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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

The large cloth bags you buy from the grocery store in Ontario are just the best things ever. They're a dollar each but they last years and years, hold far greater volume and weight, and are useful for all kinds of other tasks. I bought ten to help me transport bric a brac when I moved.

It's one of those things where environmentalism doesn't even have to factor in once you realise how awful the previous technology was.

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They did a comparison to cloth bags here. you have to use a colored clothbag about 30.000 times before you break even with a plastic bag. a non colored cloth bag was about 23.000 uses. Plastic bags are super efficient with regards to resource consumption, but you must never leave them in nature. There is also very little to gain from recycling plastic bags, so you would ideally burn them somewhere close to usage, and use the heat for heating.

Source? I find it hard to believe it, I commonly rip plastic bags by having any random thing with not-so-sharp edges (in the tenths of use, nevermind thousands)

I think you've misunderstood. The point isn't comparing to reusability of plastic and cloth. Cloth obviously wins. But if you compare cost per use, plastic is so cheap relative to cloth that its a better to use plastic (assuming proper disposal.)

Those numbers over 20k are only for organic cotton though. Standard uncolored cotton as is most common has to be reused 7.100 times.

And the best end of life for plastic bags is not recycling but repurposing them to trash bags.

You are of course correct, I couldn't find the source anymore and I remembered incorrectly.

If IIRC && this refers to the same research I heard about earlier the it compares the main driver for resource usage for a cotton bag is watering.

According to that research the best option was a sturdier, reusable plastic bag.

That said, I think we should be happy for people that use and reuse cotton bags. This is people that want to do the right thing.

> They did a comparison to cloth bags here. you have to use a colored clothbag about 30.000 times before you break even with a plastic bag.

That study (https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...) compared the resource consumption of:

1. A plastic bag then reused as a trash bag before discarded.

2. A reused cotton bag where you then also buy separate plastic bags for the trash can.

Sounds fair, as I am required to bag my garbage.

As someone else pointed out, the problem with plastic bags wasn’t resource usage but littering. This study is irrelevant.

It's one of those things that takes political will to achieve however in the first place because they can appear unpopular before they even are tried, and there in lies the rub. We just don't have time to ease into it this time, especially for climate change.

As far as I remember Cloths actually use way more CO2 in production than plastic.

https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotto...

While reducing our carbon footprint is certainly the most urgent problem we are facing, the footprint of creating a cloth bag isn't very large. This is a case where one has to ballance very different impacts onto the environment of two options. If we had a way to ensure that no plastic bag reaches the ocean and all of them get properly disposed of, this would be different. It also is a good idea, if those cloth bags get created somewhere close instead of being shipped around the globe.

Creating somewhere close doesn't mean that all the ingredients will be created locally too. And then you suddently have a situation where ingredients needs to be shipped around the world.

It might as well be that creating everything one place and shipping it globally is actually better.

Also weight of cloth bags are higher and it's not certain that they will be used as many times as you might think before you buy a new one, loose it, forget it etc.

In other words, it's not a good as you might think and it's certainly much more complex than just buying a tote bag vs. plastic.

Much of this looks more like a fools errand to me. We are much better of using what we want to use.

Cleaning our oceans from plastic is certainly a priority but the number one way to prevent that from happening is to make countries richer so they start caring and are able to deal with their plastic waste.

I would assume that most countries would have the ability to create cloth bags locally. Which raises the question: where does the clothing people wear come from and what is its environment impact? Also: where do all the plastic bags get created?

Personally, I would think that plastic makes for a great low-resource material, as long as we make sure it is recycled or burnt. But the plastic in the sea has become a far too serious problem. And yes, the biggest sources of plastic in the sea are places where plastics doesn't get caught in a proper disposal system. Helping there would also be a priority.

Yet, as with many other things, the rather rich countries - we tend to call ourselves "developed" - have a burdon to lead ahead with the reduction of the plastic waste. Either by developing alternatives or plastics, which decompose quickly enough to be no problem when escaping into nature.

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