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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

There doesn't seem to be a clear concensus on how well these bans work. The clearest win seems to be a decrease in ocean plastic and street litter. But the advantage in terms of landfill or carbon emissions seem to be a wash at best and a net loss at worst.

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I'd accept even a very slight net loss to be rid of the never-ending sight of plastic bags littering sidewalks, roads and parks. Call it a step towards eradicating an aesthetic externality for which industry has failed to come up with a viable solution.

Exactly. The main downside to plastic bags is not the carbon emissions or landfill contributions, it’s just what the OP said: ocean plastic and street litter. Each factor isn’t equally weighted.

Well, for Kenya, we do see a decrease in the amount not plastic in use. In fact, I now regularly have more than five reusable bags in my car boot. The only time I see plastic bags are in new purchases (wrappers for electronics...) and garbage bags. A total plastic ban does work!

Plastic bag usage by itself is neither positive nor negative. The parent comment was referring to the effects of plastic bag usage. What are the implications? What does it affect?

England introduced a 5p charge for plastic bags, and use dropped by 85% https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...

> More than 7bn bags were handed out by seven main supermarkets in the year before the charge, but this figure plummeted to slightly more than 500m in the first six months after the charge was introduced, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.

That's a reduction of roughly 6 billion plastic bags.

The street litter win cannot be understated. Little black bodega bags are a plague on New York's streets.

Combined with the crazy wind here it also ends up everywhere (like at the top of tall trees)

> the advantage in terms of landfill or carbon emissions seem to be a wash at best and a net loss at worst

Is it even worth researching those two? Plastic shopping bags is so far down the list of landfill use and CO2 emissions that I feel there's better things to spend our time on.

Which I wish governments would get. Rather than ban plastic shopping bags, maybe work on funding MTA?

Emissions are far from the main problem here. Plastic is the #1 pollutant in oceans and rivers: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_58fed37be4b0c46f0781d426

And 80% of it originates from the land.

Read my comment again. I didn't dispute that point; I was talking about carbon emissions and landfill space.

But how much of that plastic is bags? And how much is consumer plastic and how much is industrial?

It's hard to find sources measuring weight/volume, but usually goes something like this:

> Extrapolating with the help of estimates from the 2017 National Geographic report that 79% of plastic in landfills ends as free floating waste worldwide (6.3 billion tons), it can be estimated that the U.S. is responsible for 327 billion bags that goes into the seas. And the global contribution to ocean debris is 3.95 trillion bags each year

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