We have reusable bags in each vehicle. It’s really easy. Where’s the downside to using reusable bags?
Yes I should clarify.
I pay 10 cents at Wal-Mart and other major retail stores for a plastic bag that seems slightly sturdier than the free plastic bags before the ban.
Paper bags have largely been eliminated from most retail stores now, though I have been to at least one super market that dropped all plastic bags and exclusively uses paper bags, but they still charge you 10 cents per bag.
You have to remember to carry them around.
I have reusable bags in my car but I always get that moment where I go “Dammit, I knew I left something!” im the store and I park far enough away from it that it’s a hassle to walk all the way out and all the way back. Rather pay the ten cents.
One of the cool things about Meijer, and I assume others are doing so as well, is that you can scan your items as you put them into your cart, then checkout with a single barcode.
So, the idea is to take your reusable bags, line them up in the cart, and shop. You scan and bag in the aisle. When you are done, just take them out of the cart into the car, and then into the house.
I’ve never had them rip on me because of one too many cans.
You have to use them many, many times to break even with the environmental impacts of single-use plastic carrier bags. It’s a rather uncomfortable dilemma
What irritates me about this is how bad renewable bags are on the environment:
You need to use those reusable plastic bags 71 times for them to be better than disposable plastic. Doable, but a pain. You need to use those canvas reusable bags 7000 times, or 3 times a week for 45 years.
That said, paper bags have to be used 43 times as well, with all factors put in. So they aren’t better, either. Honestly, it seems to me like we’d be better off just allowing plastic bags and encouraging reusable plastic bags. Or, heck, why not just do what most people have done for years and push reusing the “single use” bags?
The problem with the single-use bags, albeit that they are the least impactful to manufacture, is where they often end up at end of life - basically blowing into the ocean
Which is a good thing. That’s carbon sequestration. It’s not like we’re running out of space for landfills, or anything.
And paper isn’t usually made from clear-cut forests. It’s usually made from farmed quick-growing trees. It’s a crop, like any other, except on a five-ish year cycle, instead of a one-year cycle.
Exactly, it’s less about how they are made, than how they are disposed of.
If there actually was a way to dispose of them cleanly, then it would probably be better to use the single use bags and throw them away.
I used to think this. If nothing else, there was a Penn and Teller Bullshit where they specifically said this. (I stopped watching them when they compared a Harley to a Prius, as though that was a reasonable comparison in any way between ICE and EV’s).
But, landfill space is not actually infinite, and paper does break down into methane, offsetting the carbon sequestration.
Not to mention, as mentioned upthread, the vast quantities of water needed, as well as the contaminants created in the production of paper.
It does mean that I don’t feel guilty about throwing a used tissue in the garbage, but I don’t see any burning need to be wasteful in my paper product usage.
I feel like this is the origin of a fair number of mankind’s more egregious environmental injuries.
Cultivation of pulpwood forests typically involves the clearcutting of old growth forest and resulting impact upon the biodiversity including undergrowth and the fungal mats that are actually as significant contributors to capturing atmospheric carbon as the trees. Although paper products are technically sequestering carbon in cellulose and lignin, once they are in the landfill they break down producing methane and carbon dioxide, which unless captured (which most landfills are not designed to do) much of the carbon does return to the atmosphere. And while we may not technically be running out of real estate where landfills could be placed, most people do not want a landfill in their community, so landfills tend to be located in places with low political influence or where they will be out of sight instead of where they are more readily accessible, which means more energy spent on transporting trash to landfills.
Of course, there are single use applications in which disposable paper products are preferable to reuse from a sanitation standpoint but that is primarily in the medical field. Reducing the dependence upon disposable paper would actually be both a not-insignificant reduction in net carbon emissions and industrial water usage.
Stranger
Maybe when the pulp farms are first laid out. That’s true of any sort of farm. But once it is laid out, the same farm can be sustained indefinitely, without having to cut down any further old growth.
Learning to remember the cloth bags is not as hard as replacing the ecosystems destroyed by clear cutting, not as hard as replacing a planetary climate ruined by burning fossil fuels. I mean, for me personally.
Like I said, I started the cloth bag thing in the late 1970’s, Earth Day and all that I shop at least once a week, filling six or seven bags every time. That’s a lot of uses. I also use them for anything else you would use a grocery-sized bag for. I use them to carry a packed lunch, kids’ toys to the beach, library books, you name it.
The issue is that the old growth that as long sequestered large amounts of carbon is now gone, along with the complex ecosystem and microhydrologic cycle it supported, replaced by “fast growth” trees that do not sequester nearly as much carbon even over multiple growth cycles. Some of that old growth is likely used for lumber and thus remains sequestered but much of it is used for fuel, processed products, or ends up in landfill. In short, the best solution to minimizing net atmospheric carbon emissions is to retain and protect old growth forests rather than to cut them down and cultivate pulpwood trees that sequester much less carbon which largely ends up being released into the atmosphere anyway.
Stranger
That argument would make more sense if people cutting down old growth forests thought that way – we’re saving other old growth forests by endlessly replanting this patch. They don’t though. They just keep cutting until all the old growth is gone. Then they turn that unduplicatable ecosystem into a monocrop farm.
Stranger
Paper is not as environmentally unfriendly as plastic. At least it biodegrades.
The palm oil market is a heavy contributor to deforestation, which I personally believe is the main factor in the human-caused aspect of climate change. We may replant in the U.S. and Canada, but in many other areas, they don’t.
Several years ago, I saw a report on TV about an island off Southeast Asia that was, according to them, being compromised by rising ocean levels, but they also mentioned that they were experiencing significant beach erosion due to loggers from the mainland clear-cutting the mangrove forests. They did show some children planting mangrove saplings, which looked like sprouted avocados, in the beach under adult supervision.
This from a study at Columbia done in 2020
"Life cycle studies done in Europe and North America have determined that, overall, plastic bags are better for the environment than paper or reusable bags unless the latter are used many times. "
Once again, that depends on how it is disposed of.
If we could incinerate plastic to make electricity, without the dioxins and other nasty pollutants they give off, then probably the most environmentally friendly thing to do would be to use a bag once and throw it away.
Since plastic at best ends up in a landfill for the next millennia or so, and often ends up in places that do much more environmental damage, the reusable bags come out on top.
And why wouldn’t you use reusable bags many times? That’s kinda the point of them in the first place. They also have the factor of being much stronger. I’ve never had a reusable bag split and dump my canned goods all over my front porch.