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California's plastic bag ban is failing
- Dig1t 3y agohttps://archive.ph/IHgtT https://archive.ph/IHgtT
- seanw444 3y agoIf you look up "ban" in a dictionary, California should come up as the first example.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoObviously it'll fail. Forcing private companies into charging people that happen to prefer carry their plastic packages in plastic bags to avoid extra plastic is silly. Same with the straws. There is no progress. Only the illusion.
- dawnerd 3y agoActually there has been some progress on the straw front. It’s forced companies to find alternatives that are not paper based but still biodegradable. All of the agave based straws I’ve gotten lately have held up just as well as plastic. It is silly plastic straws were banned but not the lids
- sarchertech 3y agoMost of those alternative straws are covered in coatings that contain PFAS. Including types that have been phased out in the US.
- snakeyjake 3y agoIt isn't silly. I'm a Watershed Steward on the east coast and bag bans and/or fees have irrefutably reduced the amount of plastic I have to pick out of local rivers and bays Styrofoam as well. People, for the most part, aren't just tossing their bags for them to end up in waterways, there is a complex and long path a bag takes from factory to landfill and at multiple steps along the way there are opportunities for them to fly away free as a bird. If you are a responsible consumer and dispose of your bag in a responsible manner, all it takes is one strong gust of wind to blow it into my river where I'll pick it up months later. The bans and fees should be nudging people towards reusable bags. I've been using the same four cotton reusable bags since July 2007 removing, at a minimum, 2,533 plastic bags from the waste stream-- and that's just my grocery usage. I carry an additional stuffable tote that stuffs down to the size of a deck of playing cards for convenience store purchases. Unless your objection is rooted in a pseudo-religious libertarian "free minds and free markets" stance and your ideology cannot be changed, it is self-evident given global experience that plastic (and styrofoam) reduction programs, to include bans and fees, are effective if implemented correctly and enforced.
- print_goto_ten 3y agoIve been using the same .99 bags for ten years when grocery shopping. "Obviously it'll fail." Oh really? It hasn't failed everywhere and the QOL in my area from not having shitty plastic bag tumbleweeds blowing all over is wonderful. You sound like a MAGA doofus.
- gilbetron 3y agoPeople hate this idea, but that just makes me think it has merit. Stop trying to reduce/recycle plastic use. We need to increase it. We need carbon sinks, and so lets produce more plastic, use it, then bury it in a way that prevents it from getting out. Switch production to use atmospheric carbon (or maybe just use trees) to create the plastic, switch back to never-degrade plastic formulas, and then just pull carbon out of the atmosphere, use it for plastic products, and then bury those plastic products forever. Plastics are awesome, it is us trying to recycle them and not bury them that is the actual problem.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoIt's like suggesting we should use up all our nuclear warheads by firing them into space
- gilbetron 3y agoYour analogy is not even wrong.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoDoesn't work because humans litter despite efforts to mitigate, and all of this plastic ends up uncollected. Paper bags break down eventually. We need less plastics in our daily lives, full stop.
- eastbound 3y agoTwo third of the plastic waste in the ocean come from Indonesia. Stop trying to make good people the culprits.
- kevingadd 3y agoIgnoring your implication that other countries are "bad people" and your country of choice is "good people", western nations ship garbage to other countries https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48444874 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48444874 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-colonialism-countries-grapple-with-wests-unwanted-plastic https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-co...
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoThere's something poetic and fitting about a California greenwashing campaign that only cares about what contains the trash, not the contents themselves.
- tehlike 3y agoPeople will find this chart interesting. It compares different types of grocery bags and how many times do you need to reuse to have less environmental impact than single use plastic bag. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental-impact https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
- Ekaros 3y agoSo Organic cotton is horrible for environment on these metrics? And it is not even small margin compared to regular one...
- chewbacha 3y agoFWIW - My family has generally used the same cotton canvas bags for decades and they are useful for more than just groceries.
- smileysteve 3y agoI use a cotton/nylon blend backpack from grade school 25 years ago. Useful for all sorts of things from groceries to beach/mountain day pack.
- nomel 3y agoUnless you’re going to eat it, what’s the point of organic cotton? Cotton seems like something that should be optimized, for production, as much as possible.
- cultofmetatron 3y agothe ecological damage from all the pesticides used in traditional cotton production would be why.
- tekla 3y agoOrganic pesticides are similarly terrible for the environment.
- 01100011 3y agoSoon to be followed by a failed attempt at forcing organic waste recycling onto citizens... I'm all for composting. I'm not for adding a third waste management stream all the way to single-family homes which will likely comply poorly with organic waste regulations due to the inherent disgusting inconvenience it entails. Officials are now seriously suggesting you store your food waste in the freezer to prevent smells, insects and rodents. As if we all have extra space in our freezers, extra time to deal with a third waste stream, extra space for a third trash can... I really agree with the spirit of these proposals but I wish the folks in government would temper the idealism with pragmatism. "Doing something" isn't enough.
- smileysteve 3y agoAnecdotally, with composting, just a 5 gallon bucket every other week (and yes, eating at home), my trash waste is more than cut in half (and my bucket is on my deck, where it doesn't smell, so i empty the trash less) I currently use Compost Now service, but started with Bokashi - which prevents the smells, bugs; but from a price perspective the counter top compost systems seem they would pay for themselves in less than a year compared to curbside service (our trash).
- soperj 3y agoIn BC we've had this for decades, everyone uses it. There's decomposable bags that you can put your compost in, and when you tie them, they take care of most of the odor issue.
- SoftTalker 3y agoOur town has trash pickup, recycling, and yard waste pickup. Behind the scenes it almost all goes to the same landfill. It's nothing but theatre and extra costs.
- hathchip 3y agoHow do you know?
- 3y ago
- bawolff 3y agoWe've been banning plastic bags in (parts of) canada for a while now and honestly i love it. So much less litter just blowing everywhere. It is much nicer and worth it for that alone.
- light_hue_1 3y agoThere's a far simpler solution that many states and cities have adopted: a plastic bag ban. You go to check out and your option is a crappy paper bag. That's ok for some small items, but doing your groceries with them is annoying. Everyone remembers to bring their shopping bags now. Simple.
- dawnerd 3y agoI prefer paper bags as long as they’re constructed right. Target in Portland had some of the best until Oregon started to force companies to charge for bags, then like magic target decided to switch to cheaper bags they could make money on.
- gedy 3y agoFunny antidote, but when plastic grocery bags first became available, my environmentalist sister would berate me for using paper bags, because "you can recycle plastic bags" and paper kills trees..
- SoftTalker 3y agoYep, people forget that paper shopping bags were a huge environmental issue. Just like the anti-nuke activists, they created a much bigger problem than they solved.
- hathchip 3y agoThis is very dubious. Unless paper bags are produced using timber from first-growth forests, growing and then cutting down the trees that were used to make them took carbon out of the atmosphere. When the paper bag decays or is burnt, they become roughly carbon neutral. But things that take carbon out of the atmosphere for a while as part of a cycle are generally good - by the time one particular paper bag has returned its carbon to the atmosphere, others have been made, and so there is some greenhouse gas reduction long term.
- SoftTalker 3y agoI think we agree? Paper bags are carbon-neutral. Plastic bags introduce new carbon into the environment. Nuclear power is carbon-neutral (after the construction of the plant itself). Anti-nuke environmentalism in prior decades contributed to the continued and expanded use of coal, oil, and natural gas for power generation.
- hathchip 3y agoI don't really agree with the point about anti-nuke environmentalism. In the past many environmentalists were opposed to both nuclear energy (because of the risk of Chernobyl-style disasters or because of the implicit subsidy to nuclear weapons proliferation) and they were opposed to fossil fuel extraction and burning. The people who were opposed to the environmentalist worldview were in favor of nuclear, but also in favor of fossil fuel generation and extraction (and CFCs, and leaded gasoline, and deforestation, and DDT, etc). They often very publicly argued that all these issues were bogus, that global warming could never happen, that we had nothing to worry about, that all these concerns were motivated by hatred of money or progress. The environmentalists, on the other hand, tried hard to make a more abstract point - that we need to protect our environment and treat it as a precious good to be shared. This was obviously right. Why should we cherry-pick one aspect of an environmentalist strategy from a very specific time and use it to blame them for "the continued and expanded use of coal, oil, and natural gas for power generation". Why aren't the numerous vocal cheerleaders of fossil fuels (who may have happened to be in favor of nuclear, but only because they generally argued that we should ignore all safety and resource depletion concerns) held to account here?
- legitster 3y agoStores in our area have stopped stocking plastic bags. Lately I have been just loading armfuls of groceries into my car directly. "Yes I am an idiot. I thought I could swing by the store on the way home from work. No I will not by a reusable bag - I already have 900 at home stuffed into a closet." I don't know why we waste so much effort on environmental initiatives that help the least but make people annoyed the most.
- vel0city 3y agoStore a few bags in your car somewhere. My car always has 2-3 reusable bags tucked somewhere in there. Once I'm done bringing in whatever was in the car they get hung up by the door so the next time I go out to the car I take them back out to the car so they're always available.
- legitster 3y agoYes, I am well aware. But with kids and multiple adults sharing cars life happens. So I am still often stuck in stores without any sort of bags. I don't mind paying for them or using paper, but increasingly stores in our area have nothing except for totes.
- playday 3y agoUse them as trash liners or you can cut them to make doggy doodoo bags.
- tzs 3y agoI too usually don't use bags in the grocery store. I get most of my groceries at Walmart and use their "Scan and Go" feature (part of Walmart+). With S&G you read the barcode from the Walmart app on your phone as you put them into your (physical) shopping cart. At checkout you scan a QR code on the checkout terminal, confirm payment in the app, and you are done. I then push the cart out to my car and load them into the trunk. I've got some reusable bags in the trunk so if I'm going to want the groceries in bags for carrying into my house I bag them then as I load the car. I've also got some stackable empty boxes in the trunk. If I bought a lot of groceries I might load the boxes instead, and then can use a hand truck to move them all at once to my house. This works quite well, and checkout is way faster than scanning at the terminal. Also, the sale is actually processed as if it was an online order. I've got bigger credit card rewards for online purchases than I do for grocery store purchases so that was a nice bonus. It's enough of a difference to cover a large part of the cost of the Walmart+ membership.
- 0_____0 3y agoIt's hard to imagine now but there used to be SO MUCH plastic bag trash blowing everywhere when I grew up (in California). People don't appreciate how much cleaner our cities and green spaces are now that there's a cost attached to this common form of disposable plastic.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 3y agoIt does seem that litter is the important issue. Harder to measure, of course, so it doesn't make it into the neat bar charts.
- tantalor 3y agoDoes this article eventually get to the point?
- smileysteve 3y agoUsing reusable bags is so easy; yet it seems Americans are entitled to getting free bags, they can't adapt. It takes me 10s to stop by my pantry and grab my trusty backpack (from grade school, 25 years ago) or to remember to put bags back in my car. My backpack is better at carrying heavy items (like liquids) and more ergonomically too. But reusing thick plastic bags (from pickup, or beach locations that have banned "single use" plastic) is also easy. Somehow, personal responsibility is difficult for the majority of Americans.
- czscout 3y agoYou do realize that there are 300 million people in the US, right?
- blitz_skull 3y agoI think you’ll find personal responsibility is a high bar for most of the world. Americans are not unique in that.
- smileysteve 3y agoToo much of a boy scout :-/
- drivers99 3y agoI haven't seen anyone mention what's in the article: they banned one type of plastic bag and replaced it with a different type of plastic. One that has a "recyclable" (chasing arrows) symbol on it but actually gets thrown out anyway. So they didn't really ban plastic bags.
- Guvante 3y ago> Who keeps the proceeds from the sale of reusable grocery bags and recycled paper bags? The stores that sell the bags keep the money and must use it to cover the costs of providing the bags, complying with the bag ban, or encouraging the use of reusable grocery bags through educational materials or an educational campaign. I feel like this isn't quite "companies get more profit". It basically just eliminated the old cost but didn't become a revenue stream. Certainly it avoided the alternative where we switched to paper bags that companies paid for.
- debesyla 3y agoFrom my experience in Lithuania where we had a law of "plastic bags have to cost at least 1 cent" put in place few months ago: - I see more people not using any bags at all. Previously some people would put even bananas and cabbages to bags (or some put even already packaged food items like rice or salt to extra bags "in case it rips open"). So the use overall decreased. - shops started to offer reusable cloth bags for sale... But I don't see many people using those. I heard that some people just keep forgetting to take those to the shop. - a lot of people just accept that 1 cent cost and move on. - few populists political parties already "promised" to remove this tax. It's not a popular promise, but some people are attracted to that. - overall it seems there's less bag use (my perception says it decreased by ~20%), but the difference isn't huge. I personally don't really care about the tax because I didn't use plastic bags before anyway - I just throw everything to one cotton bag I have used for the past 10 years and it's fine to me.
- weaksauce 3y ago> put in place few months ago speaking from personal experience of "i forgot the bags again"... it will take more than a few months for that to change. it's been many years since the switch and it's a different habit now where I generally bring or have the reusable bags in the car.
- throwaway8582 3y agoI live in the US and I see something similar when shopping at Aldi. They charge like 5 or 10 cents per bag, but it's enough that most people will bring their own or not use bags at all. It's a small fee, but it has a significant impact, and it's great that you can still get bags if you need them. I'd much prefer cities and states impose a small tax like this instead of a ban. It would reduce usage without risking harmful, unintended consequences like we see in California.
- Fluorescence 3y agoYou've got to charge enough for it to be a disincentive. In the UK, I did not change my behaviour at 5p a bag but at 30p a bag I did. I keep couple of foldable bags in my laptop bag and it works great - zero downsides. It was frustrating to begin with but now, if anything it's entirely positive - less hassle relying on a shop's bags and I like the continuity of using my own - so I give such schemes a thumbs up. The resistance is about habit changes rather than actual lifestyle impact.
- playday 3y agoI loved the new plastic bags in California ever since they came out. Those old weak bags always ripped and tore. Had no idea the new ones were reusable! They make much better trash liners than the old ones.
- xkjyeah 3y agounpopular opinion in this US-centric forum, but just burn the bags when they end up in the trash. Much of Europe does that. Bags are just hydrocarbons and burning them completely releases nothing but CO2 and water. Then the landfill ceases to be an issue and we can focus on CO2. Well, CO2 is a problem, but plastic bags are already more CO2 efficient than any alternative bags given the average number of uses in their lifetime.
- underseacables 3y agoWhat would a mass burn of plastics like this do to an area?
- dpkirchner 3y agoDoesn't matter, as long as they're not burnt near my yard.
- HPsquared 3y agoIf the combustion is well-run and the exhaust properly filtered, nothing.
- hathchip 3y ago> Much of Europe Single-use plastic shopping bags are banned or levied in much of Europe.
- elzbardico 3y agoThe problem is basically a people’s problem. It is not that hard to keep a bunch of re-usable bags at your home/office/car and bring them with you. People do this in countries like Germany, Sweden or the Netherlands. But we are too fucking individualistic to bother ourselves with this minimal inconvenience. We act as if we are all entitled to maximum convenience, every other concern beyond our comfort be damned!
- standardUser 3y agoTo be fair, that American ethos has diminished significantly in younger generations. However, the American ethos of abusing a good cause for political gain or private profit remains firmly in place.
- whartung 3y agoWe use the thin bags for the cats litter box. Since we don't get them "naturally" anymore, we buy them at the office store. I particularly hate the thicker bags we have today. We're supposed to take them back to the store for recycling (which the article says is not done), but simply the fact that we can't toss it into our curbside makes that a non-starter, so in the black bin they go. That said, we bought a set of cloth bags years ago. Easily over 10 years ago, we use them every week, they're in great shape and I mostly prefer them to when we had the thin bags. Launder them now and again. We had a seam go on one of them, and had a tailor sew it back up. The clerks at the store identify us with them, some of them recalling back in the day when they were originally sold. The funny thing, though, is that there's this cloth bag with a Target logo. It's half again bigger than the others, I keep it with them all, but specifically shove it in the bottom to deter its use. Inevitably, if that bag comes out, it gets gorged with gallons of milk, bags of oranges, cinder blocks, and bowling balls -- both of them, rather than the paper towels, popcorn, bags of cotton candy, etc. Quick stops we almost always just carry stuff out to the car, and put them into one of the cloth bags we carry all the time (assuming we forgot to bring it in in the first place). If we do get the store bags, they're single use. I just toss 'em.
- coding123 3y agoI just steal the more expensive bags at the self-checkout.
- underseacables 3y agoI took an entire box of IKEA plastic bags years ago, they had those nice thick plastic bags. I used those for years.
- djhworld 3y agoIn the UK shops have to charge for bags, think it's about 10p or more for the better quality ones. Tbh it's easier to just bring your own bags, for a big grocery shop I have 2 bags lined with foil insulation to keep cold items cool. They're super easy to pack if you're smart with your item placement and super easy to get into the car. Cost about £20 from Amazon but you can probs find cheaper ones.
- klodolph 3y agoThat’s how California works too.
- underseacables 3y agoThere isn’t much official data about consumer bag usage.
- karaterobot 3y ago> Though plastic bags represent a fraction of plastics produced, they are a unique source of blight, according to Mark Murray, the executive director of environmental group Californians Against Waste. They blow into tree branches, clog sewer drains, wrinkle jellyfish-like in our oceans and tumble across our roads. Right, LDPE bags are a fraction of plastics produced (and plastic trash), and they were chosen as a scapegoat, because they are highly visible. In a world where we chose to spend our (extremely) limited legislative focus on getting the biggest bang for the buck, we'd have targeted different plastic type produced by or used in different industries, which would have made more of a positive impact. Instead, we did something that made us feel good, but did nothing, and in fact ended up making the situation worse by getting people to buy and throw away far more HDPE plastics. All the information required to make a better decision existed at the time, but pretty much everybody involved ignored it and did the dumber thing.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoSo two weeks ago I stopped in at the farmers market where I always shop, but I hadn't been there physically in 6 months or so. There was a sign outside proclaiming that they were abolishing single-use plastic bags, and that they were selling durable ones. The sign was dated in May. This was entirely a surprise to me, since I shop there via Instacart, and they've had no shortage of single-use plastics to single-and-double-bag all my groceries and drop them on my doorstep. Obviously, when you use a delivery service, there's no way to provide your own durable bags. The pile-up of plastics causes much chagrin in my heart, but if I pile them on a shelf, then I can bring them back to that farmers market and shove them into the recycling bin, and let them do whatever they do with them. I have no idea what Instacart would do if these bags were banned entirely. Perhaps the drivers would get a clue and carry their own reusables.
- JacksonXR 3y ago[flagged]
- hparadiz 3y agoWhen I moved to California I tried not always buying bags. I have a ton of tote bags and would just leave them in the car but there was always the random stop at a grocery store on the way home or sometimes you just forget them and don't feel like walking back. Being a hardass on your SO about it is no way to be either. So I ended up just buying them and not thinking about it. Every once in a while I'll remember to bring bags but it doesn't always work. It ends up being an extra 30 cents on a shopping trip and most of the workers will give you free bags after you've already paid if stuff won't all fit while you're bagging. I actually do use the bags. I end up using them for bathroom trash cans and when I'm cleaning. I have a half acre on a hill and have a compost pile at the bottom of the hill. 15 mature trees producing a good amount of locked up carbon. My food waste in comparison is minimal but I still throw it into the pile and it produces some really nice earthy black compost. But even that is kinda annoying. Walking all the way to pile and back is a bit of a chore and my ex would never do it so it was up to me. I pretty much just have a bucket next to the sink. At the very least when I'm throwing out stuff that has spoiled it makes me feel a tiny bit better that I'm fertilizing my own land. I'm not really sure what the solution is for people in apartments. It will smell no matter what you do.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoThe requirement of collecting the bags went the same way as the can policy. They are required to charge $.05 (or more) per can that they sell, but I have to drive to a completely different place, somewhere in a backlot to get my $.05 per can back. And now in Phoenix I get plastic bags everywhere. But they're even worse. I remember in the old country we'd get plastic bags but they were actually usable as trash bags. Now, I actually have to double bag the groceries as they tear by just pulling them off of the holder.
- kkfx 3y agoI suggest another reasoning: when plastic packaging start the historical advertisement was "save trees, nature with plastic", because yes, without it even if bamboo is strong and light enough, cardboard cheap enough, paper help etc at the actual rate we need simply too much resources for nature to regenerate. Or to enlarge a bit: build homes with wood means build something recyclable at least once, environmental friendly, renewable etc BUT only if the wood demand remain below a certain threshold. Well, for packaging not just bags it's the same. I have no massive data, nor I do not know if I can source them somewhere but I suspect that the main issue these days is that we simply need too much to avoid using plastic. So a ban can work ONLY with some other push toward less packing witch is FAR less easy. I'm from EU where the first push toward mater-B (a kind of polymer made from corn) end up in two kind of scandals: - it's not deteriorate easily in nature, just like nylon bags - it's more fragile, meaning instead of using a single bag you use two to be safe, and it's production is not much sustainable Than the ban of single-use plastic dish, glasses, spoon, forks etc substituted by bamboo ones. Sure they to not pollute once dropped in nature, but how many forest need to be cut and substituted with bamboo to sustain the demand? The answer here is "well, just we metal/ceramic/glass stuff, wash them, reuse, we all have a dishwasher". Doing the same for fast food, supermarkets etc is FAR LESS easy specially in modern dense cities where people shop by feet nearby their home every days instead of by car once a week or less. The bottomline: to ban plastic we need to ban the modern dense life to came back to domestic stockpile of foods and so on, to shop with cars and have a garage so we re-use many-usage packing stuff and we buy in large quantity. Witch actually is something NO LOBBY want because meaning reversing the current trend toward 15' cities and "all dependent on services" model.
- cannabis_sam 3y agoThis whole “plastic ban” is just a feeble and disgusting distraction from the orders of magnitude larger environmental issues facing humanity. But since we apparently, absolutely need to continue to burn down the house we all live in, banning plastics is seemingly a great and democratic compromise on environmental issues. Yes, plastics are bad, but it’s like plugging a single hole in one bathtub on the Titanic, which apparently large amounts of politicians across the western world feel is a great win.