Germany to meet EU guidelines to ban single-use plastics by 2021
mymodernmet.com
mymodernmet.com
It's not that plastic doesn't cause expenditure of resources but rather that life requiees that anyway and in most use cases plastic may be the most enviormently friendly way to answer a need such as a carrying vessel for forgetful people (again, in 1st world countries with excellent waste management)
[0] https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
I don't think this is the case in reality though. I live in a coastal city in a "first world" country and waste management here can't deal with seagulls getting hold of bin bags and ripping them to pieces for the food inside, scattering plastics that blow into the sea. People are also terrible at disposing of things carefully - there's plenty of plastic waste floating around after a weekend of people on the beach.
By "bin bags", I presume you're talking about the bags you use to put garbage in. If you get rid of those, what are you going to replace it with? Paper bags? Those aren't going to hold moist garbage very well.
This is a very petty matter from an environmental standpoint though. Buying a foreign imported cheese just once probably negates anything I've gained from an environmental standpoint. I bought the bag because one time one of those shitty thin plastic bags tore and smashed my spaghetti sauce on the sidewalk. My fabric bag is very sturdy and has never torn. (Come to think of it, what's the environmental impact of wasted spaghetti sauce?)
Where I live, we banned plastic bags in 2017. Every store at first sold cloth bags, for buyers who didn't bring their own. Some weeks later, everyone had several reusable bags, that they would bring when buying stuff, not a hard thing to do.
Those bags last even years, so I don't understand why you think people wouldn't reuse them. They actually are quite better (they don't make my fingers hurt, won't break so easily, etc).
I don’t know about you but even if a bag lasts for years I don’t think it will be reused more than 1000 times.
You can use a cloth bag 131 times easily.
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable
If like you assume the bag will not be used more than 1000 times, it beats it's target to be better than plastic bags by a factor of 10.
Many grocery stores "complied" by replacing the single-use bags with much thicker "reusable" plastic bags. So now customers still don't bring their own bags into the store, the new bags still aren't easily recyclable and I suspect most are thrown away just as before.
Edit: on the other hand, the city of Austin's waste management is very supportive of recycling and hopefully they'll support plastic film in the single-stream collection and make it much easier for the average person to do the right thing.
In Germany, single use plastic bags have not been allowed in supermarkets for several years now and it has worked quite well IMO.
Yes you can buy thicker re-usable bags (sometimes made out of textiles or a mixture of textiles and plastic) but by far many people bring their own bags, or just load the stuff into shopping trollies and take it to their cars (unfortunately the petrol/diesel car culture is still going strong :( ).
Also, in places like Lidl and Aldi, it's quite normal to just look for an empty box of some product on the shelf(e.g. a box that had some canned goods) and use that as your 'basket', stuff your items there, pay, go home and dispose of the box in the paper recycle bin.
EDIT: I also forgot to mention, as an example of culture/attitude: plastic bags are still available for fruit & vegetables but even then, people do make their own choice to just take the produce without a bag, and place it 'loose' at the cashier for them to weigh.
I wonder about supermarket food in particular. Most of it comes in at least one layer of single use plastic - I think plastic can be the right product, but it would need reusable plastics that are standardised and used across different companies products. A bit like how nearly all Chinese takeaways use a variant of a cheap but reusable plastic container (but they're not quite standardised, particularly the radius of the lid corners).
I'd love to see say 20 different allowed packages, you return after use, they're cleaned (or recycled if damaged), and used for more food. No more half full tubs carefully concealed with labels!
I wonder what the stats say vs GPs impressions of Austin?
Piece of fruit wrapped in cling film, shrink-wrapped in plastic, tucked into a foam lattice, placed into a styrofoam mold, put in a box, wrapped in paper, then wrapped again by the shop, placed in a small bag that goes into a larger bag.
Even as an American, I never really knew wastefulness until I started going to Japan.
You do also get whole vegetables in plastic packaging, but there has been a push to remove this. I believe one of the major supermarkets (Morrissons) has recently removed all plastic packaging from fresh produce.
Really crummy paper bags for (dry) fresh food isolation, heavier re-usable for takeout and carry. It's nice to have bags to be able to give to others and forget about.
Re-usable produce containers should be sold too, and I'd prefer if those were sold from a special part of the store so that consumers could pack in their own togo containers.
How? Random search turned up
>According to the previously cited U.K. study, it takes three reuses of a paper bag to neutralize its environmental impact, relative to plastic. A bag’s impact is more than just its associated carbon emissions: Manufacturing a paper bag requires about four times as much water as a plastic bag. Additionally, the fertilizers and other chemicals used in tree farming and paper manufacturing contribute to acid rain and eutrophication of waterways at higher rates.
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable
I guess you can argue that paper bags are compostable, but I'm not sure whether that matters much. Plastic bags that are sitting in the landfill doesn't harm the environment, and their bulk is negligible due to how thin/light they are.
Failing all of the above, it is unlikely used paper bags end up on barges destined for the developing world for recycling, only to be dumped into the ocean.
Is using petroleum intrinsically bad? There are externalities with oil extraction, but growing a monoculture of trees for paper isn't stellar for the environment either. Also, plastic is stronger than paper (on a mass basis), hence plastic bags can be thinner than paper bags, which also carry advantages. I feel people irrationally like paper bags because it's more "natural" than plastic. It's insufficient to judge whether plastic or paper is better for the environment just by coming up a list of bullet points. A total lifecycle cost analysis is needed. Of the literature I've seen, paper bags are not better for the environment overall than plastic.
>Failing all of the above, it is unlikely used paper bags end up on barges destined for the developing world for recycling, only to be dumped into the ocean.
addressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763885
Yes. It should be phased out of all use cases, as quickly as possible. We have proven ourselves incapable of being responsible stewards of the resource.
Most of the plastic in the oceans isn't coming from consumer waste[1]. Furthermore, most ocean pollution comes from a few developing countries[2]. Therefore a ban single-use plastics for consumers in developed countries will have little or zero impact on ocean pollution.
[1] "Ocean-based plastic originates mainly from the fishing industry, nautical activities and aquaculture" https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/marine-plastics
[2] https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...
That statement might be broadly true, but I doubt that it's accurate for plastic bags.
For china at least, only around 10% of their total waste is imported[1], so blaming it all on developed countries is questionable. The data is from before the ban, by the way.
I'm not sure what you're implying by putting "recycled" in quotes, but they're not definitely taking the plastic and dumping it into their rivers. They're paying us for the plastic[2], not the other way around. Plastic bags can't even be recycled in most jurisdictions, so it's unclear how they'd be imported into those developing countries in the first place.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#how-much-plasti...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/28/6239729...
The biodegradability of paper bags is the whole point here. You've seen the sides of the roads. You've seen the streams and rivers. People get done with their garbage and just throw it wherever. With garbage made out of plastic that doesn't break down, this is a big deal.
My local rivers are relatively plastic-free. Same with roads. They're not completely free of plastic, of course. Given that there are thousands of plastic bags being dispensed in my neighborhood every day and that the roads/rivers aren't being regularly cleaned, the fact that the neighborhood isn't completely filled with plastic bags makes me think that the overall disposal rate is pretty good.
Plastic litter might be the most visible externality of single use plastics, but I'm not quite sure whether tripling our co2 emissions from plastic bags is a worthwhile trade for eliminating plastic bags from our neighborhoods.
This has been my experience shopping in Austin, but it may vary based on neighborhood. The vast majority bring their own reusable bags. Those that forget to bring bags buy the plastic reusable bags (unless the store also offers free paper bags).
1) What I find it funny is banning plastic bags but at the same time many of the "bio" veggies and fruits come in plastic packaging to prevent contamination and hijacking (sometimes between the producer and consumer non bio stuff is introduced and sold like so)
2) And the funniest thing is that single plastic use is banned in a first world country where most of the food products come from the other side of the world. The CO2 footprint here in Germany is one of the biggest in Europe... Sometimes it feels a bit of green-washing all this news
A good start would be a carbon tax, but crucially it would have to apply to imports too
Of course, that's all out the window now with reusable bags banned in stores indefinitely. And I assume it will take years before people go back to regularly using recyclable bags again in much of the US.
If I brought multiple use bags to buy groceries I’d have to buy plastic bags to use for trash.
At H-E-B you must pay for the thicker bags at $.24/ea, which incentivizes people to bring their own. I bring the same ones every time now.
At Central Market, Wheatsville & Whole Foods they give you paper bags.
Not sure about Randalls or Sprouts though
Many people re-use them for dog/cat waste disposal, as laundry bags when traveling, packing material, soiled diaper disposal, for coating meat prior to cooking, etc.
Now those people have to buy more plastic for these things, instead of re-using what they received while shopping.
The thicker reusable bags also now available here (usually costing 10p), and in practice they do actually see a lot of reuse.
It's high time we got more creative in the products we mass produce, we've grown complacent, something as simple as the plastic bag or the plastic straw have caused such environmental destruction yet can actually be phased out with behavioural modifications.
I would also argue that reusability and repairability is a part of the equation of 'long-term economic mass production', at least for day-to-day necessities where sterilisation isn't paramount.
Seriously, just looking at what I have lying around at home, even something as mundane and as simple as a broom seems to have special plastic elements (plastic hook on the top to hang on a wall, plastic lining in on the pole).
There's a lot of unnecessary un-recyclable waste out there and while banning Single-Use plastics is a great step in the right direction, we need a paradigm shift in how we think about the objects we construct.
It's not that I love plastic, it's just the optimal choice for food packaging now. Saying "I don't use plastic spoons" while following current consumption standards makes no dent whatsoever.
[1] https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/muenchen-grosse-muell-luege... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Energy_consu...
IMO the value is not only in the concrete measures taken (e.g. using wooden spoons) but in the overall trend. We have the movement away from plastic right now and while some single actions or policies may only have a negligible effect there is a huge value in the big picture: Research for alternative materials, lots of companies and consumers trying to figure our ways to reduce waste and plastic usage. And boom, after a few years or decades we might have a plastic free future where everyone consumes less and close to 100% of materials are recycled.
Could we search for alternatives without banning single-use plastic bags? Probably yes but the workings of society are messy and not always rational so better take the path that actually works.
No, really. What about the dogpoo-bags?
It's mandatory to pack the shit of your dogs into bags, and drop them into some trashbin in most places here.
Example: https://www.hamburg.de/saubere-stadt/7174714/gassibeutel/
A paper bag or cotton swab with wooden stick just dissolves if it ends up in nature. Plastic versions are around for a long time.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the Paris Agreement covers climate change, carbon emissions, energy production, etc.
The topic of single-use plastics, while related to sustainability, covers an entirely different emerging issue, namely: the infiltration of micro-plastics into our environment.
Besides the environmental effects that microplastics already seem to have, such as hindering plant growth [1], microplastics are also entering the food chain, and making their way back to us. The long-term affects are as far as I know, quite unknown.
[1] German: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/umweltschutz-verbot-von-ei...