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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Or use cloth bags. Stronger than both. Re-usable for longer than either. And some stores give you discounts for using your own bag.

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Don’t you have to use a cloth bag like a thousand times before it’s recouped the environmental impact of making it compared to that many plastic bags? I’m not sure that’s always going to add up to being a win for the environment.

131 was the number thrown around in other comments. And I replied there as well, but go ahead and add it up - if the bag holds twice as much, and you use 2 bags a week, we're talking about less than a year before you are ahead of the game.

The Danish government said they thought it was 20000 times. I guess we don’t really know.

> one study from the Danish government found you'd have to use an organic cloth bag 20,000 times for it to be a better environmental choice than plastic

> ...better environmental choice than plastic

I think "better" is very subjective here. If we're talking the energy and water to make it, sure. But that probably pales into comparison compared to the produce you'll be putting in those bags anyway.

With all we know about plastic in the environment now, and how ineffective recycling as a strategy is, I think anything that will harmlessly biodegrade in a reasonable amount of time is a better choice than plastic.

This is why it is important to adapt environmental policies to local circumstances: if you are living in a country where your plastic bag ends in a landfill, you will have a very different definition of what is better for the environment than if you are living in a country where the plastic bag is safely burned in a trash incinerator.

(Which is where Denmark is coming from: http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/wtert/sofos/Denmark_Waste...)

It's a trade off between traditional waste and carbon dioxide. You will be dead before you recoup the total energy costs that went into the likely exorbitant and absurd steps of building and shipping your cloth bag halfway around the world assembled from materials gathered thousands of miles apart, compared to the cost of using a plastic bag each and every time. But you're consuming less single use plastic that is possibly going to get dumped into the ocean and trash the food chain.

Why would you ship a cloth bag from halfway around the world?

It is a cloth bag. It is something we teach our kids to make from old shirts they grow out of. I know society has moved deep into the paradigm of buying everything and making nothing, but there are some items that make no sense to buy, and cloth bags are one of them.

You can make almost anything you use. But in modern society, you definitely have to pick your battles.

Society has effectively abandoned and destroyed a large section of do-it-yourself culture in favor of a rapid and disposable one. I'd wager that most people would not even consider the idea of making a cloth bag, and of those that would consider it a lot would not know how to do such a task, even if all that were involved is just sewing shut the holes of a shirt to make a sack, because their parents and their parent's parents were already fully immersed in atomized, disposable culture.

Yeah. Unfortunately, that means we are having the wrong discussions, not just here, but with the people in our lives. If most people have abandoned DIY and want to purchase, and ship worldwide, every item we use, then paper vs. plastic vs. cloth isn't even a drop in the bucket of the environmental impact our lifestyle choices have on the world.

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