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Comment by air7 | Hacker News Reader

From my reading of the data, I feel that banning plastic bags (for example) would do more harm than good (in 1st world countries). The alternatives require more reuse than actually occurs in order to be environmentally viable [0], waste management makes sure that no garbage gets into the ocean and is either kept in a landfill or incinerated responsibility. And "dumping plastic overseas" is a non issue: Its at most 10% of the exporting country's plastic waste.

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-...

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> The alternatives require more reuse than actually occurs.

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).

Because there is a study showing that some bags needs to be reused 50,000 times, degradable plastic bags which are then reused as rubbish bags or put into recycling are a better option than the trendy cloth bags that have a pretty substantial environmental impact and not the beneficial kind.

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.

It's not 50000 times. It's 131 times. Paper bags 3 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.

Ok then make a sturdy and reusable plastic bag.

"waste management makes sure that no garbage gets into the ocean"

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.

>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.

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.

Yes, and I admit the mention of bin bags might have been an unintentional red herring. I was just intending to point out that even in a "first world" country with supposedly good waste management, lots of plastic gets into the sea. Better not to have the single-use plastic in the first place. Bin liners can be made from things like starch. Those are generally for compostable waste, but I don't believe for a moment that companies wouldn't come up with something suitable pretty rapidly if there was money to be made.

No need to replace them. My grandparents shrugged when first introduced to garbage bags as they were used (from soviet times) to carry the trash out with the bin, empty it to the trash container and be done. Seems easier and also one less thing to worry about. You do have to wash the trash can regularly, but that's the case even with garbage bags, albeit not as big.

There are also those idiots that will flush anything down a toilet. Regularly causes trouble where I live.

I'm probably up to somewhere around 2,000 uses on my fabric grocery bag, using it a few times a week for the past 10 years. It shows no signs of wearing out, so I should be able to exceed that 7,100 reuses easily enough.

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?)

We banned single use bags in NZ more than a year ago, there was a bit of a learning curve while people got used to bringing their own bags but in general it's been succesfull. People now mostly remember to bring bags to the supermarket, I keep mine in the car.

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