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> why are we using these devices designed to be immediately thrown away?

I mean, the answer is pretty easy: people have a strong preference for options that help reduce their cognitive load.

People prefer restaurants that provide take out containers rather than require they bring Tupperware.

People prefer grocery stores that provide bags rather than require they bring their own.

This isn't true of everyone - conscientiousness is normally distributed - but it is true for most people most of the time.

At the risk of... whatever:

Disposable items (properly disposed of, ie landfilled) can be, and often are, more environmentally friendly than reusable items. Especially if you look at actual real life use, as opposed to projected or design use.

Look at a UK LCA of shopping bags:

A cotton tote needs to be reused ~173 times without being washed to break even with the efficiency of a single use HDPE bag. (Edit: other alternatives, like LDPE, paper or woven plastic, are also listed as low as multiplier of 2x vs HDPE. I didn't intend to mislead.)

If you're not doing a whole load of dishes, it can be more efficient to use plastic or paper plates for a meal, and trash them. The cost of just washing something can be relatively and unreasonably high, environmentally speaking.

The green movement has been over reliant on emotional programming (reuse = always good, plastic = always bad, etc) and needs to invest more in actual education. Landfills have gotten an especially unearned negative connotation.

Hopefully the new generation of college graduates are getting proper training in conducting proper Life Cycle Analysis'.

Not saying reuse is always bad or that we shouldn't be analysing these things, just that they need analysis, and not a collective gut reaction.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

Banning single use plastic bags is more about reducing litter and water contamination than about energy efficiency. Lightweight plastic bags are particularly bad because the wind blows them everywhere and they often end up in oceans or rivers. This causes serious harm to aquatic environments.

Yes, and that's fine, but it's also somewhat a different problem. One that is better solved with a deposit scheme, redesign, or some other method than tax and ban. (Edit: or the obvious- using biodegradable additives in HDPE at a marginal cost.)

Make them twice as thick. Melt a weight into the seam of each one to prevent flying and floating. You'd still be a magnitude ahead of the alternatives. There are alternatives besides banning.

They have their problems, but people don't realize what a damn miracle of engineering HDPE bags are. And other disposable paper and plastic items, to a lesser extent.

I disagree that it's a different problem. There's a branch of corporate environmentalism that says, hey, look, green things are great when they reduce costs. LEED certified buildings reduce energy costs, for example, so everyone is down for building and occupying them. It's great, because it's a win win, but it's not at all the whole story.

Plastic bags in the ocean are an externality, whose cost is hard to measure but is paid in the lives of wild things. The whole point of externalities is that people aren't bearing any cost for them: tax and/or ban is absolutely a reasonable approach to handling them, since it makes people take literal account of the literal downstream effects.

One more thing, on edit: the analysis you're calling for is good to do, but is also prone to the "seeing like a state" problem. The analysis will only include what can be easily measured... Which can leave out a lot of the story.

LCA's are only as good as the person who performs them. But we'd be much better off if everyone at least knew what they were, and what they try to accomplish, specifically capturing all of those externalities.

Re: the tax and ban... Tires and lead batteries in most states in the US is good example of this. You can tax or ban or regulate to put a cap on the problem. But if you want to collect the existing waste already out there, an incentive refund accomplishes much more, in less time.

> Make them twice as thick. Melt a weight into the seam of each one to prevent flying and floating.

Well, now a palette of them weighs 2-10 times as much and the energy required to ship them needs to be recalculated.

Sure. That's the point. There are lots of variables that all need to be looked at and evaluated to find the sweet spots. It's why LCA's should be done for every option, including a ban. Identify what variable(s) are the low fruit to go after.

> One that is better solved with a deposit scheme

Ocado will pay 5p per bag, even other supermarkets' bags.

You also have to make the deposit amount high enough to convince people to use the mechanism.

I think the bag bans are more about the litter clogging up sewers, trees, streets, and breaking down into microplastics outside. I also think your number is cherry picked.

Here in the states, most grocery stores sell woven poly polypropylene, LDPE resusable bags, not cotton totes. The study you cite says it only takes 4 reuses of an LDPE bag to beat a single use plastic bag, and 11 for the woven PPE kind, an order of magnitude better than cotton. That's only a month or two of grocery trips, and they last for years. I know I've reused the same ones for the past decade.

Yes, litter is a problem. But in the same article, note the impact for HDPE with a biodegradable additive for a marginal cost. Just saying there are many options, that's all.

Yes, I picked cotton because it's considered the luxury choice (given the context) and usually the one sold as the most environmentally friendly. Ie non bleached, organic, sustainably sourced etc that you don't usually see with plastic alternatives. (I did mean to make a point, but not mislead.)

Which is kinda my point... Plastics can fill a proper need and still be the most "green" choice. Same with paper or any "disposable".

But back to HDPE... Most people even reuse these at least once at home. And ignoring that, the nearest competitor is still twice the impact.

I'm not saying alternatives are bad, just that people need to be open to the fact that sometimes the unexpected alternative can be best.

And conversely, the "green" luxury alternative might actually be worst.

Next time you're at a supermarket count the number of people using cotton bags.

Cotton bags are completely irrelevant but are often cherrypicked by those with an agenda to push.

They're at least as popular where I am as the LDPE or woven plastic options; at least at Whole Foods type stores. But I didn't intend to mislead.

Besides my point is more that plastics have an appropriate place in the environmental scheme of things. Whether you treat them as disposable or reusable.

The plastic bag issue was a particularly conspicuous source of litter, somehow. They tended to blow away and get caught in trees and bushes. The 5p tax has cleaned up the visual environment quite dramatically, just as vaping has put a big dent in the cigarette litter.

It's certainly a problem and I don't mean to minimize it.

If you look at numbers, it's also enormously better here than in Asia. Like all of Europe and America are responsible for less than 5% of worldwide river/ocean litter.

Part of the problem is us (western society) shipping bulk "recyclables" overseas, which then get picked through for valuables, and the rest is often left out to be picked up by the next wind or rain.

One of the best things we could do for world wide river ocean litter pollution, is to just landfill low value recyclables domestically, instead of shipping then overseas. (Edit: or at least recycle them domestically, or with a trusted, regulated country)

Also applies somewhat to air quality with burning plastic for electricity.

Good point about landfills, they serve as carbon sinks when plastics make it there.

173 is less than 4 years if you shop groceries once a week or so, I already used mine longer than that (aside from a couple that I lost). Never washed them either. They can last another 10 years I think, unless they are lost.

Those bags are bad idea for random shopping, but they work well enough for regular trips. Just keep them in the car.

I expect people waste more cotton on socks and t-shirts, but that's neither here not there.

> The cost of just washing something can be relatively and unreasonably high, environmentally speaking.

We have a break room with a sink, reusable dinnerware, and disposable dinnerware. I cringed when I saw people washing a reusable plate in the sink. We're in Southern California. There's no way in which it is better for the environment to use gallons of water in order to keep a paper plate and a plastic fork out of the landfill.

Too often people take Reduce/Reuse/Recycle to heart without taking a broader view of all the resources that they are consuming.

I bought canvas bags at a local food coop back in 1994. I use them at least 2-4 times per week. I wash them every other year. 25 years later they are still going strong, some 4000+ uses. Plus they are biodegradable compare to plastic bags.

They are way sturdier then the ones sold now. To replicate them I’d have to make them myself or look on etsy.

That’s something I’m trying to get at, the wealthy and/or upper middle class have the luxury of having time for that cognitive load of certain “conscientious” activities like that.

The upper middle class and wealthy who already harm the environment more by flying frequently or driving a brand new 25MPG Audi instead of a 40MPG 10 year old Nissan Versa aren’t going to save the planet by going to a zero-waste fancy restaurant, and they might be eating at that restaurant to alleviate their own guilt because they know they’re using more than their fair share in the first place.

For every one of them there’s 15 people working two jobs and eating at a fast food joint with disposable cutlery because there is no other option that fits their schedule or budget. But they might be less wasteful anyway because they don’t have the money to buy a few thousand pounds of jet fuel.

> driving a brand new 25MPG Audi instead of a 40MPG 10 year old Nissan Versa

I know this is not your substantive point but ...

The extent to which CAFE standards have improved mileage even over the past 10 years should not be ignored, and you should check your assumptions about fuel economy. e.g. 2020 Audi A4 gets basically the same combined mileage as the 2010 Nissan Versa.

https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=29866&id=4...

> For every one of them there’s 15 people working two jobs and eating at a fast food joint with disposable cutlery because there is no other option that fits their schedule or budget

Very US-centric though, people in most european countries eat at home.

People in the US eat at home too. Do you mean to suggest Europeans eat at home more often? I could believe there's a small difference, but although Europe might not be covered in fast food chains at the same rate as the US, I'd guess smaller eateries more than make up for that.

I, and everyone I know from my European cultural background, cook basically every day.

OTOH I have some US friends who I am not even sure know how to cook

I, and nearly everyone I know here in the US, also cooks pretty much every day.

This both enlightens and pleases me :-)

> Very US-centric though, people in most european countries eat at home.

I'm in the US, and 95% of the time, I cook my own food and eat it at home. So does nearly everyone I know.

That seems a cultural thing. In Spain disposable cutlery would be unthinkable except for McDonalds. Any menu-of-the-day cheap blue-collar bar will have real cutlery and fabric.

It’s mostly for fast food and take-out places in the US, too.

> People prefer grocery stores that provide bags rather than require they bring their own.

Definitely cultural, AFAIK most Europeans brings their own bags for groceries and it's just automatic. Otherwise you have to buy a new bag at check-out.

That's because they stopped giving them for free: ~10 years ago we still had plastic bags everywhere in France.

Make people pay for their waste, usually it helps reducing them.

I find a lot of the bags and boxes I'm forced to use annoying. I buy one thing at the pharmacy and they print out a receipt that is sometimes 8 feet long (dead serious) and put it all in a bag that I would immediately throw away. I tell them I don't need the bag, but I'm still stuck with these ridiculous receipts full of coupons I don't care about. Purely from an annoyance standpoint, this bothers me a great deal.

I know the company/cashiers assume it's expected of them, but to me it's like the gallon sized drinks at fast food chains. It aggravates me that anyone thinks it's necessary.

The Amazon packing and boxing situation is a whole other level of annoying.

Being a luxury isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s some cost to being a trailblazer, but it opens the trail for others to follow.

In this case, being able to pick and choose suppliers who can accommodate their needs is a luxury, but once the suppliers are tooled for that, it’s easier for others with less clout to follow.

A lot of changes are chicken and egg scenarios, where the market can’t move without the supply chain, and the supply chain can’t move without the demand. If someone has the means to kickstart that, more power to them. For example, 10 years ago smartphones were a luxury - now I know homeless people who use them to access public services. And I don’t see how we could have got to this point, without starting at “luxury”.

...a portion of waste reduction can simply be a change in habits and doesn’t necessarily cost anything.

My father had a restaurant long ago. He hired a professional and prestigious cooker (the the title "chef" was not so common then) and the first thing he noticed is that everything was used.

There were a thousand tricks to plan the menus so meat not served were reused for broth and so on.

This is the old way of cooking - waste means you have to go pull it out of the fields or kill it yourself.

Honestly, its a sign of a great (and often family or locally run) restaurant when I see they are rolling their menu into the next day in a circumspect way - its a sign to me that they understand their menu very well and know the best ways to present it.

> Sure, a fancy expensive restaurant can afford to do this

Looks like a pretty humble vegetarian bistro to me? Far from fancy.

And I would have thought someone best places to have a huge impact here might be someone like McDonalds, with their supplier clout they could force suppliers to meet high standards and with their scale it could have a huge impact.

Humble? Look at the menu. The cheapest glass of wine is $12. $13 cocktails, $20+ small plates, $15 cheese board for one. It’s not a vegetarian restaurant, either.

I know this isn’t New York Expensive but it’s not working class food, either.

Restaurant prices are based on the cost of real estate. Cheaper places assume more tables per square foot and more turns per table. Prices are based on average spend per cover.

$12 glasses of wine seems more than reasonable for NYC, especially since natural wine often comes in at a higher cost than mass produced wine.

> it’s not working class food

Seems exactly like simple working-class food to me - preserved fish and vegetables, pickled eggs, pies, breads.

If a pickled egg if your idea of fancy then I'm perplexed.

Homemade pickles and preserves are undoubtedly fancy these days. They were only working-class foods when the working-class had to make them to have food throughout the year. Which was admittedly most of history, but the present is not the past.

Expensive and fancy are two different things. You're right, though, those prices look steep to me.

Why are you looking to businesses to initiate change? Rally for state regulation.

Setting aside the philosophical question around whether government should be compelling businesses to make these sort of changes, change has to come at all levels, from personal to organizational to government, and businesses can implement change with much more immediacy than government can.

E.g., McDonald's shifting to cage-free hens for egg purchases. Regardless of the reasons, that was expected to have a huge impact on egg farming.

> government should be compelling businesses to make these sort of changes

That's exactly what governments do all the time. Every regulation on food safety, or pollution standards, etc. came from them. Because left to their own devices most businesses would settle on the same "maximize profits regardless of consequences" path.

P.S. Well you can "ask/demand" anything. But with no authority the process would be painfully slow, if even moving at all. Voting with the wallet works only when we have many good alternatives, which we usually don't.

I agree, but that's orthogonal to the question of whether we should ask/demand businesses to do better.

This doesn't fall under philosophy. Businesses have financial incentives to not make environmentally friendly changes. They do have some marketing incentives to change, but that has proven itself solvable via greenwashing. If you wait for a for-profit organization to become socially aware, when their financial incentives are not aligned, you'll be waiting a long time.

Does the state have any expertise in how to reduce food supply waste? Not sure why you’d task them over people who know the problem intimately.

The state doesn't have to tell you how, just to mandate it. See pollution standards where the point isn't to come up with a technical solution but with a measurable expectation.

>A lower climate impact is almost like a luxury item.

Only from the perspective of a citizen of a wealthy country trapped in a mindset of consumerism. Inhabitants of wealthy countries on average consume multiples of what inhabitants of poorer countries do.¹ The easiest way to lower your climate impact is to simply consume less. This doesn't cost anything, and in fact saves you money.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

You generally don't have ice in your beer. Because ice makes beer gross (I'd like to find the scientific reason why, but it just does). Soda and water are typically served with ice, and it is difficult to drink it without a straw. Especially crushed ice.

Now if you had a lid on the cup similar to car coffee mugs (where the top is indented with a small hole for the liquid to flow through), then that could be a solution for the straws.

> That’s not exactly a solution to the dives and street food joints that couldn’t operate without some form of disposable containers or cutlery. And more importantly, that’s not a solution to the customers of those dives that can’t afford anything more expensive.

Street vendors could dispense into your container or charge you for a disposable one.

I don't see it as a solution, more like an experiment.

Zero waste is impractical. But having a zero waste restaurant showcases possible solutions for more practical waste reduction.