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Yeah, I still don't understand why brown paper bags aren't more standard for everything. I do see some manufacturers reducing plastic, fortunately. For example
by mcv 1y ago
Yeah, I still don't understand why brown paper bags aren't more standard for everything.
I do see some manufacturers reducing plastic, fortunately. For example, my box of tea bags used to come wrapped in plastic, and now it suddenly doesn't, and I'm wondering why it ever needed plastic. But there's still so much stuff that comes wrapped in plastic, and often multiple layers of it.
Just ban it. There are excellent alternatives.
- alexchamberlain 1y agoI think banning plastic completely in packaging is a much harder ask, as whether it is needed is rather nuanced (if I understand it correctly). For example, it's perfectly possible to deliver cucumbers to an end customer without them being shrinkwrapped. However, to deliver enough cucumbers to enough customers for a supermarket scale, I understand from several documentaries that plastic is still required in that case. (For those outside the UK, plastic covered cucumber is the social barometer for plastic packaging.) Banning plastic bags was easy and simple, and our laws don't tend to deal with nuance very well...
- vanviegen 1y agoThe way I understand it, without the wrapping a much larger percentage of cucumbers need to be thrown away before ever being sold, due to spoilage. That's not a win for the environment.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago> That's not a win for the environment. How is this calculated? I know that growing a cucumber has an environmental cost but so does producing plastic, delivering it and then using machines to shrink-wrap every cucumber.
- vanviegen 1y agoThis study, for instance, [1] looks at CO2 emissions. Which may be a somewhat limited view, but the effect is rather large: adding 5 wrappers around a cucumber (4 of which being useless) would result in about the same CO2 usage as adding no wrapper. And that's not even considering spoilage after the cucumber has been bought by a consumer. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2022.750199/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...
- AlecSchueler 1y agoCO2 usage, I get you, but what about the plastic waste?
- alexchamberlain 1y agoThis is the problem though, right? It’s not one league table of environmental goodness - there are tradeoffs that as an educated consumer are impose to navigate.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoYes, I understand, that's why I questioned the unqualified claim "that's not a win for the environment" as if it's so clear cut.
- mcv 1y agoInteresting thing is, the non-organic cucumbers at my supermarket don't come in plastic, but the organic ones do. I never know which ones to get.
- jraph 1y agoYeah, this is terrible. Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me. Of course wrapping everything non-organic is a no go as well, it would be terrible for the environment. And I'm afraid stopping the production of non-organic stuff ain't happening anytime soon. I believe the real solution if possible until they fix this is to go to a market or an organic store where nothing is in plastic, at least for fruits and vegetables.
- mcv 1y agoYeah, the issue is of course that the supermarket sells both kinds of cucumbers, and they need to be able to distinguish between organic and non-organic cucumbers, which is why they wrap one type in plastic. And of course it's better for the environment if that's the type they sell the least of. So every step makes sense, but the end result looks ridiculous. Maybe they can use paper wrappers instead? Or maybe just settle on one type of cucumber.
- philipallstar 1y ago> Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me. They're different types of environmental. One is "I don't like pesticides and I have money" and the other is "I don't like eternal plastic waste".
- jraph 1y agoDifferent things, same group of people (money matters aside - people don't buy because it's more expensive, but despite it), no? The "I have money" part is obviously unfortunate. Buying healthy and environmentally-friendly shouldn't be conditioned by money. The next best individual thing is voting with one's own wallet in the meantime. The "I don't like pesticides"¹ and the "I don't like eternal plastic waste" are very compatible. Both pesticides and eternal plastic waste hurt the environment in their own ways. I suppose the target is the restricted set of people who are interested in organic products for their own individual health and who don't push the reasoning far enough to see that their health depends on the environment being healthy in the long term. Or, people who prefer buying organic food and who will make a compromise. Do you have a different reading? ¹ we will note that organic doesn't mean "no pesticides", and is broader than just pesticides, but I accept the shortcut.
- jon_adler 1y agoUnfortunately, all the actual tea bags are usually plastic. The wrapping is probably a small percentage of the plastic in this product.
- gmac 1y agoThis is also an issue for microplastics ingestion. In the UK, teabags are increasingly made of PLA.
- mcv 1y agoI'm pretty sure my tea bags are paper, and have always been paper. It's the more recent "pyramid" shaped tea bags that I think are made of plastic. The most recent change to my tea bags was to remove the staple so they could go in organic waste.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoYou'd be surprised how paper-like the plastic bags appear to be.
- GuestFAUniverse 1y agoBrown paper, from recycled fibers are often contaminated with mineral oil residue (e.g. from ink on paper) and other unhealthy chemicals, sadly. There was a report in Germany, years ago, of a range of organic products that failed during testing. They discovered the packaging (recycled paper) was the issue, not the crops and the supply chain before packaging. So, a _really_ biodegradable cellulose bag is desirable. Even if only to use it I side a brown bag (to stabilise it).
- jajko 1y agoRoad to hell is paved with good intentions... I wonder how many here even notice the most important comment here from you and just keep repeating how plastic bags are worse. Yes they are terrible, but we shouldn't just blindly replace them with anything and call it a day but do the (continuous) investigation for best solution, poisons are these days everywhere.
- loopdoend 1y agoWouldn't the best solution be ensuring they all end up in an appropriate landfill rather than a river? It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India. Meanwhile it could have been buried with their other trash and appropriately managed.
- jraph 1y ago> happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India It's not like they like this outcome or are even aware of it. We can't blame the individuals who want to do things properly here. The correct solution to "broken recycling chain" is not "let's not recycle", it's "let's fix the recycling chain". The issue with non-reusable / non-recyclable stuff is that we have a limited amount of it and is also environmentally expensive. Even recycling is not ideal. There's waste, and it costs energy. It's in the end not so sustainable. The best solution to me is reusable bags and containers (washable, and possibly refundable / returnable) whenever possible.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago> Yeah, I still don't understand why brown paper bags aren't more standard for everything Because plastic is cheaper. As I understand it it's often got a negative cost to it, the companies are paid to take it and use it.
- mcv 1y agoNegative cost? Why? It still needs to be produced and transported, right? I don't understand the business case behind this.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoThe way it was explained to me isv that there are so many plastic feedstocks produced by fuel production that it's often most efficient to pay someone just to take it away.
- potato3732842 1y agoThat's basically the economic equivalent of having to pay to get rid of a fallen tree despite that tree then going on to be chipped and sold in bulk to whatever the nearest local place buying chips is. The feed stock is basically worth nothing, it's the labor and energy investment that you add to it at every step that adds the value.
- foobar1962 1y agoI'm old enough to remember when supermarkets only had brown paper bags. They were weak and the handles tear off easily, and anything cold will make the bag wet and it will fall apart usually from the bottom. Supermarkets must have spent a lot of money replacing customer's broken items when bags failed even before leaving the store. So when doing the calculus for brown paper bags don't forget to include the cost goods wasted when they fail.
- tremon 1y agoThose are not the brown paper bags the GP was referring to. Those fall under the earlier category of "forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it". The ones that are left are to replace "small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in".
- nandomrumber 1y agoAustralian supermarkets have excelled at replicating this paper bag fiasco. The white plastic bags they replaced are magnitudes of order more durable and able to carry, I should test this, at a guess ten times the weight. Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times. Fortunately the white plastic bags are still available online (eBay / Amazon / etc) so I just buy 50 for my own use as required and use them till they nearly fall apart then repurpose them as bin liners. They’re incredibly cheap, don’t really get dirty in an unhygienic way, can be washed if something does spill in them, and they fold up in to almost no space.
- throwawayffffas 1y ago> Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times. Yeah that's not good, the way they do that is with more plastic in the bags. A single bag weighs as much as 5-10 old timey single use bags.
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- the__alchemist 1y agoI agree getting rid of plastic bags is a net win for the reasons discussed. But I can't take the brown paper bag thing seriously! They are a UX nightmare in my workflows. Carry one bag per trip in multiple trips (Instead of ~4 I can do with reusable or plastic). Or try the handled ones which tear off end up with groceries all over. Reusable bags are nice though.
- SoftTalker 1y agoBrown paper bags were the standard grocery store bag up until sometime in the 1980s. The transition to plastic was pushed by environmentalists with a "save the trees" message focused on how many trees were used to make the paper bags.
- hliyan 1y agoCan you back that last claim up? The push was from plastic manufacturers. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/birth-ban-history-plastic-shopping-bag#:~:text=Plastic%20companies%20begin%20to%20aggressively,States%2C%20switch%20to%20plastic%20bags. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/birth-ban-histor...
- SoftTalker 1y agoNot really. It's just my memory of the times. "Save the trees" was a very big thing for a while, in arguments for avoiding paper and cardboard packaging.
- nickserv 1y agoA lot of so-called environnemental awareness campaigns are the work of trade organizations or multinationals. Often they shift the blame onto the consumer, so for example it's "you need to recycle" instead of "we need to produce less".
- rincebrain 1y agoThey break in a lot of use cases. What you see in a lot of places that have people heavily relying on things like delivery services, is people using the reusable bags like they would use single-use bags - so now you have spent even more resources on a bag that's still being used as single-use. Oops.