My comment was specifically in reference to Walmart and other grocery pickup operations who pack the groceries into new “reusable” bags, leaving the customer with hundreds of them.
There is a vast variation in quality in plastic grocery bags. The ones that some stores use are so predictably crappy that I try never to get any by always bringing enough reusable bags. But others are really quite good – flexible, stretchable, and airtight. Those are the ones I collect and use for garbage liners.
I used to be perfectly happy reusing supermarket plastic bags. I would test for holes when it mattered, and discarded maybe 10% of them. The rest worked great.
I don’t mind buying plastic trash bags, now. They are incredibly cheap, and there may be fewer plastic bags drifting in tree branches and stuff. But it is a new item i need to stock, because of the ban.
(Also, low flow toilets were terrible for at least a decade, maybe more. Maybe if you don’t use toilet paper they worked for piss. My experience was flushing over and over. I’m delighted that the current low flow toilets work very well, and i took the opportunity to replace all the old toilets in my home with the current generation. But the complaints were real. The requirement went in ahead of the technology to make it work.)
Thanks, it was interesting. He touches on some of the limitations of the study at the end.
This article discusses a couple more limitations:
In any case, the study, the video, and the article agree that the best bag is the bag that you already have.
Edit link to the study:
Yes indeed.
Walmart makes a stupid decision that is harmful to the environment. What a shock. The solution is for Walmart to stop doing this stupid thing, rather than rail against the entire idea of a ban on single use plastics.
I have noted that many take-away restaurants stopped using single use plastic a while ago, and they did not come to the idiotic conclusion that they should use regular plates and cutlery and throw them away after each use - they used alternatives made of paper or recyclables.
I’d be good with them bringing out my groceries in a cart like I’d shopped them myself for me to transfer into my own bags. I know that they do their shopping into baskets on a rolling rack, but it would only take a few minutes to transfer them into a cart to bring out.
I still get a LOT of plastic when i get takeout. In fact, i got rid of my Tupperware because the stuff from restaurants is better.
(I like the ones that let you request no flatware, though. We have plenty of flatware at home, and don’t need disposable flatware with the takeout.)
The OP is from Canada, where this ban is going into place, and business has known about it for some time. So most of them have gotten their shit together and figured out how to comply with alternatives, without looking like total idiots like Walmart Canada.
I have no doubt that other jurisdictions lag behind, and are still gleefully shoveling single use plastics out as fast as they can. For a while the “Plastic bag association of Canada” (yes there is such a thing) was suing cities that put plastic bag bans in place. These lobby groups were ineffective at getting to the federal politicians.
I understand that lobby groups can be much more powerful in other areas, and effectively own politicians and can prevent them from putting in environmental rules like this.
We don’t get much takeout, but have stopped it entirely from the ones that are so wasteful. We are down to one taco truck that uses paper plates and no plastic. Good thing they have delicious tacos!
We’ve also never used any sort of grocery pickup service. However, from my observations at a local grocery store, they bring them out in bins and load them into your own bags. Seems like Walmart could do it’s part to help with this “hilarious” problem. 
We had groceries dropped off when we all had Covid. They used paper bags.
During the past 3 years, when stores would not pack groceries into our reusable bags, they were sometimes out of paper because of supply issues. We accumulated a bunch of thicker plastic bags that are meant to be reusable. We are slowly getting rid of them. It’s taken some time to figure out how we want to reuse them. We were happy to build up a supply of paper ones, because we use those under the kitchen sink to hold recycling. Then the whole bag goes in the recycling bin.
Our adjustment period when getting the thick plastic bags says nothing about the viability of single-use bag bans, though. It had to do with the circumstances at play during the pandemic. I’m pretty confident that, in my area at least, there will be a net benefit from the ban.
We aren’t going to restaurants any more, due to the pandemic, so we get takeout twice a week. I don’t feel like the amount of plastic is excessive for the job it needs to do, but each dish comes in a plastic container. Well, i guess that’s not true. Pizza, sandwiches, etc. Often come in paper or cardboard. But wetter dishes, like most stuff we get from Indian and Chinese places are in plastic trays or tubs. I guess the Japanese place probably could use cardboard, but doesn’t.
A few more passing comments …
The CBC article is mostly about Walmart, but they’re not the only ones doing this. Note the lengthy New York Times article in the third post about exactly the same problem – not in Canada, and it barely even mentions Walmart. I think it’s reasonable to conclude that if many stores are just plunging ahead with using so-called “reusable” bags for only one-time use, then there is some basic problem with the efficiency or the economics of alternatives.
For those who feel the need for snark at my use of the word “hilarious” in the title, I see a sort of dark humour in well-intentioned good deeds backfiring because they were poorly thought out and had easily foreseeable unintended consequences. YMMV.
Oh, and I’m just back from my second and hopefully last bit of pre-Christmas grocery shopping and I have a little story, very minor but revealing. I was at one of the more upscale supermarkets, the one that has particularly good plastic bags that are perfect as kitchen garbage liners. Being a good citizen, I did bring along one of my nice big insulated reusable bags. As often happens, it didn’t quite hold everything so I told the cashier to just put the rest of the stuff in a plastic bag, just one if possible.
“No more plastic bags”, was the response. But I could buy a cheap reusable one for 35 cents. So I said fine.
Two problems with that. One, it’s a shitty little thing made of some type stiff cloth-like plastic that I’ll never use again because I like my big insulated bags. Two, there was a small spill of a bulk food item in one of those paper-like bulk food containers. Now the inside of the bag stinks, further guaranteeing that I’ll never use it again, and it’s useless for garbage because it can’t line anything and it can’t be securely closed. So it’s just going in the garbage. Yay for intelligent environmentalism!
I don’t get this logic. Why are you comparing the 35 cent reusable to your insulated reusable? Prior to this policy change you would have gotten a free disposable bag. The fair comparison is the cheap reusable vs. the disposable.
Rinse the cheap reusable out, stick it inside one of your big insulated reusables, and use it next time you run short of your preferred bags.
If occasionally you have to toss a cheap reusable because it’s too dirty, you’re still streets ahead of using all disposables.
My uneducated guess is that these “Many stores” will soon get their shit together and stop doing stuff that loses them money. Far too many businesses are guilty of wanting to do things the same old way because they find it too hard to change. Tough - change is happening. Many businesses fail because they can’t adapt to change.
For some definitions of “occasionally” and “streets ahead” …
I did, incidentally, make an effort to squirt some dish detergent into it and rinse it out. And here is another data point from that experience: unlike the majority of plastic bags, which are virtually airtight and certainly liquid-tight if kept upright, this thing literally leaks like a sieve. Literally. Water pours out the bottom as fast as a full-open kitchen tap can pour water in. Imagine if you were bringing groceries home in that fine reusable, sitting on a car seat, and had a major leak of some grocery item.
OK, look everyone, I’ve been an environmental type for a long time. I’ve made lengthy and detailed arguments about the hazards of climate change and I believe the same about pollution in general. We nearly killed ourselves through the use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline, and now we’re on a similar path with GHG emissions. I’m just not completely convinced that banning plastic grocery bags is a justifiable tradeoff.
I guess it’s possible that the effect on ocean and tree pollution is worse for the planet than the additional carbon. For example, maybe it uses 7000x as much carbon to make a cloth tote instead of a plastic bag. However, it’s possible that it’s still a small amount – 7000x a small number can still be a small number.
On the other hand, if plastic bags are contributing to air, ground, and sea pollution, maybe the extra carbon is worth it in this case, especially if the amount of extra carbon is small.
I don’t really know, just putting that out there.
I suspect our efforts would be better spent keeping plastic bags out of the ocean, and directing them to proper landfill facilities at the end of their life, even if their life is only one use.
Agreed. The Danish study prioritized ozone depletion as the main environmental cost. For cotton bags that comes from the natural gas burned to pump water to use for irrigation for the cotton crops.
Absolutely. Microplastics in the ocean are indisputably a huge problem. Plastics in our waterways are also a problem. I can’t imagine anything other than irresponsible disposal being the root cause. Perhaps the core of the argument here is whether overall blanket bans are the best solution to the problem of many people being irresponsible morons.
Plastic bags don’t even have to be relegated to landfill – many jurisdictions (though by no means all) are capable of recycling plastic grocery bags. Not sure that anyone has offered to recycle the supposedly “reusable” crap (one of which is currently dripping water all over my kitchen floor after my attempt to rinse it).
Even 20 years ago at Danish stores you were charged for disposable bags. Not a lot, I think it might’ve been 0.30 Kroner (about $0.10), but that can add up. It provided an incentive to use fewer bags in the first place, or to just bring your own. Also they would refund deposits on bottles, including plastic. That’s a good way to reduce litter. I think the whole “free bags” thing is part of the problem, and stores aren’t shy about just baking the cost of more expensive bags into their prices.
How responsible does the disposal system have to be though? All it takes is one slightly overfilled garbage bin and the things are blowing all over the place, then they get into the sewers and the rivers and the ocean. A squirrel gets into the garbage and rips out a bunch of them and they go flying. Just in the time it takes for the garbageman to chuck it into the truck and pieces go flying. I’ve had bags let loose on me just walking out the front door of the grocery store and send a chunk off into the wind. Etcetera etcetera. How can that reasonably be addressed?
I use produce bags, and also the plastic bags that enclose my dead-tree newspaper to which I still subscribe, as a sleeve when I clean up cat barf. Since I get way more than I could use that way, I also take them to a local animal shelter to use as dog poop bags.
Zip-loc bags that contain things like shredded cheese are also repurposed for things like meat bones. Sometimes I make them into broth, sometimes I don’t.
Plastic shopping bags are reused as trash bags, and excess ones go to the library I work at, for their self-service bookstore. I use paper grocery bags as kitchen trash can liners, after putting a larger plastic bag in first (usually a designated kitchen trash bag, but if I get larger plastic bags, usually from the library, I’ll repurpose those) and take excess bags periodically to a thrift store that I know will use them.
Some grocery stores, especially the budget ones like ALDI, put boxes in the front of the store for customers’ use.
I’m actually surprised that the grocery stores that offer delivery, especially the big chains, don’t offer some kind of reusable container that has a small deposit that is refunded when the container is returned. Maybe they’ve tried that and it didn’t work out for them?