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...and yet I don't see paper bags in the troughs next to roads, choking turtles and washing up on beaches. There are no micropaper particles on top of Mount Eve

...and yet I don't see paper bags in the troughs next to roads, choking turtles and washing up on beaches. There are no micropaper particles on top of Mount Everest or polluting the ocean. This is an annoying framing of the issue. Emissions aren't the beginning and end of the story, and it's not a binary choice. When I go shopping, I keep my groceries in a trolley and then load them into heavy plastic bags in my car, which I paid for, keep there and use over and over, easily more than the 40-odd times specified. My supermarket accepts soft, pliable plastics to recycle in a special program, and when these bags fail, I put them there. I sometimes buy paper bags, and reuse these as best I can. I recycle these too. Cloth bags exist too. The bottom line is that we need to remove cheap, flimsy, disposable plastics from our lives about as quickly as they came into them, and plastic in general should not be so ubiquitous, for our health and for the wellbeing of the environment.

timellis-smith 4y ago
Agree. In the UK we saw a massive reduction of single use bags when we introduced a 10p charge on bags. https://www.edie.net/single-use-plastic-bags-down-97-in-supermarkets-since-2015/ https://www.edie.net/single-use-plastic-bags-down-97-in-supe...
Beltalowda 4y ago
According to the second tweet that was factored in; didn't look at the details, but the analysis is not just about emissions. The best way to use plastic bags is as bin liners by the way; you're going to need those anyway. Not possible in locations that use bin liners to levy waste tax though. I wonder if incentivising that might be the best path forward, by designing these plastic bags to explicitly be easily reusable as bin liners.
robomartin 4y ago
I think what you might not be seeing is the entirety of the life cycle and consequences of each action. I am not making the argument that plastic bags are better/worse/neutral. I don't know enough to make that argument at the moment, even if I wanted to. What I am saying is that very few actions come without consequences. And, more often than not, those consequences are not immediately obvious. Consumers, as a generalization, are pretty dumb. They'll get behind causes because they are told to do so by politicians, news organizations and celebrities. They --the generalized masses-- never use a process that involves critical thinking and informed analysis to make decisions. Perhaps more important than that, they never stop months or years later to evaluate the real outcome of the decisions they made. That's just how things work. Banning plastic bags did not eliminate the need to carry things. That means a range of solutions surfaced. That ranged from thicker bags to paper bags, both of which were sold as better solutions. And yet, we don't really know. For example: How much more plastic is used to make the thicker bags? How does their entire life cycle rate in terms of energy, resources, pollutants, CO2 and, yes, disposal? Same question about paper. In fact, with paper we can even add questions about deforestation. We need trees to capture CO2. Are we cutting down more vegetation because we banned plastic bags and straws? Are we generating more waste and CO2 because of this and, at the same time, capturing less CO2 because we need more trees? Again, I am not taking either side. I have written this comment merely to point out that the real effects of any decision are never --ever-- as simple as what we might each see individually. The fact that you don't see plastic waste washing-up on beaches might have no correlation whatsoever to a measurable improvement in waste generation at all.
deleted 4y ago
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timellis-smith 4y ago

Agree. In the UK we saw a massive reduction of single use bags when we introduced a 10p charge on bags. https://www.edie.net/single-use-plastic-bags-down-97-in-supermarkets-since-2015/ https://www.edie.net/single-use-plastic-bags-down-97-in-supe...

Beltalowda 4y ago

According to the second tweet that was factored in; didn't look at the details, but the analysis is not just about emissions. The best way to use plastic bags is as bin liners by the way; you're going to need those anyway. Not possible in locations that use bin liners to levy waste tax though. I wonder if incentivising that might be the best path forward, by designing these plastic bags to explicitly be easily reusable as bin liners.

robomartin 4y ago

I think what you might not be seeing is the entirety of the life cycle and consequences of each action. I am not making the argument that plastic bags are better/worse/neutral. I don't know enough to make that argument at the moment, even if I wanted to. What I am saying is that very few actions come without consequences. And, more often than not, those consequences are not immediately obvious. Consumers, as a generalization, are pretty dumb. They'll get behind causes because they are told to do so by politicians, news organizations and celebrities. They --the generalized masses-- never use a process that involves critical thinking and informed analysis to make decisions. Perhaps more important than that, they never stop months or years later to evaluate the real outcome of the decisions they made. That's just how things work. Banning plastic bags did not eliminate the need to carry things. That means a range of solutions surfaced. That ranged from thicker bags to paper bags, both of which were sold as better solutions. And yet, we don't really know. For example: How much more plastic is used to make the thicker bags? How does their entire life cycle rate in terms of energy, resources, pollutants, CO2 and, yes, disposal? Same question about paper. In fact, with paper we can even add questions about deforestation. We need trees to capture CO2. Are we cutting down more vegetation because we banned plastic bags and straws? Are we generating more waste and CO2 because of this and, at the same time, capturing less CO2 because we need more trees? Again, I am not taking either side. I have written this comment merely to point out that the real effects of any decision are never --ever-- as simple as what we might each see individually. The fact that you don't see plastic waste washing-up on beaches might have no correlation whatsoever to a measurable improvement in waste generation at all.

deleted 4y ago

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