Something that has improved after getting rid of the flimsy plastic shopping bags is they no longer constantly choke the waterways. That’s a tangible benefit that I forgive the, otherwise incredibly inconvenient and poorly thought through, change.
My challenge is getting them back from apartment to car :).
I get a lot of my groceries delivered due to factors like transportation and back pain. My collection of the heavier “reusable” plastic bags is getting a bit out of hand, and I do use them for things like lining wastebaskets.
The local Wegman’s had a discount offer for delivery and since I didn’t feel like going out shopping for the few things I needed I decided to take advantage of it.So I put together a delivery order, added the discount code and a tip for the shopper. It turned out one of the items I wanted wasn’t in stock; which they told me before the delivery and took it off the order.
When the order was left on my porch it all fit into a single double-bagged paper bag (plus the jug of cat litter). On the receipt I was charged a ten-cent bag fee (plus a one-cent tax on the fee). I put the paper bags in my recycle bin.
Yeah, I’d have an issue with this. Having to bag your own groceries or carry them one by one for the trip from your car into your house would defeat a lot of the convenience of online grocery pickup. Plus you’d have produce rolling everywhere whenever you turn or brake.
A quick look at Alibaba I found you can buy 10,000 of them for a dime each. Presumably if you’re Walmart and want a million of them you can do even better.
Something that costs them pocket change per delivery isn’t worth trying to recover and then paying an employee to inspect them and make sure they’re clean.
Exactly. Whereas if they used regular plastic grocery bags, it would cost them less than a cent each (probably much less), they could be reused as garbage bags, and they’re better for the environment because they contain just a fraction of the amount of plastic (or whatever other material the heavy reusables are made from). The ideal would be plastic bags made of biodegradable material, like those used for compostable waste.
I don’t understand the basis of this comment. The way I use plastic grocery bags for garbage is as liners for the under-the-counter kitchen garbage container. They’re the perfect size, and can be stretched tightly around the rim. You can’t do that with a reusable bag, and even if you could, throwing it out is much worse for landfill than a thin plastic bag. Re-using it for garbage multiple times obviously isn’t an option – where would you put the garbage, and would you want to bring the stinky thing back into the house? This is the whole reason for using liners for garbage containers. So I really don’t get where you’re coming from. In a practical sense, when plastic grocery bags get phased out I’m just going to have to buy garbage pail liners, which are essentially the same thing.
Though biodegradable is not the same thing as compostable.
I may have my terminology wrong, but the bags sold for lining green bins, which are collected separately from regular garbage and used for composting, are claimed to be compostable. Like these, which are described as “…Biodegradable garbage bags are made of PSM (corn starch extract) … [and] can be decomposed into carbon dioxide and water by microorganisms in the soil under natural conditions to complete the organic cycle”.
Gotta think of the trees, you know.
Believe it or not, that’s the reason behind plastic bags.
Plastic bags were invented to save the planet, according to the son of Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin who created them in 1959.
The bags were developed as an alternative to paper bags, which were considered bad for the environment because they resulted in forests being chopped down.
Supermarkets in the UK no longer even offer the old flimsy plastic bags. Most people take their own.
I do most of my weekly shop as “click and collect”. I bought some bags that are insulated and rectangular with flat bottoms and a zip-up top. They fit neatly across the rear of my car. At the pick-up point, the goods come out in crates, and I transfer them to my bags with cold, veg, and ambient in different bags.
After the pick-up, I go into the store for fruit and veg (I like to choose my own); fresh-baked bread and meat from the butchery counter (neither available on C&C).
When waiting my turn for pick-up, I see how other people do it: Some have a motley collection of bags and sort the goods as they load them; others simply stuff the groceries into the bags as they come, with no attempt to sort cold from ambient etc; a few just throw their stuff into the car with no bags at all.
No doubt, but I had thought by now, recycling used-once paper bags would be de rigeur and that few trees would have to be cut to keep producing paper bags. At the same time, I know recycling efforts vary greatly place to place in their efficacy. I guess we’re not there yet.
I sometimes forget to take my own bags when I go shopping and get ones from the store. I have accumulated a few.
I am in favour of changes that meaningfully help the environment and have heard conflicting opinions about plastic bags and straws. But replacing them with alternatives that are worse is somewhat tragic and not that hilarious.
To be fair, the thread title claims that the side effects are hilarous, though I’m not sure what Hilary has to do with it.
In both cases you use the same number of plastic bags. The difference is in one case you get them ‘free’ from the grocery store and in the other case you have to buy them.
I reuse plastic grocery bags when I have them. Maybe I am a bad person, but I’ve noticed that when I have a lot of bags, I use them faster. When I run out, I manage without them.
There’s no way a policy change this big can optimize for every situation. The question is will the policy be an overall net-positive. Even the inefficiency of Walmart’s reusable bags may be a temporary issue and the throwaway reusable bags may be a stop gap.
Ooh, we have different preferences. I don’t want to carry 7 bags into my kitchen if i can carry 3. I’d MUCH rather get 3 fully-loaded bags and 4 empty ones i can just leave in the car.
Since my town outlawed plastic grocery bags, I’ve taken to buying small plastic bags to line trash cans and such. And i now save the disposable produce bags for many of the things i used to use the grocery bags for. They are too small and fragile for lining trash cans, but they work for disposing of the chicken bones after making soup, for instance.
I’ve also collected a huge number of paper bags. I often remember to reuse them, but i don’t want to bring too many, and i often end up with too few. Or i just forget. At least we’re allowed to reuse the bags again. For a while, during the pandemic, we weren’t and i collected so many paper bags that i did a dump run one day just to get rid of the excess.
That’s a good point – I save those produce bags, too, and find them useful both for miscellaneous storage (like a couple of slices of leftover pizza) and for wrapping odoriferous items of garbage. They are neither more nor less harmful to the environment than the grocery bags themselves, and I suppose we can expect to see those banned soon, too. Again, I think biodegradable plastic would probably be the way to go.
I’m not convinced that there is any real harm to burying stuff in landfills, unless the stuff is inherently toxic.
That’s only true if you throw away the reusable bags rather than, you know, reusing them. The single-use bags also kinda suck for garbage. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one home that didn’t have a hole in it somewhere. That’s no good for liquids, smelly stuff, or kitty litter. Gotta double or triple bag those, and that’s only if they survived the first trip from the grocery store at all.
While it is a thing that’s happening in some cases, is there any evidence that it’s actually a “proliferation” and not just isolated incidents?
This reminds me of the early days of low-flow toilets. “I have to flush twice whenever I take a dump, these new toilets are worthless!” Never mind that only some toilet models had that problem, they got fixed, and even if you did have to double-flush your dumps, you’re most likely still below a single flush from the old toilet. And then there’s all the time you’re just flushing piss that are conveniently ignored. Then there were the first compact fluorescent lights too. “I put one in a ceiling light and it didn’t last any longer than the old incandescent, waste of money!” Never mind that you still saved some energy during that time, and heat, and the technology continued to improve, and those were ANOMALIES, just like the huge stack of free reusable bags.
Hank Green’s SciShow had a video a while ago on the actual environmental costs of different bags.
