin and easily torn, but if I'm careful, I can reuse the same one for a month or two before it wears out.) The same material could probably be used to make sturdier shopping bags if they increased the thickness and added handles. Exceptions to these anti-plastic bag ordinances should be added for this type of recycled bag, to encourage its use. Similarly, make an exception for recycled paper bags. Just banning all disposable bags seems overly broad and counter-productive.

markbnj 4y ago

I live in New Jersey, and I suspect the law of unintended consequences is going to come in hard on this one. The stores all sell cheap reusable bags so that customers don't get caught in line with nothing to carry their goods in. I've bought two so far. If the bag is in the car you obviously have to remember to take it into the store with you. If you carry the bag into your house with your groceries then you have to remember to put it back in the car. If you fail to do either of those things you'll probably buy another $.30 reusable bag at checkout, which you'll then carry into the house with your goods. I suspect people will accumulate a lot of bags, and I can't help wondering why some recycling chain involving paper bags would not have been a better solution. I'm no expert and presumably there's a reason.

orev 4y ago
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. In that order. Each one of those has a higher cost than the one before it. Change takes getting used to. Yeah, you’ll forget your bags for a while, but eventually it will become a normal thing.
xtracto 4y ago
That's happened to me... Right now I've got around 12 reusable fabric bags that I've had to buy at some point when I needed to buy groceries but didn't have a bag handy. I am now thinking what to do with some of them (maybe some type of LED lamp shade)
neverminder 4y ago
It can be worse. I live in central London and I don't even have a car. Busy lifestyle means most of the time I swing by groceries on my way back from somewhere. I don't have space in my pockets to carry bags all the time, so I end up buying them all the time. This anti-bag politics is complete bullshit.

alistairSH 4y ago

Instead of a ban, wouldn't it be better to tax the heck out of single-use bags? That' what we do in Fairfax County. At the end of check-out, you have to enter how many bags you used, and get charged a small fee for each. I wish the fee was a bit larger, to try an dissuade more people from simply paying it, but it seems better than an outright ban.

LordKeren 4y ago
I would be interested to see if these taxes have any meaningful effect on consumer behavior The core issue is that any tax on bags like this is a regressive tax. A tax that is big enough to make changes in how upper middle class households operate would have a highly disproportionate effect on lower middle class and those in poverty. The result is areas like the DC metro doing things like a $0.05 bag tax. A number probably too small to change any behaviors at a relevant scale. I don’t have a nice solution to these topics either— it’s just that these bag taxes feel like the poster child for middle of the road policies that fail to have a meaningful impact on the issue they’re seeking to address
- alistairSH 4y ago
  That's definitely a concern. And of course, as was noted in the link, the heavy cotton bags have their own environmental impact. It certainly feels like part of the problem is the way we've built our neighborhoods. It's inconvenient to shop regularly, so we all go weekly and buy a trunk full of food. Lots of bags. Lots of packaging. Etc.

fortran77 4y ago

In the trunk of my car, I have 10 reusable bags, 5 of which are insulated. The total weight of those bags is 2.5 pounds. Let's suppose because of bag laws, 100,000,000 cars in the U.S. are now carrying around 1 extra pound wherever they go. And that all the cars are gas. (My car's electric, but I don't want to confound the calculations). Let's assume that the average car travels 12 miles/day (this is probably low). The fuel cost to haul 2.5 pounds 12 miles/day 100,000,000 times/day is not insignificant. And nobody ever calculates this when comparing reusable bags to disposable bags.

samatman 4y ago
Ok I'll bite: this is a weird comparison. Surely the 5 (!) insulated bags are the bulk of the weight? Those ones aren't fungible with disposable bags, which don't insulate. The weight in the car is also an irrelevancy, because just tire pressure will absolutely swamp the difference, by which I mean there would be no way to extract the cost from the noise no matter how hard you tried.
moate 4y ago
Keep going: Why is that not partially offset by the transportation of all the single use bags ceasing? How many shipping containers full of plastic bags no longer needed to be moved in order to solve this? It's not like this hauling issue is created in a vacuum. Further point: You don't need to keep a bunch of bags in your car all the time for every trip you ever take. The fact that this is how you choose to address the issue is personal, and not at all the only way this new paradigm can be solved.
klyrs 4y ago
> The fuel cost to haul 2.5 pounds 12 miles/day 100,000,000 times/day is not insignificant. That's a thousandth of the weight of a small 2500lb car, but much of the inefficiency is due to drag, so the impact is not even 1:1. In absolute terms, you can successfully argue that tons of CO2 are emitted as a result, but that's extremely marginal, at less than a tenth of a percent of emissions. I'm pretty sure you know how ridiculous your argument is, but if you were that much of a hippie, you'd know that shucking your clothes, ditching your spare tire, and driving on empty would be even better for the environment.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

I'm betting it's some sort of elected representative.

sys_64738 4y ago

This is just a waste of time when the real culprits are the oil companies. If people are serious about this then they need to go after the real culprits, not shave a few specs from around the edges.

zerof1l 4y ago

The ban is specifically on single-use bags, not all bags. I don't use paper bags for groceries and I never will. Paperbag is fragile. If it rains, one can hope to reach the destination before the bag falls apart. To replace all plastic bags with paper ones we will need to chop a lot of trees. Plastic bags are still the best, just not single-use ones. I have a grocery bag that is made out of tightly-woven polypropylene thread. I've been using it for about 2 years now and it looks like new.