8 ms·

People 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 t

People 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 ago
So Organic cotton is horrible for environment on these metrics? And it is not even small margin compared to regular one...
- chewbacha 3y ago
  FWIW - My family has generally used the same cotton canvas bags for decades and they are useful for more than just groceries.
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    I 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 ago
  Unless 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 ago
    the ecological damage from all the pesticides used in traditional cotton production would be why.
    - tekla 3y ago
      Organic pesticides are similarly terrible for the environment.
      - cultofmetatron 3y ago
        I'll agree with you that some organic pesticides can be just as bad. however there are much stricter guidelines on when and how they are applied to qualify for organic certification. In the case of conventional, the application methodology is more about the bottom line. which in many cases means spraying way more to maximize yield.
- hathchip 3y ago
  I really don't think those graphs make that case, although it seems they are trying to. Organic cotton is ahead of plastic for greenhouse gases after 149 uses. That's a small number of uses for a cotton tote bag, which should last several years of daily wear. That means that from the 150th use you are reducing greenhouse gases every time you take the bag out, while potentially still net polluting in a couple of other ways. But greenhouse gas emissions are by far the most critical and potentially catastrophic environment issue. If we can effectively and reliably lower greenhouse gases while causing a few extra rhino deaths or depleting the ozone layer marginally, we should enthusiastically seize that opportunity. Given this, the "average over all pollution types" seems particularly useless and intentionally misleading here. That number literally cannot be coerced into meaning anything that should affect your decision making process.
  - causi 3y ago
    That's a small number of uses for a cotton tote bag, which should last several years of daily wear. Who uses it every day? My trips to get groceries are every week or two weeks. I'd have a decent chance of misplacing the thing before I offset its carbon. If I forgot it just once and had to turn the car around to get it I'd probably double its footprint.
    - hathchip 3y ago
      I mean, if you use it less, it will wear down slower. Nothing to worry about.
    - InSteady 3y ago
      >Who uses it every day? There are 52 weeks in a year. After several years of weekly use you have offset the carbon. > I'd have a decent chance of misplacing the thing before I offset its carbon. You can keep things simply and only use it for groceries if you have trouble keeping track of things. Keep it in the same location every time, ideally by the door, always return it to it's spot immediately after unloading groceries when you get home. Don't leave a full bag of groceries at the store. You're pretty much set. You could also go for a recycled PET reusable bag if you just can't trust yourself to hang on to a cotton bag for a few years. Still better than single-use plastics by many metrics as long as you aren't losing bags multiple times per year. And yeah, don't turn around to get your bag when you're halfway to the store; get single-use plastic on that occasion and spend a few moments gently reaffirming your habit/routine that includes grabbing the bag when you head out for groceries.
chewbacha 3y ago
Unbleached paper seems like a good winner here. I feel vindicated for taking paper bags now.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  Do you reuse them 8+ times?
  - skyyler 3y ago
    I use the paper for other things once they rip from use.
    - sarchertech 3y ago
      Assume I get 4 reuses out of a paper bag, and I use 4 bags per week. I don’t think I could replace 4 bags worth of paper per month that I would have bought otherwise.
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    They can then be recycled.
    - sarchertech 3y ago
      True, but recycling takes water and energy. You’d probably still going to have to use them yourself a fair few times to make it a net positive.
- robrichard 3y ago
  And New Jersey banned paper bags!
  - waynesonfire 3y ago
    stupid. they grow on trees and can be recycled. we should be using as much paper as possible.
strictnein 3y ago
Wonder what the fancy bags that Whole Foods sells would need. We use them all the time, but they're insulated, with a plastic inside and a zippered top.
zeristor 3y ago
So what about the environmental impact once you’ve used the bag?
raincole 3y ago
What does the -2.3 uses for biopolymer mean? Biopolymer actively generates clean water??
legitster 3y ago
I used to reuse the plastic shopping bags as trash liners for small cans around the house. Since they have been banned I have actually had to start buying bags for home.
- mschild 3y ago
  I'd say give using none at all try if it works within your location. We haven't bought any trash bags in close to 4 years. We split our garbage into compost, recycling, paper, glass, and others.
  - FreshStart 3y ago
    Free work needs to be subsidized. How much time does it cost you to sort what they dump&burn together anyway?
    - Kerb_ 3y ago
      How much do you suppose you need to be paid for picking up the spoon and putting it in your mouth? Taking out the trash should be basic self maintenance
    - mschild 3y ago
      None? It takes me not even a second to decide what bin to put it into. Compost goes to a compost facility that generates methane from it and then sells the excess as fertilizer. Plastics get recycled. Reusable glass bottles get cleaned and reused, other molten down and reused. Other gets burned, filtered, and generates electricity.
  - legitster 3y ago
    Do you have kids?
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    So how do you leave the "others" for garbage collection if you're not using bags?
samstave 3y ago
What I want is a chart which can evaluate the consumption/spend/waste of products pre-plastic, vs, post plastic as weighted by things such as milk delivery services.. with glass pickup (soda (coke) and milk) etc) vs, single use plastic. Even in Cebu Philippines, they still had massive glass cola re-bottling plants, as recent as today... Why is the US so afraid of actual reuse, as opposed to trash. (oh, we invented the plastics industry...)
noelwelsh 3y ago
If the implication is that reusing bags is pointless, I'd like to point out that a so-called single use plastic bag can be reused many times. This is what I used to do before people started handing out more durable bags, and they are fine for a very long time. (Now I have a small stash of cotton bags, some of which are over a decade old.)
- InSteady 3y ago
  I reuse produce bags, ziplocks, sandwich bags, and the like by rinsing them lukewarm water and hanging up to dry, occasionally using a bit of soap as needed. It's a bit of a hassle and there is a likelihood that I am exposing my food to more microplastics via direct contact as the bags get worn from use and washing. I have no clue how quickly the bags start breaking down, it probably varies due to numerous factors. I wish there were more and better options for silicone, beeswax coated muslin, etc as alternatives. Unfortunately plain cotton bags don't keep veggies from wilting otherwise I'd go for that. I've got a pair of giant silicone bags for this purpose but the shape and thickness means they can't hold many veggies, take up more space than they should, and are generally unwieldy. They were also $20 each, which seems a bit high (I assume because they are a specialty item in a niche market). Come on free market, solve this problem for me so I can ditch single-use plastics!
Aunche 3y ago
Some of these numbers don't make sense. Unbleached paper and biopolymers definitely require a nonzero amount of energy to produce, so how can they have 0 greenhouse gas emissions? How can biopolymers have negative water use?
rendaw 3y ago
That looks terrible, but cotton or at least non-plastic bags have been around for a long time, right? Would bag production always have been that bad? It feels like this is tying the manufacturing process to the materials for manufacturing. You can't make a plastic bag without plastic production, but I feel like you can make a non-plastic bag without plastic production and at lot of other modern industrial processes and chemicals.
slg 3y ago
How do the cotton bags lead to freshwater eutrophication and terrestrial acidification? Is that just from the production of the bags? I always thought moving away from single use plastic was meant to be environmentally friendly in that it reduced the pollution caused by disposing of the single use items. I thought everyone knew the production costs were higher including from an environmental perspective of things like greenhouse gas emission and water use. Sometimes different environmental goals are in conflict with each other.
- Aunche 3y ago
  I'm assuming this is the from cotton fertilizer runoff.
  - slg 3y ago
    Which would mean all 5 of these measures are purely about production which gives an incomplete picture. The problem with single use plastics isn't the production. That is why they became so popular. The main concern is what happens to the plastic after that single use. For example, how many microplastics does a cotton bag keep out of the ocean?
    - Aunche 3y ago
      A plastic bag that is reused as a trash bag that ends up in a properly lined landfill isn't going to release microplastics in the the ocean either. The problem is that people really like sexy solutions over practical ones, so you end up with with ineffective initiatives like teaching Africans how to recycle or plastic bag bans rather than building more and safer landfills.
      - slg 3y ago
        If the solution was as easy as telling people to reuse and dispose of single use plastic properly, we would have solved this issue decades ago. People still don't do that in high enough numbers for it to be an actual solution.
scblock 3y ago
Definitely interesting, but clearly shows the cheap plastic reusable bags, which hold 2-3x as much as the disposable ones, repay their environmental cost about as fast as their actual cost. Which is very quickly.
InSteady 3y ago
Color me skeptical. A single organic cotton bag requires 20,000 uses due to ozone depletion? Apparently the researchers chose one specific dataset to determine how much electricity is used for cotton irrigation, and then further assumed that all of that electricity is generated from burning natural gas. It's not the gas itself that depletes ozone at that rate, but rather two chemicals used to pipe and transport methane long distances, which escape from leaky pipe infrastructure. Gee whiz, isn't cotton terrible? [0] If we looked at each one of the metrics, both for single use plastics and for their alternatives, would we find a similar story of absolute best/worst case scenario to paint single-use plastics as environmentally friendly? The original article also notes that plastics industry groups jumped on the pandemic to write to regulators and grocers imploring them to ban re-usable shopping bags due to them being "virus-laden" cesspools. Which is not at all what the science suggests (we figured that one out pretty early in the pandemic as I recall). These people are interested in one thing only: getting as much plastic into consumer markets as humanly possible. They are not operating in good faith by any stretch. [0] https://www.metabolic.nl/news/are-organic-cotton-totes-really-worse-than-plastic-bags https://www.metabolic.nl/news/are-organic-cotton-totes-reall...
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  > due to them being "virus-laden" cesspools I usually bring my backpack or a duffel bag to purchase groceries or whatever, and the cashiers are absolutely uniformly grossed out by these bags. They will hardly touch them. They poke at a hem as if it were radioactive or something. Of course, this started around the time of the pandemic, when everyone was extra paranoid about germs. But it has not abated. Nobody will bag groceries into my personal bags, they just kind of shove it to the end and make me do it all myself.
  - InSteady 3y ago
    That seems reasonable on their end. I bag my own bags when I bring them from home, always have done so without asking (even before the pandemic).
    - 3y ago
dehrmann 3y ago
A lot of environmental activists and policies aren't clear what they're optimizing for.
aeturnum 3y ago
These kinds of metrics are brought up often and, while I think they are somewhat useful, the article makes it clear that they're not in line with the goal of these bans. The problem is not that it was too harmful to the climate to produce these bags. The problem is some percentage of bags become litter and pollute the environment. I think other environmental indicators are good to consider, but simply presenting these metrics as capturing "environmental impact" is both deceptive and out of line with the goals of the bag bans as I understand them.
- gruez 3y ago
  >The problem is not that it was too harmful to the climate to produce these bags. The problem is some percentage of bags become litter and pollute the environment. 1. Is this actually the case, or just post-hoc justification? Remember when during the pandemic, the lockdowns were justified by "just 2 weeks to flatten the curve"? 2. Most of the time I'm given a plastic bag, it's being used to carry something back to my home. Under that scenario, there's basically a 0% chance that it's going to "become litter and pollute the environment". If litter was actually the concern, you'd expect the bans to be targeted at stores where goods being sold don't end up going to homes (fast food resturants and gas stations maybe?), but that's not what we're seeing.
  - aeturnum 3y ago
    1. I did not write these laws and cannot speak to the internal beliefs of the authors, but the campaigns I saw were about reducing waste / overall plastic production (i.e. litter) not about reducing the climate resources to produce bags. 2. I don't think what you are saying makes sense? I also take things that gas stations and restaurants give me home. Like...based on your objection there should be no litter because everyone takes things given to them home. That said - I am sure that the people who advocated for the current bag bans would absolutely support expanding them.
  - drtz 3y ago
    Can't speak for California or LA, but in Dallas we had a plastic bag ban for a short period and it was sold as a way to reduce local litter, not reduce greenhouse emissions or protect the climate. I didn't realize how effective it was until about 6 months when I was walking Downtown and noticed a plastic bag tumbling down the street. Prior to the ban, they were a regular sight and nothing I would have taken note of.

Ekaros 3y ago

So Organic cotton is horrible for environment on these metrics? And it is not even small margin compared to regular one...

chewbacha 3y ago
FWIW - My family has generally used the same cotton canvas bags for decades and they are useful for more than just groceries.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  I 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 ago
Unless 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 ago
  the ecological damage from all the pesticides used in traditional cotton production would be why.
  - tekla 3y ago
    Organic pesticides are similarly terrible for the environment.
    - cultofmetatron 3y ago
      I'll agree with you that some organic pesticides can be just as bad. however there are much stricter guidelines on when and how they are applied to qualify for organic certification. In the case of conventional, the application methodology is more about the bottom line. which in many cases means spraying way more to maximize yield.
hathchip 3y ago
I really don't think those graphs make that case, although it seems they are trying to. Organic cotton is ahead of plastic for greenhouse gases after 149 uses. That's a small number of uses for a cotton tote bag, which should last several years of daily wear. That means that from the 150th use you are reducing greenhouse gases every time you take the bag out, while potentially still net polluting in a couple of other ways. But greenhouse gas emissions are by far the most critical and potentially catastrophic environment issue. If we can effectively and reliably lower greenhouse gases while causing a few extra rhino deaths or depleting the ozone layer marginally, we should enthusiastically seize that opportunity. Given this, the "average over all pollution types" seems particularly useless and intentionally misleading here. That number literally cannot be coerced into meaning anything that should affect your decision making process.
- causi 3y ago
  That's a small number of uses for a cotton tote bag, which should last several years of daily wear. Who uses it every day? My trips to get groceries are every week or two weeks. I'd have a decent chance of misplacing the thing before I offset its carbon. If I forgot it just once and had to turn the car around to get it I'd probably double its footprint.
  - hathchip 3y ago
    I mean, if you use it less, it will wear down slower. Nothing to worry about.
  - InSteady 3y ago
    >Who uses it every day? There are 52 weeks in a year. After several years of weekly use you have offset the carbon. > I'd have a decent chance of misplacing the thing before I offset its carbon. You can keep things simply and only use it for groceries if you have trouble keeping track of things. Keep it in the same location every time, ideally by the door, always return it to it's spot immediately after unloading groceries when you get home. Don't leave a full bag of groceries at the store. You're pretty much set. You could also go for a recycled PET reusable bag if you just can't trust yourself to hang on to a cotton bag for a few years. Still better than single-use plastics by many metrics as long as you aren't losing bags multiple times per year. And yeah, don't turn around to get your bag when you're halfway to the store; get single-use plastic on that occasion and spend a few moments gently reaffirming your habit/routine that includes grabbing the bag when you head out for groceries.

chewbacha 3y ago

Unbleached paper seems like a good winner here. I feel vindicated for taking paper bags now.

sarchertech 3y ago
Do you reuse them 8+ times?
- skyyler 3y ago
  I use the paper for other things once they rip from use.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    Assume I get 4 reuses out of a paper bag, and I use 4 bags per week. I don’t think I could replace 4 bags worth of paper per month that I would have bought otherwise.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  They can then be recycled.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    True, but recycling takes water and energy. You’d probably still going to have to use them yourself a fair few times to make it a net positive.
robrichard 3y ago
And New Jersey banned paper bags!
- waynesonfire 3y ago
  stupid. they grow on trees and can be recycled. we should be using as much paper as possible.

strictnein 3y ago

Wonder what the fancy bags that Whole Foods sells would need. We use them all the time, but they're insulated, with a plastic inside and a zippered top.

zeristor 3y ago

So what about the environmental impact once you’ve used the bag?

raincole 3y ago

What does the -2.3 uses for biopolymer mean? Biopolymer actively generates clean water??

legitster 3y ago

I used to reuse the plastic shopping bags as trash liners for small cans around the house. Since they have been banned I have actually had to start buying bags for home.

mschild 3y ago
I'd say give using none at all try if it works within your location. We haven't bought any trash bags in close to 4 years. We split our garbage into compost, recycling, paper, glass, and others.
- FreshStart 3y ago
  Free work needs to be subsidized. How much time does it cost you to sort what they dump&burn together anyway?
  - Kerb_ 3y ago
    How much do you suppose you need to be paid for picking up the spoon and putting it in your mouth? Taking out the trash should be basic self maintenance
  - mschild 3y ago
    None? It takes me not even a second to decide what bin to put it into. Compost goes to a compost facility that generates methane from it and then sells the excess as fertilizer. Plastics get recycled. Reusable glass bottles get cleaned and reused, other molten down and reused. Other gets burned, filtered, and generates electricity.
- legitster 3y ago
  Do you have kids?
- crazygringo 3y ago
  So how do you leave the "others" for garbage collection if you're not using bags?

samstave 3y ago

What I want is a chart which can evaluate the consumption/spend/waste of products pre-plastic, vs, post plastic as weighted by things such as milk delivery services.. with glass pickup (soda (coke) and milk) etc) vs, single use plastic. Even in Cebu Philippines, they still had massive glass cola re-bottling plants, as recent as today... Why is the US so afraid of actual reuse, as opposed to trash. (oh, we invented the plastics industry...)

noelwelsh 3y ago

If the implication is that reusing bags is pointless, I'd like to point out that a so-called single use plastic bag can be reused many times. This is what I used to do before people started handing out more durable bags, and they are fine for a very long time. (Now I have a small stash of cotton bags, some of which are over a decade old.)

InSteady 3y ago
I reuse produce bags, ziplocks, sandwich bags, and the like by rinsing them lukewarm water and hanging up to dry, occasionally using a bit of soap as needed. It's a bit of a hassle and there is a likelihood that I am exposing my food to more microplastics via direct contact as the bags get worn from use and washing. I have no clue how quickly the bags start breaking down, it probably varies due to numerous factors. I wish there were more and better options for silicone, beeswax coated muslin, etc as alternatives. Unfortunately plain cotton bags don't keep veggies from wilting otherwise I'd go for that. I've got a pair of giant silicone bags for this purpose but the shape and thickness means they can't hold many veggies, take up more space than they should, and are generally unwieldy. They were also $20 each, which seems a bit high (I assume because they are a specialty item in a niche market). Come on free market, solve this problem for me so I can ditch single-use plastics!

Aunche 3y ago

Some of these numbers don't make sense. Unbleached paper and biopolymers definitely require a nonzero amount of energy to produce, so how can they have 0 greenhouse gas emissions? How can biopolymers have negative water use?

rendaw 3y ago

That looks terrible, but cotton or at least non-plastic bags have been around for a long time, right? Would bag production always have been that bad? It feels like this is tying the manufacturing process to the materials for manufacturing. You can't make a plastic bag without plastic production, but I feel like you can make a non-plastic bag without plastic production and at lot of other modern industrial processes and chemicals.

slg 3y ago

How do the cotton bags lead to freshwater eutrophication and terrestrial acidification? Is that just from the production of the bags? I always thought moving away from single use plastic was meant to be environmentally friendly in that it reduced the pollution caused by disposing of the single use items. I thought everyone knew the production costs were higher including from an environmental perspective of things like greenhouse gas emission and water use. Sometimes different environmental goals are in conflict with each other.

Aunche 3y ago
I'm assuming this is the from cotton fertilizer runoff.
- slg 3y ago
  Which would mean all 5 of these measures are purely about production which gives an incomplete picture. The problem with single use plastics isn't the production. That is why they became so popular. The main concern is what happens to the plastic after that single use. For example, how many microplastics does a cotton bag keep out of the ocean?
  - Aunche 3y ago
    A plastic bag that is reused as a trash bag that ends up in a properly lined landfill isn't going to release microplastics in the the ocean either. The problem is that people really like sexy solutions over practical ones, so you end up with with ineffective initiatives like teaching Africans how to recycle or plastic bag bans rather than building more and safer landfills.
    - slg 3y ago
      If the solution was as easy as telling people to reuse and dispose of single use plastic properly, we would have solved this issue decades ago. People still don't do that in high enough numbers for it to be an actual solution.

scblock 3y ago

Definitely interesting, but clearly shows the cheap plastic reusable bags, which hold 2-3x as much as the disposable ones, repay their environmental cost about as fast as their actual cost. Which is very quickly.

InSteady 3y ago

Color me skeptical. A single organic cotton bag requires 20,000 uses due to ozone depletion? Apparently the researchers chose one specific dataset to determine how much electricity is used for cotton irrigation, and then further assumed that all of that electricity is generated from burning natural gas. It's not the gas itself that depletes ozone at that rate, but rather two chemicals used to pipe and transport methane long distances, which escape from leaky pipe infrastructure. Gee whiz, isn't cotton terrible? [0] If we looked at each one of the metrics, both for single use plastics and for their alternatives, would we find a similar story of absolute best/worst case scenario to paint single-use plastics as environmentally friendly? The original article also notes that plastics industry groups jumped on the pandemic to write to regulators and grocers imploring them to ban re-usable shopping bags due to them being "virus-laden" cesspools. Which is not at all what the science suggests (we figured that one out pretty early in the pandemic as I recall). These people are interested in one thing only: getting as much plastic into consumer markets as humanly possible. They are not operating in good faith by any stretch. [0] https://www.metabolic.nl/news/are-organic-cotton-totes-really-worse-than-plastic-bags https://www.metabolic.nl/news/are-organic-cotton-totes-reall...

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
> due to them being "virus-laden" cesspools I usually bring my backpack or a duffel bag to purchase groceries or whatever, and the cashiers are absolutely uniformly grossed out by these bags. They will hardly touch them. They poke at a hem as if it were radioactive or something. Of course, this started around the time of the pandemic, when everyone was extra paranoid about germs. But it has not abated. Nobody will bag groceries into my personal bags, they just kind of shove it to the end and make me do it all myself.
- InSteady 3y ago
  That seems reasonable on their end. I bag my own bags when I bring them from home, always have done so without asking (even before the pandemic).
  - 3y ago

dehrmann 3y ago

A lot of environmental activists and policies aren't clear what they're optimizing for.

aeturnum 3y ago

These kinds of metrics are brought up often and, while I think they are somewhat useful, the article makes it clear that they're not in line with the goal of these bans. The problem is not that it was too harmful to the climate to produce these bags. The problem is some percentage of bags become litter and pollute the environment. I think other environmental indicators are good to consider, but simply presenting these metrics as capturing "environmental impact" is both deceptive and out of line with the goals of the bag bans as I understand them.

gruez 3y ago
>The problem is not that it was too harmful to the climate to produce these bags. The problem is some percentage of bags become litter and pollute the environment. 1. Is this actually the case, or just post-hoc justification? Remember when during the pandemic, the lockdowns were justified by "just 2 weeks to flatten the curve"? 2. Most of the time I'm given a plastic bag, it's being used to carry something back to my home. Under that scenario, there's basically a 0% chance that it's going to "become litter and pollute the environment". If litter was actually the concern, you'd expect the bans to be targeted at stores where goods being sold don't end up going to homes (fast food resturants and gas stations maybe?), but that's not what we're seeing.
- aeturnum 3y ago
  1. I did not write these laws and cannot speak to the internal beliefs of the authors, but the campaigns I saw were about reducing waste / overall plastic production (i.e. litter) not about reducing the climate resources to produce bags. 2. I don't think what you are saying makes sense? I also take things that gas stations and restaurants give me home. Like...based on your objection there should be no litter because everyone takes things given to them home. That said - I am sure that the people who advocated for the current bag bans would absolutely support expanding them.
- drtz 3y ago
  Can't speak for California or LA, but in Dallas we had a plastic bag ban for a short period and it was sold as a way to reduce local litter, not reduce greenhouse emissions or protect the climate. I didn't realize how effective it was until about 6 months when I was walking Downtown and noticed a plastic bag tumbling down the street. Prior to the ban, they were a regular sight and nothing I would have taken note of.