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Actually, plastic bag bans may increase overall emissions: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-plastic-bag-bans-garbage https://www.npr

Actually, plastic bag bans may increase overall emissions: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-plastic-bag-bans-garbage https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-... TLDR: garbage bags are thicker plastic, so the ban increases overall plastic use. Replacing plastic grocery bags with paper or cloth also is more resource intensive; cloth bags have to be used an average of 130 times to break even.

Dylan16807 3y ago
Maybe if you're buying 4 gallon garbage bags. When it's 13 or 30 gallon bags, the volume:area ratio is so much better it easily overcomes a lot of thickness. And if you're picking up dog poop, grocery bags are a lot bigger than you need so most of the plastic is wasted. Oh, I just noticed this part of the article: "They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment." Oof, that's a huge hit to credibility. I remember this number. The study did not say that. That's cherry-picking the very worst impact number out of a bunch of different categories. Specifically I think it was the impact of fertilizer on water supplies. And organic cotton had numbers three times as high as normal cotton. The reuse estimate for climate for normal cotton was about 50.