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Comment by phildawes | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is that the quantity of CO2e dumped into the atmosphere when you make a cotton bag has a much worse environmental impact than the plastic bag dumped in landfill.

[1] https://medium.com/@tabitha.whiting/should-you-swap-plastic-... "The study estimated that a cotton tote bag’s total carbon footprint was 598.6lb of CO2e. This compared to 3.48lb of CO2e for a standard plastic bag. That means that you would need to use the tote bag 172 times for every 1 time you used the plastic bag."

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I doubt that's a significant factor in global green house gas production while plastic bags are a significant factor in plastic pollution. This seems like a basic optimization problem. Yes, this approach uses a tiny bit more memory, but a lot less CPU. Running out of memory is a problem, but there are likely other areas where we can save a whole lot more (e.g. eat less meat, don't generate demand for food that was shipped around the world).

> I think the point is that the quantity of CO2e dumped into the atmosphere when you make a cotton bag has a much worse environmental impact than the plastic bag dumped in landfill.

The reason these laws get enacted is because not enough of the plastic bags end up in landfills.

Yeah, but the problem is that a lot of plastics don't get dumped in landfill. They reach the water, and the micro-plastics enter the food chain and produce a toxic hormonal responses in animals.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-huma...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132564/

I find I can carry at least 4 times as much stuff in a reusable bag as a disposable one. They've done remarkable work in making those disposable bags thinner, which is especially helpful when you're only buying a few light items, but for larger trips it's simply not a 1:1 substitution.

There are so many factors involved (CO2, petroleum drilling, microplastics, other pollution, etc) that it's not easy to provide a definitive ratio. I do think it's good that the discussion has reduced the amount of plastic being used in the bags themselves (though I'd need to see a study if that ends up reducing the total amount of plastic involved, or if they're just using more bags). I think it's good that people are now in a better position to forego bags entirely rather than put a single item in a bag simply because they're there and free.

Mostly, though, I'd caution against citing numbers that assume that one reusable bag is exactly the capacity of one disposable one.

"Dumped in landfill" is an optimistic worst case for plastic waste, though. Dumped outside the waste-processing stream so it ends up in the food chain or bobbing down the river - that's the problem case we're trying to avert.

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