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Overall, has there been a noticeable change at the landfill level? Also have there been reductions in plastic bags making their way to waterways, streams, seas, etc?

I ask this because the inevitable comments arise regarding people now having to buy rubbish/bin bags instead of reusing shopping bags. So, what is the net effect of this change on the environment?

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Plastic bags used to be the tumble weed of urban environments; in winter you could see every tree had one blown into it. These have entirely vanished, and I would count that as the main success.

The stream near my house still collects plastic bottles, which probably has to be the next challenge.

I have never seen a straw as litter, in a stream or on a beach.

I am in favour of banning all single use plastic (and quite a lot of non single use as well).

But I now do have to buy some bin bags... What do people do to avoid this?

I actually used to reuse single use bags to line all of the trash cans in my house. Now that my town banned free ones, my family has been trained to reuse. Only now I'm buying disposable trash bags and only using them once.

Fairly sure the overall impact here is worse. Especially since the heavy trash bags you buy consume much, much more plastic compared to the thin film freebies I was using before.

I do hate to see trash bags blowing in the road and know they end up in the rivers and oceans. I guess overall this is still a win, just not for my household.

I guess trash bags can/could be produced with biodegradation in mind, while shopping bags may prioritize being able to stay in stock for years and to hold dyes, etc. It's not necessarily a 1:1 replacement.

> Especially since the heavy trash bags you buy consume much, much more plastic compared to the thin film freebies I was using before.

Seems to be cultural/regional: the bin liners I buy are of the flimsy type, precision engineered to just barely survive the one-way trip from the room bin to the large outdoors bin, whereas the free bags I used to get at the store were almost universally heavily overdesigned as brand-carriers, can't take any chances with a bag that has your logo all over it.

I always carry an eastpak backpack when I bike to work. Those things are pretty much indestructible; on my second one since highschool. Then I usually shop on my way back from work. Obviously I probably have to shop more often than most people because of the limited capacity. I usually keep a spare plastic bag(that i re-use) in there as well if I need to buy more than can fit in the eastpak.

I don't agree with blanket bans. We should also consider patterns of usage and actual environmental impact. Trash bags are efficient in production, very convenient and allow to better organize other garbage , and most often end up in the landfill, as it's their main usage. It almost never will end up in the ocean or in the forest/on the streets/on the tree branches by the wind etc. Plastic bottles, plastic fishing net, etc that's where main source of problems is.

I'd guess that bin bags are more likely to make it to landfill (full of other things that need to go to landfill) than to end up in rivers, etc. Since we are still throwing things in landfills for the foreseeable future and bin bag usage is a) directly proportional to the amount we dispose of and b) relatively minor, it doesn't seem like a great loss.

Also the old shopping bags were extremely thin. The new ones in countries that implemented the tax are much thicker. So what exactly is the net plastic here? What about including plastic tote bags? I know they are reusable, but how many times do you need to use a very struby plastic bag until you reach net plastic?

The thinner ones like to fly away, get carried long distances by wind or water, and will shred and tangle around things spontaneously. They are much more of a danger to wildlife than the thick ones for this reason alone. Shifting the bag away from "disposable" and "single-use" category makes a difference on its own in terms of how much of it ends up in the environment.

LDPE (thicker, 'bag for life' etc) is about 4 times as bad, paper bags 3 times, vs HDPE (thin) bags assuming no reuse. The below UK gov study investigates impact of each (and other alternatives like cloth bags) and also considers reuse as bin liners, which significantly changes the numbers.

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

not sure but we no longer have a bag of bags filled to the brim, like we used to :)

Us too. I sincerely hope that it does actually translate to less plastic bags hitting the environment!

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