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Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

Banning plastic bags is bad policy that promotes resource waste and food contamination.It's a rolling back of the gains from sanitation that we've made, for no purpose other than muddle-headed virtue signaling by people who can't be bothered to learn the facts before passing their intrusive bans.

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/726035361/why-banning-plastic...

https://fee.org/articles/banning-plastic-bags-isnt-just-bad-...

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Multi-use plastic bags and single-use plastic bags, in actual lifetime probably are close to equal in terms of energy use, carbon and pollution. Where multi-use wins is in aesthetics. You don’t get as many bags blowing and landing on the streets and roadways or finding themselves in waterways and estuaries.

So I see that as a positive. Straws now, I don’t see the logic in it beside trying to condition people into “plastic = bad”. It’s the the “broken windows theory” applied to (anti-) plastics environmentalism.

Don't forget the damage plastics do to marine life. For almost any shape, type, and size of plastic, there is an animal in the ocean that will mistake it for food.

In the case of plastic bags, they seem to be commonly mistaken for squid and jellyfish, eaten by the albatross and sea turtles, to name just two species.

So while the bag-free aesthetic on land is an improvement, the potential for downstream benefits is even greater.

The pollution of plastic in the ocean is a breakdown of sanitation and is primarily the result of 5 asian nations that have poor sanitation systems.

You fix that by improving the sanitation system so that garbage is not dumped into the ocean, not by trying to stop the creation of garbage going into the system.

350 million metric tons of plastic are produced each year and that number is growing by 4% per annum. Plastic bags are not going to change that, and plastic is only one type of long lived material in our garbage.

The solution is to not dump garbage into rivers and oceans and to create effective sanitation systems in developing countries.

But people in Germany forgoing the use of plastic bags, thinking that they are saving a seal or something are just misguided. Germany has an effective sanitation system -- India, Thailand, China, Myanmar do not. Nothing you throw away in Germany is going to end up in the ocean.

Neither of the articles you cited mention anything backing your claims on food contamination or sanitation.

As a policy in action in Kenya, I'd say that it is working. (We have a ban that has been in place for more than a year). practically everyone at the supermarket uses reusable bags compared to pre-ban mentality of 'oh I'll get yet another bag at the till'.

And don't said reusable bags cost thousands of times the carbon emissions of single use plastic bags? So unless you use your reusable bags for years and years, you won't break even.

"So unless you use your reusable bags for years and years..."

That is literally the exact point of reusable bags. The hint is in the name.

The issue is how do you sterilize the bags between re-use to achieve the same level of hygiene as disposable bags? Doing that is very energy intensive and you are in a situation in which the energy cost of washing a bigger reusable bag is comparable to the cost of making a brand new plastic one. That is why I was emphasizing sanitation. We don't use disposable needles, containers for meat and produce, dairy, because they are cheaper per se, we use them because we are concerned with hygiene.

And of course the larger issue is the totalitarian nature of this. Who needs two cups of coffee? Ban the second cup! This idea that we should start using the government's monopoly on violence to ban what are symbolic and irrelevant things -- even without thinking through the repercussions for sanitation and energy -- is a very dangerous one.

No one will look out for the environment we live in, especially business. Try living with re-use bags for a month and find out just how inconvenienced you are...we as citizens are making these laws to live in a clean sanitary world, not Some unnamed totalitarian regime.

No, you are doing it to feel good about yourself. You are doing it to feel like you are making the world better.

But you are not making the world better, you are forcing random laws on people as part of an empty performative ritual.

If you wanted to live in a cleaner world, you would focus on improving systems of sanitation rather than trying to force a very marginal reduction in waste going into these systems.

90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers in India and Asia. The plastic is in the ocean because of poor garbage pickup and disposal infrastructure, it's not there because some guy in San Francisco is using a single use plastic bag when he goes shopping. If you want to make the "world" cleaner, then improve the waste management infrastructure rather than trying to reduce plastic waste by 0.000000001%. The thin disposable bags are not gonna put you over the top.

These are all symbolic acts that have real world deleterious consequences in terms of personal liberty as well as increasing the number of food poisoning cases, emergency room visits, etc, due to people re-using bags without properly sterilizing them between each use.

Why would you need to sanitise a plastic bag after use ?

What if you carried meat then carried lettuce in a reusable bag?

Who's going to the grocery store and putting unwrapped raw meat in their shopping bag (plastic or not)?

Which is exactly what people do. My family reuses the same 'reusable bags' we've had for years. Almost all the bags I've seen are sturdy enough to last several years.

Plastic bag bans are not due to CO2 emissions.

They are due to plastic being a pollutant.

Not everyone goes out and buys a brand new reusable bag to replace plastic. Many people already had them lying around. Many people use their backpacks. Many people just carry things in their hands in situations where they would have otherwise taken the free plastic bag.

The problem is not an emission, the problem is the insane amount of waste.

Kenya has relatively lacking landfill and garbage collection infrastructure - such a policy makes great sense given those conditions. Bag bans have less utility in developed countries where more than 99% of trash is safely sequestered into landfill.

Nonsense! We have this law here on Maui and it has only helped lower plastics pollution and loose trash. People have all adapted to carrying re-use sacks and I hear very few complaints. It is so nice not to see shredded plastic blowing in the the trees and brush all over the place.

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