Hacker News Reader

Comment by franch | Hacker News Reader

As a European temporarily living in the US I am truly shocked by the amount of plastic used in packaging here. Moreover, the number of plastic bags that it's used in supermarkets is also shocking. Where I come from (Italy) we banned plastic bags 2 years ago in favour of compostable bags with no problems. Instead of creating a different kind of plastic, I think that we should really enforce at least a global ban on light plastic bags.

EDIT: spelling

View on HN

The other thing that is very obvious as an European currently living in the US is the insane amount of plastic associated with food. Hotel breakfast will be (even in relatively upscale hotels) on single-use styrofoam plates, with single-use plastic cutlery, plastic lined single-use "paper" cups and composed of tons of individually plastic packed items.

Food in the cafeteria (I have seen the well hated name Aramak in a few places there) is served in single-use take-out containers, even if you explicitly tell them it is "for here" not "to go", because the cafeteria works have no (clean) plates at their stations. Cutlery is also plastic, since they removed the silverware a few weeks ago after too many complaints that it had been poorly cleaned. The disk washers are now busy taking out mountains of trash, instead of cleaning reusable items.

Once dinner time comes around most of my colleagues eat take out, that is put in plastic lined paper in the best case and styrofoam in the typical case. And even if it is a single item, it will be in a plastic bag or two, along with a large handful of napkins, ten tiny sachets of bbq and hot sauce and three straws, even if no single drink is included.

This is America, where adding plastic always makes it better, and making it disposable is progress.

Today I looked in the fridge at work and saw precooked hardboiled eggs in a plastic bag.

- Sad American

To add on to this: The plastic bags in the supermarket are also typically too flimsy to be used as garbage bags, which was my standard way of using them when we still had plastic bags in Europe. Instead they are already full of holes by the time I get home and all I can do is throw them straight into the trash and by extra plastic bags just to take out the garbage.

At least in Chicago, single-use plastic bags have been banned from grocery stores since 2015.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com