Hilarious side effect of ban on plastic bags

In My Humble Opinion
1

The federal government in Canada is about to start phasing in a nationwide ban on plastic bags. Many individual businesses, municipalities, and at least one province have already done so.

I’m as environmentally conscious as anyone, and I make good use of my nice insulated reusable grocery bags. But when they aren’t enough, I do collect the odd plastic bag now and then, and I use them to line the kitchen garbage pail. All my garbage goes out in used grocery bags. None ever get thrown out as garbage by themselves. If I didn’t use grocery bags for this, I’d simply have to buy plastic bags for that purpose.

Anyway, here’s a CBC article about the effect of Walmart’s ban on plastic bags. This is the money quote (emphasis mine):

When Walmart banned single-use plastic checkout bags in April, customer Larry Grant applauded the move — until he found himself drowning in reusable bags.

Each week, Grant orders Walmart groceries for pickup at a depot near his home in Toronto. Due to the plastic bag ban, the retailer now packs his items in reusable bags — new ones for each order.

Grant estimates he has acquired about 300 over the past six months.

“It’s a bit crazy,” he said, pointing to a large pile of blue Walmart bags stuffed in the trunk of his car. “In a month, I can be accumulating anywhere from 40 to 50.”

Of course this can just be attributed to idiotic policy at Walmart, but it does show that the ban is more about public relations and saving a few bucks than anything to do with the environment. The only difference between the “reusable” new bags and traditional plastic bags is that the new ones are thicker and heavier and use much more plastic, cannot be reused for garbage or doggie-poop pickup, and are ultimately more damaging to the environment when thrown away.

The real solution to the plastic bag “problem”, if indeed it’s a problem at all, is to reuse or recycle them responsibly, and potentially to make them out of biodegradable plastic. There already are such bags sold for use as “green bin” liners, for kitchen waste that is used for composting.

2

On NPR, I heard that you have to use a cloth tote bag every day for over 20 years in order to make up for the extra CO2 emissions creating it, when compared to a plastic bag.

That’s ignoring the regular solid waste pollution, of course, but that was pretty eye opening. I don’t know how that compares to the plastic bags that Walmart is using in the article.

I also now buy plastic bags to line my small garbage cans, rather than using what I used to get from the supermarket.

3

The New York Times ran a similar article (gift link) in September. The problem seems to be the grocery store home delivery services, which use new reusable bags for every delivery.

4

Are they giving away the bags? In America you have to pay for them. Or they give you paper bags, which I use for in-house recycling collection.

I suppose they could implement some kind of deposit system for the reusable bags, but that would probably create more problems than it solves.

5

They could, of course, just do what supermarkets do here in the UK. The delivery guy brings your shopping to your door in crates, and waits while you put your goods into your own bags (or boxes, or the floor, or whatever). No plastic bags in sight.

6

I don’t know if the idea of waiting around would sit well over here. Maybe copy the idea already being used between grocery stores and suppliers of baked goods and dairy products – product delivered in plastic crates that are then picked up on the next delivery.

However, I think the (ab)use of so-called reusable bags by grocery home delivery services is just one example out of many of how the advocates of banning plastic bags just haven’t thought through the many unintended consequences.

I agree that microplastics in the ocean and things like the infamous “Pacific garbage patch” are a scourge on the environment. But there are much better solutions than mandatory bans on a genuinely useful product.

So much of this is just virtue-signaling and mindless PR. For instance, I love this picture of supposed environmentalism, from the NYT article kindly gifted by @Dewey_Finn. If each of those had been a conventional plastic grocery bag, the total mass could probably have been compressed into something not much bigger than a baseball.

7

The “side effect” for me is now I have to pay for kitchen catcher garbage bags where previously I used plastic grocery bags (doubled) for that purpose. The commercial garbage bag companies must be happy. :rofl:

8

Some of my cloth grocery bags are more than thirty years old. I wash them, mend them … keeping plastic out of the waste stream is a GOOD.

You don’t build up a mountain of reusable bags if you fucking reuse them you idiot. Speaking to the author of the article, not anyone here.

9

OK, but if you’re getting your groceries by curbside pickup or delivery, how do you reuse them?

10

I do not know – there isn’t even mail delivery up her – but that particular circumstance has to be a thoughtless error by a company, that should be able to be changed. I used to belong to a CSA where you went to the delivery point, put your crate of vegetables into your own bags, and left it there for next time. A different CSA left your veggies in a heavy waxed cardboard box that you took home; you left your empty last week box at the site.

This isn’t science, it’s just organization.

11

OK, sure, solutions exist. But they’re out of reach of the individual customer, which means that in this case, it’s Wal-Mart that’s the idiot, not the author of this article.

12

I got a home delivery from Walmart last month, just after these policies came into effect. I wasn’t expecting the reusable bags, and even asked the delivery guy if he needed them back, but he said no. So yes, in this case you do seem to get the reusable bags for “free”. I figure Walmart probably just wrote them off as part of the delivery fee, but if you were planning on getting it delivered anyways, it’s a bonus.

13

Why can’t you use them for garbage or animal poop? I do.

What’s a CSA?

14

Isn’t this exaggerating the issue of accumulating reusable bags – how many people get home delivery from Walmart – and ignoring the other problems from the thin single use bags?

A couple of issues I know of are that people put them in with plastic recycling and they clog up and jam the machines, and also they get blown all over the place. When they wind up in the ocean, turtles can’t tell them from jellyfish and eat them. Even when they make it to landfills, they don’t stay put, and get blown out. I know of a case where a farm near a landfill expansion had to be bought out, essentially, because it was getting so many bags blown onto the fields that they couldn’t operate anymore.

And, as already mentioned, a dumb policy from one retailer doesn’t mean the whole concept of banning single use bags lacks merit.

15

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Getting to be rather common in some areas. You buy a ‘share’ in the harvest of a small diversified farm, money up front, and get a box of mixed vegetables (and sometimes fruits, cheese, flowers etc) once a week for the season. You get some basics, some surprises and experiments, inexpensively, without having to get to the grocery store, and the farm gets a much steadier more predictable money stream. It’s quite a good thing. I only stopped because I went through a long period of not being able to keep on top of cooking (okay, I barely cooked at all). That’s changed but I now have a big vegetable garden so there’s too much redundancy.

16

My reusable bags are mostly cotton ones. The others are a heavy woven plastic material similar to tarps or feed bags – in fact before Covid there was a lady who’d take your feed bags and turn them into totes, she had a drop off station at the feed store.

17

I needed something from Target, and was going to do the curbside pickup thing, but then noticed that would incur a mandatory bag charge of, as I remember, a couple of dollars. I cancelled the curbside pickup and went in to find it myself.

18

… is a return to 1970s-style paper-bag-based grocery shopping considered a non-starter?

19

Not at all. During the pandemic, I acquired a pile of store-provided paper grocery bags. So they’re still being manufactured. But obviously they don’t do as well when they get wet.

20

Interesting. My main problem with “reusable bags” is I never remember to take them with me to the store. I know, “just keep them in the car” but even if I do, I still never remember to bring them into the store.