The known unknowns of plastic pollution

"emi-coordinated move by major corporations to reframe the plastic waste issue so that responsibility for the pollution is shifted from themselves onto the consumer"

It's a very successful strategy. They did the same with "identity theft" where banks deflected the blame for bad security practices.

"Make producers pay for the clean up. F them."

Totally agree...but this isn't a lake or local stretch of a river that a pulp mill is polluting, this random/isolated stretches of the ocean where everything ends up.

Does international waters jurisdiction make it harder to make them pay for it (from a legal perspective)?

Not an economist, but it strikes me that perhaps a better way than "making producers pay for the clean-up" (short of regulating their production in the first place) is to make users pay for the cleanup. If some sort of "tax" or "fee" on these items is passed to consumers, I'd bet we'd see less use. Hell, I live in Seattle, and the $0.05 I have to pay to get a paper bag in the store (plastic is mostly banned) is enough to make me bring my cotton bag.

> that I have had for 3-4 years

If you do groceries once a month, you would need 10 years to get into that magic number. That using the same bags every time, if you have more bags than you need, so you alternate their use, it would take more than 10 years.

That said, I usually use plastic bags 2 or 3 times. Does that mean I would have to keep a cotton bag for 20 years? (I do like using reusable bags, but I don't carry them all the time.)

It is also possible to create bags that are useful for more than just groceries. Part of it is also the mental shift away from disposable.

There is also the the possibility of shared bags but the germ/dirt issue would exist and then adding the cleaning of shared bags may be energy worse. We used to have shared glass bottles for milk that had to be cleaned and sterilized after each use not to mention transporting all the weight of empty bottles back to the dairy.

I think it also depends on what we are solving for. Is it lower carbon footprint or keeping plastic out of our waterways? More quickly bio-degradable plastics may be best for one but not the other.

Is it really 140 uses, or is it that you breakeven at 140 plastic bags?

This is a significant difference because reusable bags are usually a lot larger and a lot stronger. In my experience, one use of a reusable bag substitutes for something like five plastic bags. That makes the breakeven point arrive a lot faster.