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Comment by vishaltelangre | Hacker News Reader

Imposing a ban on "public" and practically making sure that it is followed by the huge population of India is really difficult. We have seen such bans imposed on public before, and none of them were successful till the date.

On the other hand, keeping an eye on the handful of (big) companies to restrict them from supplying plastic to people is comparatively an easy task and requires less (man, money and infrastructure) power.

Besides, government(s) can also think of funding research program(s) to synthesize an eco-friendly material alternative to plastic which can be produced with same cost as of plastic; or funding program(s) to at least efficiently recycle plastic directly proportional to its growing usage.

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Arent there eco friendly alternatives already?

I remember that in Germany you can buy bags made from corn starch, but they're very thin and very fragile. You need to be really lucky to bring home your shopping bags safely and you definitely cannot reuse them. But you can put them on the compost, which is really cool! If they work on making it a little more robust, bags like that would be my first choice

What’s wrong with paper? They’re strong, biodegradable, and can use tree types that can be quickly grown.

Producing a paper bag has environmental impacts equivalent to three lightweight polyethythene bags. For cotton bags, it's about a 130x multiple. The best option is to reuse a thick nonwoven plastic bag until it's worn out; woven plastic or cotton bags are rarely re-used often enough to repay their greater costs of manufacture.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

3x in which dimension(s)?

The paper bag can be easily recycled, will biodegrade, and not cause issues in our ocean.

Clearly people bringing their own reusable bags is best, but we're talking about disposable alternatives here.

Just a word of warning - some compostable and bio degradable bags only compost in an industrial facility.

http://www.capradio.org/articles/2015/02/17/is-compostable-c...

for some things sure e.g. Italy has had mandatory biodegradable shopping bags for a few years, but for other things, like coke bottles, it seems harder.

I mean, you can enforce glass bottles but that does not seem like a major improvement.

Glass bottles can be reused, like Germany does, or Spain did (sadly not any more).

plastic bottles can be recycled, but the problem, as I understood it, is thrash not being handled properly, so the fact that you have plastic bottles in rivers or shard of glass bottles does not change much.

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