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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> 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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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...

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.

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