You’ve had two cites in this thread that littering is indeed greatly reduced after bag bans/taxes. :rolleyes:
Not in Europe, bans affect every store. Takeout restaurants aren’t affected directly because they don’t count as stores, but the cultural shift means that they tend to offer bags rather than give you one without asking.
Surely the thing to do is ban manufacture and import, rather than just sales?
Wow. That must have been equal parts saddening, infuriating and terrifying to see as an employee.
Technically I misspoke – ending animal agriculture is the best single thing you can do for the environment overall*, not specifically carbon footprint.
(*leaving aside catastrophic population reduction, which would be unpleasant)
I have a hard time believing that a paper bag is so much worse without them really cherry picking data.
I started using the reusable bags several years ago and I am now just getting to the very bottom of my “bag drawer”. We’re talking 15+ years of bags, which I use daily to empty the litter box. For those who have indoor cats and don’t use plastic bags, what do you use? Paper? Need answer fast:p
I’m having trouble understanding how they figure that. If I cancel the trip to Greece I booked for this summer American Airlines isn’t going to cancel that flight. They’re more than likely going to sell that seat to someone else. The plane is still going to fly that route and burn just as much fuel, I just won’t be on it. Worst case (from the airline’s perspective), they don’t manage to sell that seat to another passenger and the plane leaves with an empty seat. But the effect of having one fewer passenger on the plane’s fuel burn is pretty much negligible.
Is the idea that if lots of people all decide to travel less, airlines will respond to the decrease in demand be scheduling fewer flights?
I can understand forgetting the first few times after the plastic bag ban went into effect, but after that, you’re just not trying.
We keep a half-dozen bags in the trunk of our car. When we shop and bring the bags into the house, we empty the bags and then hang them on the front door handle. Then, the next time someone walks out the front door to go to the car, they grab the bags off the door handle and put them back in the car.
This is not especially difficult.
Of course it is. These issues are problems to deal with in the aggregate, but they still require individuals to change their behavior.
Sure, cancelling that trip you’ve got planned next month won’t, by itself, change anything. But if you do that, and thousands of other people do that, and if we all make a determined effort to make fewer flights, then over time that will have an effect.
I do have trouble remembering. They aren’t required here, but I bought some reusable fabric bags, anyway. It’s been a while, and I’m still hit or miss or remembering to take them. And sometimes when I remember to put them in the car, I forget to get them out of the car when I walk into the grocery store. I know once I get in the habit, it’ll be a habit, but it’s been over a year since I bought the first bag, and I just haven’t made it part of my routine yet.
Also, boy are the bags different quality. Forgot mine one day last year and picked up an Easter-themed one in Publix, and it is so much flimsier than the regular Publix bag I had.
Still, I support moving away from plastic bags. I had tons of them in my cabinets, even excluding the ones I threw away or recycled. One grocery trip was two or three months worth of plastic bags - and I shop every week.
I admit, I like my straws with beverages with ice, though.
I am one of the people inconvenienced by the plastic bag ban.
I used to use them for everything. Taking my lunch to work,
lining the cat trash, collecting the mess after brewing soup to take to the garage, whatever.
I already had invested in reusable super-market bags before my town banned plastic, so I used to only take bags when my stash was running low.
Now I buy plastic bags for the cat trash, use the flimsy produce bags or purchased kitchen trash bags for the soup-remains, and I’m carefully hoarding my supply of better-quality plastic bags for carrying lunch and other “clean” stuff. And yes, people have started to comment on my “vintage” plastic bags.
Yeah, this is why I grudgingly am okay with bag bans. Honestly, I don’t think the bags I got were part of the problem. They were carefully stored in my kitchen until re-use, and filled with heavy stuff before being put in the trash, and I’m sure they made it intact to the landfill, where they are pretty harmless.
(and bacteria are already learning to eat plastic. I suppose things in landfills don’t rot, but plastic bags that make it to the soil will be gone in 50 years.)
Buy a box of cheap plastic bags the right size for your needs. If you fill them with litter waste, they won’t blow loose and cause the environmental problems that bag bans address. It’s not a major carbon problem, nor a “we will have these horrible things forever problem”, so don’t feel guilty about it. Just be careful to keep your bags from blowing into the trees or the ocean.
People havent stopped eating meat, how is it helping if you cut out meat animals? Mass disturbance in the force will follow for sure.
Lots of unemployment too.
how does that happen? Trees regrow but that oil that produces the plastic bags will disappear for a few million years…what about all the plastic bottles out there too??
Paper bags weigh more than comparable carry-capacity in plastic bags, so they cost more (oil) to transport. They are also somewhat energy-expensive to produce. I think it’s entirely plausible that paper bags use as much carbon, on average, as plastic bags.
And yes, those plastic bags will disappear in well until a few million years. I’m guessing we will start having trouble with plastic “rotting” in my lifetime.
BUT paper bags don’t produce trash problems, because they break down quickly when they get wet. So no whale is going to choke on a plastic bag. If they get tangled in trees or fences, they will degrade, and fall down on their own. And they rot pretty quickly today – no bacterial evolution needed.
Paper bags also hold more than plastic ones and are usually (around 80%) made from a traditional lumber mills waste stream.
Another negative consequence is that this law may be a form of slacktivism, i.e. a feel-good action that doesn’t make much difference in the world, but makes people feel they’ve done their share of good. It’s like signing an online petition. Nothing wrong with the action in itself, but the problem is, it gives people an excuse to not do anything more.
It’s the effect on *your *carbon footprint. The calculation is for you as an individual, not the total carbon budget.
I’m firmly convinced that Walmart changed from the distinctive blue bags they used years ago to white ones because the blue ones were so easily recognizable in trees and in barbed wire fences.
It’s telling that the first city in Texas to pass a plastic bag ban was Brownsville–not exactly the most progressive town in the state. But it’s windy as hell down there, and wind and plastic bags don’t mix well. Fort Stockton, also not a progressive town, was also an early adopter of a bag ban. It’s windy there, too. And beach towns liked bag bans.
But the Texas legislature passed a law prohibiting cities from having bag bans. They don’t like the feds telling them what to do, but they like telling cities what to do. Oh well.
I’ve been using my own bags for decades. I keep them by the door and they go into the car with me. If I forget them, I just go back to the car to get them. It’s not that big of a deal, and I get more compliant after that trek.
I also take my own to-go containers to restaurants, for my own leftovers. Reactions have slowly shifted from shock and puzzlement to occasional appreciation.
Banning plastic straws is one of those environmental policies that sounds like a good idea, but is really just window dressing that makes some people feel better while doing basically nothing (and I mean, almost literally, nothing) to help the environment.
Plastic straws account for an infinitesimally small percentage of the plastics that end up in the world’s oceans, and of the overall amount of plastic waste created in the world. Not only that, but the more than half of the plastic waste fouling up the world’s oceans comes from five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Source report.
While advanced economies like the United States need to make efforts to produce less plastic waste, and to deal with it better, America is responsible for only a tiny percentage of the plastic waste that ends up in the oceans. According to a 2015 article in Science (you need to be a member, or have institutional access, to see the article), the United States ranks far behind the above-mentioned countries, and many others, in terms of mismanaged plastic waste. The United States, according to the report, adds about 40,000 - 110,000 metric tons of plastic to the ocean each year, while Indonesia adds about 480,000 - 1.2 million tons, and China contributes 1.32 - 3.53 million tons. (If you don’t have access to Science, you can see the data table reproduced in this Reason article).
A few cities banning plastic straws basically has no effect on this at all.
It’s pretty clear that we use a lot of plastic and that it has spread even to the impossibly remote parts of our environment such as the Marianas Trench and marine and island wildlife. The solution is not clear nor easy so it’s hard to blame people wanting to start somewhere by reducing straws and plastic bags. Like many problems, the initial solutions can be inadequate.
I have no idea what the real statistics are for cost and carbon and biodegradability. I’ve seen different numbers used. It makes sense to consider how often something is reused (both potentially, and in practice). It makes sense to look at the alternatives.
Like many places, many Canadian stores started charging five cents per bag. I don’t doubt this has reduced the number folks take home. I try and reuse bags but throw them away when they are soiled. More expensive bags can be used more but can easily become unhygenic over time depending on use. Paper bags have their uses but there is a reason fewer places offer them these days - it’s hard to carry a bunch of them, they are pricier, they aren’t always sturdy. It is easy to criticize people who want to use fewer straws or bags, or stop you from using them as much, but one has to start somewhere.