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Comment by s0rce | Hacker News Reader

California is pursuing similiar bans on single use plastics, and some are already banned in certain metro areas. Unfortunately, it seems like various restaurants and stores have simply started to distribute "non-single use" versions of the takeout containers and plastic bags which are more robust (ie. use more material), however, its likely these simply get discarded anyways which makes the problem worse. Other than the round "deli" containers which are great and I actually re-use. Only a few restaurants have switched to glass canning jars which can be reused easily, given away or recycled.

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I have thought about this a bit and I wonder why can't you just have a return fee for the "non-single use" (probably glass) container. This would not be unheard of, if you've ever bought the expensive milks that come in a glass bottle you will get money if you bring the container back to the store (at least where I live). Also things like kegs and propane containers operate this way.

The problem is that this system at scale would require a widely accepted standard of "container", otherwise people would just accumulate an endless number of different containers for different restaurants so nothing ends up being reused.

That's what happens with most beers sold in bottles in Poland, there's a standardized bottle shape, you pay a little extra when buying such a beer. Even so, there's still a lot of beer bottles being trashed. Maybe the price is too low for most of people. In turn, this is what a lot of homeless people do, they collect such bottles for reimbursement.

In Canada that's referred to as a deposit and retailers will often price it on shelves without the deposit invluded, because technically it's like borrowing a shopping cart. Very related to this discussing, this week I found a $0.25 deposit on a 1.5L $2 plastic water bottle. That's enough for me to consider some kind of alternative.

In addition to replacing single use plastic bags with heavy weight reusable bags. We can't reuse bags any more due to covid19. So now we are single using heavy weight reusable plastic bags.

That’s weird. In Ontario we just temporarily shut off the fee for single use bags and used them while things were bad.

This is one proposed ban in California endorsed by Recology: https://plasticsfreeca.org

That is because it is an absurd waste of resources to use glass canning jars for takeout.

It might depend. Around my office in Paris there were a bunch of takeout salad bars that seemed fairly popular. Each would serve the salad in a dingy plastic bowl.

At some point last year, one of the places started selling glass bowls and inciting people to reuse them. They were pretty nice too, I actually went and bought one for my own use.

Most of those places' customers are people working in the local offices. So it's doable for them to wash the bowls and bring them back for another salad another day. I know at least one of the other salad bars would put your salad in your own bowl, so you wouldn't even be stuck going to the same place over and over.

It didn't really catch on with most people.

Having your own bowl won't give you any kind of discount at all. So I expect that aside from some people who actually want to do something for the environment, pretty much no one bothers to wash the bowl and drag it back to the salad place "for no reason". I think this also contributes to people's impression that plastic really is cheap (they're giving it away for free !) and that it's not really a problem for them to solve.

The most depressing thing is almost everything we do sucks for the environment at this scale. The only effective action I see is mass population decline. Just not having kids easily out weighs several lifetimes of being frugal.

I suppose it depends what your values are. Do you prioritize preserving the environment or maximizing the happiness and joy of human life? Those might not always, or even usually, be aligned.

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