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And yet, when I'm in the grocery store all those produce bags are still plastic while they brag about paper or reusable checkout bags! There is no solution in

And yet, when I'm in the grocery store all those produce bags are still plastic while they brag about paper or reusable checkout bags! There is no solution in sight for us - it's way too late.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Well, it's a continuous spectrum of outcomes. We might have missed the "nice and livable planet without having to change much", but we're not at "Mars climate" yet.
di456 3y ago
My city banned single-use plastic bags. For a couple years they went away. Then they came back and are now 10x thicker so they can be marketed as reusable.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  This is how I feel about these "reusable" bags too. If you sell them at a checkout, you aren't making people adjust to remember to bring bags. You're just making them spend more to buy single use bags. They definitely are accumulating enough in my house that I'm contemplating using them as bin liners, which is stupid. But I'm probably not gonna change. Besides, even if I brought my bags 100% of the time when I went to the store, if I ever order my groceries to be delivered, which I do when I'm super busy at work or too sick to go to the store, they seem to arrive packed into as many reusable bags as humanly possible. So anyways, yet another thing that we should be leaning on companies to fix but individuals are being blamed for. Paper bags would have been better but not profitable enough compared to selling "reusable" bags at the checkout line.
tm-guimaraes 3y ago
"plastic" is not the issue, "plastic" disposal is the issue. "Plastic" is just too good on the $/weight/resilience ratio. Also, efficient containers like plastics (as in light and thin) reduce a lot the energy needed to transport. And no matter what we do here with plastics, it won't matter without proper trade regulations. It will happen as it did with labour, third world countries will just pick up our share. Third world countries use more fossil fuels, and have way worse waste management, and they don't seem to plan on improving those just like labour is cheap. Their rulers want it that way to keep on competing on price in exportations. Without trade regulations that try to upstream some environmental regulation, all the local rules are useless

And yet, when I'm in the grocery store all those produce bags are still plastic while they brag about paper or reusable checkout bags! There is no solution in sight for us - it's way too late.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago

Well, it's a continuous spectrum of outcomes. We might have missed the "nice and livable planet without having to change much", but we're not at "Mars climate" yet.

di456 3y ago

My city banned single-use plastic bags. For a couple years they went away. Then they came back and are now 10x thicker so they can be marketed as reusable.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
This is how I feel about these "reusable" bags too. If you sell them at a checkout, you aren't making people adjust to remember to bring bags. You're just making them spend more to buy single use bags. They definitely are accumulating enough in my house that I'm contemplating using them as bin liners, which is stupid. But I'm probably not gonna change. Besides, even if I brought my bags 100% of the time when I went to the store, if I ever order my groceries to be delivered, which I do when I'm super busy at work or too sick to go to the store, they seem to arrive packed into as many reusable bags as humanly possible. So anyways, yet another thing that we should be leaning on companies to fix but individuals are being blamed for. Paper bags would have been better but not profitable enough compared to selling "reusable" bags at the checkout line.

tm-guimaraes 3y ago

"plastic" is not the issue, "plastic" disposal is the issue. "Plastic" is just too good on the $/weight/resilience ratio. Also, efficient containers like plastics (as in light and thin) reduce a lot the energy needed to transport. And no matter what we do here with plastics, it won't matter without proper trade regulations. It will happen as it did with labour, third world countries will just pick up our share. Third world countries use more fossil fuels, and have way worse waste management, and they don't seem to plan on improving those just like labour is cheap. Their rulers want it that way to keep on competing on price in exportations. Without trade regulations that try to upstream some environmental regulation, all the local rules are useless