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Comment by timmaah | Hacker News Reader

Lead by example

Having just visited Vietnam, this logic no longer makes any sense to me and I’m not sure how it ever did. Standards we set many decades ago for ourselves aren’t even close to being followed in that country. I can see no reason to believe why any future restrictions on ourselves will be any different.

We are. We have recycling programs, we have fines and social pressure against littering, city workers cleaning the streets. Those simple things can reduce almost 90 % of ocean plastic.

What is the problem with implementing bag taxes/bans then? Even if it’s simply symbolic, don’t you think it sets a good example for the rest of the world and further ingrains the idea of “reduce, reuse, recycle” in our own societies?

Because it's worse for the environment to ban plastic. And who likes to be taxed more? A new Danish study claims that low-density polyethylene (LDPE) has the smallest impact on the environment. Meaning plastic bags are more environment-friendly than paper bags, bio-plastic bags or cotton bags.

"The use of a unbleached paper bag is equivalent, as it needs to be recycled 43 times, a bag made of renewable PP needs to be recycled 45 times, and a cotton-bag has to be brought to the supermarket and back up to 7100 times (and around 20,000 times, if the cotton is organic),to assure the environmental impact is similar to the LDPE-bag."

https://stateofgreen.com/en/profiles/state-of-green/news/pla...

It might be worth a small increase in CO2 emissions to reduce plastic pollution TBH. We have other ways to offset those extra CO2 emissions, plenty of waste to cut. But once plastic and particularly microplastic pollution is in water and the food chain it's going to be nigh impossible to remove it.

> A new Danish study claims that low-density polyethylene (LDPE) has the smallest impact on the environment.

"In general, LDPE carrier bags, which are the bags that are always available for purchase in Danish supermarkets, are the carriers providing the overall lowest environmental impacts when not considering reuse."

(emphasis mine)

> We have recycling programs

Most recycling centers bundle plastic up into barges and ship them overseas where they may end up being partially recycled and partially in the ocea. There's often too much contamination to properly recycle. China has also recently stopped taking in these plastic barges so many municipalities don't have anywhere to put this except the city dump.

> We have recycling programs

Not all cities in the US participate in recycling programs equally. The overall US plastic recycling rate is still only 31%. Many states (maybe most?) don't have a plastic bottle deposit program.

>Many states (maybe most?) don't have a plastic bottle deposit program.

Most. The few places that do are:

California, Connecticut, Guam, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont.

Source: http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...

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