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Comment by bit_logic | Hacker News Reader

Thinking about this more, wasn't there a time, maybe late 90s early 2000s when the message was that plastic is more environmental than paper? Something like at the supermarket checkout you should pick plastic over paper bags to save rain forest trees? Is my memory wrong or was this a widespread message at the time?

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This is what I remember as well. I remember my mother using her own rope net grocery bags as an alternative to the paper ones.

I remember in school we switched from single-portion paper milk cartons to square bags of milk that you punctured with a plastic straw. This was sold to us along with a muppet skit explaining how to use the milk bags (the muppets rated it "one thumb up and one thumb down, to cover the straw hole when you puncture the bag"). There was a poster in the cafeteria comparing the giant pile of milk cartons relative to the small pile of plastic pouches. We paid much more attention to what adults said than they ever gave us credit for, and they had been telling us about renewable and non-renewable resources, about recycling, about landfill space, and about externality. We knew, even if the rational outcome was the same, that it was more than big pile vs small pile.

I remember when bag fees started showing up, and at the checkout grocery stores began selling... reusable plastic bags. People seem to collect these now, maybe 30-40 per household, which is fine by me I'd rather have 40 bags in someone's pantry than 4,000 floating around outside. But it seems excessive. I've accumulated about that many: I on occasion "win a prize", family members bring items over and leave the carrying bags behind, donate money to anyone and you're sure to get a tote. I actually don't have any rope bags though I wish I did, my mother still has hers and she's not parting with them. I think the rope bags are more convenient than anything else, but then what happens to the 40 odd plastic bags I've accumulated?

> what happens to the 40 odd plastic bags I've accumulated?

We always used them as garbage can liners. Now that stores no longer have plastic bags we have to buy plastic bags. So instead of reusing the plastic bags we brought our groceries home in, we are buying brand new plastic bags instead. The same number of plastic bags are entering the landfill. The only difference is that now we have to pay for them.

I don't know where you live and how garbage disposal works where you live, but in general I would urge people not to do this. Proper garbage can bags are important because they don't spill out easily. This makes the job of the garbage disposal people much easier. Imagine having someone overworked and underpaid, working on autopilot and at fast pace, and suddenly your trash spills out. You will ruin that person's day.

At least in Los Angeles there are mechanized arms to pick up residential bins. I now live on the East Coast and that is no longer the case and definitely can’t use shopping bags as liners without consolidating them into a standard 13 gallon bag.

Generally they're used for smaller trash containers like you might find in a bathroom. We use them like this and when they're full they get tied closed (the handles make this easy) and placed in the larger main trash bag in the kitchen.

Where I live, there’s no manual handling of individual bags by waste management employees. You throw your trash bags directly into a large compactor; from there, it’s handled in bulk.

Where I lived previously, residents brought bags to a warehouse-like building maintained by the town. You dropped your trash through openings in the side of the building that resembled windows. Town employees used tractors equipped with giant claws to scoop up the trash and load it into dumpsters, which were then brought to landfills.

> I don't know where you live and how garbage disposal works where you live

a dump truck with a giant mechanical arm grabs my trash can, picks up over the top of the truck, flipping it around in the process, and then shakes it violently.

Same here. I’m very surprised to learn that these aren’t universal.

Are there really still places In the US where people actually have to physically manhandle garbage into a truck?!

Boston. New York. San Francisco (inner).

Yup. Many rural areas like ours have weekly garbage collection. It's an ancient truck, with the same 3 guys ever since I moved here nearly 10 years ago. They hand toss every single bag. And when the truck breaks down they collect the trash in a pickup truck and handle it twice, once loading it and once unloading it.

My wife has been hoarding them for the last 10 years. I agree with reuse, but at the rate we use them vs the rate we consume them we have enough for the next 200 years.

I think it's more efficient all around to pay for them.

You could bring them back with you to reuse at the grocery store to balance use as liners vs new consumption. That's what I did before the plastic bag bans went into effect. Now I buy liners.

> The only difference is that now we have to pay for them.

Nitpick: you always had to pay for them, the cost was built in to the purchase price.

So, now that they no longer provide bags, but prices have not gone down at all, the grocery stores are suddenly seeing their profits increase?

> We always used them as garbage can liners

I started doing this "before it was cool" back in the 1990s. I wasn't aware of other people doing it so I couldn't understand why they weren't. I learned since then and I still do it today. Why use something once when you can at least use it twice?

Nothing is stopping you from reusing the plastic bags. My plastic bag accumulation rate is low because I always have one or two - they are very small when folded - in my backpack.

I do the same. Plastic bags are quite convenient, are often easier to clean than fancy reusable bags, can be given away without a second thought, and fit nicely in a backpack when folded. Whenever I get a new one, I fold it up and put it in a box in my coat closet. Going shopping? Grab a few, stick them in my car or backpack.

They last practically forever—certainly longer than the cheap reusable bags that have a tendency to tear and stain.

I remember cashiers asking me "would you like to kill a tree or kill a fish?"

"The tree is already dead. I'll take that one."

There were some life-cycle analyses done which created quite a stir arguing that plastic was better when the full life-cycle was considered. I can't find the original paper but here's a summary [1] of studies with sources (from a bag website)

1: http://www.allaboutbags.ca/papervplasticstudies.html.

Not sure if a site compiled by the Canadian Plastics Industry Association is a great source here. Even though it cites sources, there's probbaly some strong selection bias going on here.

I missed it was from a plastics association. But my point about the life-cycle analysis work is still valid - I studied this a little in grad-school and the paper v plastic bag trade-off was frequently discussed because of the surprising results.

(Life-cycle analysis does have huge assumptions involving usage, so it's not an exact science)

I'm not sure life-cycle analysis is that useful in this case.

If a paper bag requires more energy to produce, it could still be better for the environment as it doesn't stay around polluting the world forever.

It was in my circles, I remember some passionate eco types arguing I should use plastic bags because they were recyclable, and paper bags "killed trees".

I know paper right now doesn't have a great environmental footprint, but paper does seem like a pretty good way to trick capitalism into planting lots of trees.

Or to just use whatever trees are left and leave the next generation to worry about planting new ones...

Eh, it's mostly replanting what has been destroyed previously, and with only a few fast growth species who don't make very useful wood for other purposes, while more varied forests are being destroyed to make room. It's pretty hard to "trick" capitalism into serving other interests than its own.

And yet, capitalist societies have stricter environmental regulations and the people living in capitalist societies tend to be more concerned about the environment. Look up the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea for their environmental records and compare those to the US or Western Europe. Here's the US, page 7 please: https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/Forest...

It's probably a mix of being overall rich enough that we can think about other problems (like the environment) and because spending money and consuming is actually a choice. A market driven by consumers choice will create a market for greener products. The more power the government has the less they care about anyone else but the elite. And they for sure won't care about the terrible conditions of the environment in paesants-ville.

Traditional forestry in Europe was keen on preserving total forest area for future harvest. And after the general shift from burning wood to burning coal, forests actually expanded.

In my country (Czechia) the contemporary forest cover is about twice as much as in the 18th century and several per cent bigger than in 1950.

The problem is species composition. Those forests are mostly monocultural and prone to devastating disease / pest outbreaks.

Seems like an interesting computational ecology problem.

I don't know about forest cover, but we have the same issues in Sweden. The biological diversity in areas used for forestry is poor compared to untouched forests. The recent dry weather has been very good for a kind of beetle that has destroyed vast amounts of trees. Forests that were untouched, or just mixed kind, did a lot better.

Regulation is slowly catching up though, and some of the larger companies have actually started doing more than is required by law.

That’s actively happening!

An ex-coworker of mine has been working with a team on a drone tree-planting startup that is bidding to take on government and heavy industry contracts.

IIRC there are several companies working in that space and surprisingly not more.

Though I suppose that social guilt and pressure is still required to get those heavy industrial corps to want to wear a big green badge boating about all the trees they’ve planted.

Yeah I remember this transition from paper to plastic bags. It was the whole "save the trees" movement. Save the trees... and destroy the ocean instead.

I definitely remember this, in the 90s. And it was around the same time that fast food restaurants (well, McDonald's at least) switched from styrofoam burger clamshells to the paper type. That was driven by environmentalists who didn't like landfills accumulating. There was also some ozone layer concerns I think?

So paper was the better choice for the burger, yet plastic was the better choice for your groceries.

I also remember Vons introduced photodegradable bags.(!) They were supposed to alleviate the litter concerns, while also allowing you to save a tree I think? I'm trying to find something online to back this up, but I remember the novelty of it when they first introduced it.

Styrofoam clamshell packaging used to use CFCs as the blowing agent, I think, but that hasn't been true for decades now.

From a global warming perspective, plastic bags are generally better for the environment because they are extremely light, therefore use less gas to ship. However, plastic bags often end up in nature, where plastic particles end up in animals and plants.

Unfortunately, most people are so completely brainwashed that they feel proud of themselves for putting their plastic in the (open topped) recycling bin where it blows out, goes down the drain and ends up in the sea. They imagine that putting it in normal (closed top) rubbish will cause it to end up in a seagull's stomach, starving it to death while "recycling" allows them to sit back and gloat about how lucky they are to have the opportunity to save the planet.

I saw a bird nest once that the bird had lined with shredded bits of plastic bag to reinforce it.

Plastic does have a (significantly) lower carbon footprint per bag than paper to produce. This doesn't factor in disposability, of course, but that's probably where that message originated from.

That seems like the type of analysis where someone lumped in the coal fired power station as well. Those are always the most disingenuous ones.

Not really. Plastic is stunningly inexpensive for what it does. That's why it's so ubiquitous. A grocery bag takes a few grams of material at most, and the feedstock is dirt cheap to boot. It's almost impossible to compete with that on a per-unit cost basis if you don't take externialities in to account.

The 'good' news is that the vast majority of plastic waste in the ocean isn't diffuse from around the globe; rather, it is concentrated in a few rivers in asia. The reason for this is that the countries these rivers pass through don't have modern waste collection and landfill infrastructure. It's not exciting to talk about, but this means that helping China, India, and the SE Asian nations build waste management facilities would do more to help the world plastic pollution problem than anything else by orders of magnitude.

(We still need biodegradable plastics. But, much like shale gas being helpful because it decommissions even-worse coal, simple proper waste management will put a huge dent in the problem before the ultimate solution becomes available.)

[edit]

The problem with plastic is that it doesn't rot. So if you leave it outside it's going to stay there for a long time and mess up nature. If you put it in a land fill it's not a problem. Paper is more energy intensive because plastic bags require very little plastic. Most of them weigh 5 grams.

I remember this from that same time period. I was just thinking about that the other day. I don't even recall when the message flipped back over, but it absolutely happened.

The type of trees killed for paper (and timber) here in New Zealand are utter trash, pinus radiata.

I think the argument is more about the native forests that were destroyed to farm pine trees.

Yeah I remember that too. I worked in a grocery store in the 90’s and we were told to default to plastic for the simple reason that it was less expensive.

Managers hated nothing more than the customer who requested “paper, double bagged”. I think our cost was about 3 cents per paper bag if I recall the training video correctly. Because of generally low margins it really eats into profits.

In New York, plastic grocery bags have been outlawed. You can get paper bags, but the stores charge 5 cents per. Reusable bags are now the standard, but that requires some longer term use to pay off.

Where I live they are mainly banned as well and if you don’t bring your own bags then you have to pay a small tax for paper bags. I’m mainly ok with this since we drive to the store and can plan ahead. It’s a bit annoying when you go somewhere on the way home though and don’t have them with you. If the money was being used to actually fund proper recycling I wouldn’t care but it’s probably being used to pay off interest on government bonds.

Pay a tax, or actually pay for the bag? The bag is not free. If previously they were being provided free, the cost of those bags was being folded into the cost of all the goods in the store.

All store goods using plastic in packaging should be heavily taxed.

This is an argument that comes up often, e.g. gas tax should be used for roads.

The misconception is that it sees taxes only as a means of generating revenue to offset the cost or externalities of what’s being taxed.

But taxes are also important in steering behavior. In this case by forcing bags to To be non-free (and not allowing stores to compete by advertising free bags) it incentivizes folks to start bringing their own bag. The revenue is inconsequential.

Except for all the new little fees and taxes are being used to pay off pension debt, etc. I’d complain less if my local taxes were better being used to serve the community rather than pay a 50 year olds pension that moved off to a state without income tax. A pension that was agreed to by the crooked pols that got elected by the same public unions they had to “negotiate” with.

I agree about steering behavior and I think it should be used more often rather than bans on things.

I remember that also. Save the trees, use plastic. But I think it was earlier than the late 90s.

Recall that up until extremely recently- only a few decades ago- the nation was rapidly exhausting its timber supplies. It was not managed as a renewable resource.

That must have been around 1910, according to page 7 of this document: https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/Forest...

I don't think that chart is describing actual canopy coverage or timber supply.

Since 1630, about 256 million acres of forest land have been converted to other uses—mainly agricultural. Nearly two-thirds of the net conversion to other uses...

It's a land area/land use statement. Clearcut scars in Forest Service land are, more than likely, still considered forest land.

The general fight I remember from the 80's-90's timeframe was over clearcutting old growth, mainly in the Pacific Northwest.

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