New Jersey bans paper bags
mleverything.substack.com
mleverything.substack.com
In that order. Each one of those has a higher cost than the one before it.
Change takes getting used to. Yeah, you’ll forget your bags for a while, but eventually it will become a normal thing.
While I understand that it makes sense to ban plastic bags, I don't believe banning paper bags has nearly any positive impact on the environment.
If it's true that there really are no disposable bag regulations in Switzerland, then the much different outcome under the similar regulations also supports my point. If New Jersey thinks it has a problem where bags need to be reused more, then it would make sense to spell that out in law and nudge towards the overall desired solution (more reuse) rather than simply banning "disposable" (ie cheaply made) bags and hoping that people will automatically reuse more resource-costly ones.
That is literally what 'the market' always means.
You're right, in the short term a law banning plastic single use bags likely results in an increase in the number of multi-use bags people buy because they forgot. How long do you expect this cycle to go on for? I'm going to imagine it's "a few months" for most people, before you start leaving a couple bags in the back seat of your car. People are pretty clever and adaptable. It's akin to saying that we need to ban new calendar years because everyone writes the old calendar year for a few days in January. It seems pretty reasonable that people can and will, broadly speaking, remember their shopping bags.
The bottom line is that the tragedy of the commons is in full effect when it comes to plastic generally, and plastic bags specifically. We got addicted to them, and they're terrible. I'm going to write this one more time: We got addicted to them and they're terrible. Short term financial gains for long term environmental pains. We should have never switched from paper bags, but plastic solved a lot of problems, and nobody seemed to notice or care about the waste issue. This law itself may not be "fixing" the issue entirely, but it's forcing consumer change and that pain alone might helpful in solving the issues long term by forcing people to think about the topic.
Want to save the environment? lets focus on electrifying power tools and standardizing batteries so there is less gas used and e-waste. Let's encourage insulating old buildings. We should reward reduced packaging, more bulk purchase options. Doors should be required on coolers in grocery stores. Require greywater systems in new or renovated buildings. Mandate usage of native plant species for lawns/green areas. limit dilution of water based products.
I was around back then, and I seem to recall the switch was partially driven by environmentalist concerns due to deforestation.
It's not obvious to me. The article certainly attempted to make the claim, but the evidence was rough. Heck the evidence that most people find it inconvenient what that "most people don't have reusable bags with them all the time". Neither do I, yet somehow have been using them for years without issue.
> It's terrifying not knowing the underlying forces that are causing such a perversion to democracy.
Could it be that that your original thesis is wrong and it's not deeply unpopular, and not "perversion of democracy" at all?
But New York State legalized cannabis in 2021, instead of just decriminalizing it. From The New York Times, published in March 2021 [0]: “After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs.
“Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.”
This may seem like a minor nitpick, but the factual error invites scrutiny over the accuracy of the rest of the article. The author does link sources to the other claims in the article, but I’m now by default skeptical to believe the other assertions in the article until I can evaluate whether their linked sources are legitimate.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/nyregion/marijuana-seller...
> But you can’t purchase weed without a prescription or sell it without a license until state regulators write rules for recreational use of the drug.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/new-york-has-legaliz...
And? Most of the reusable bags in my house are 3-5 years old. We even have a couple that we brought with us when we moved home 11 years ago. Using them hundreds of times is the whole point.
The author's not wrong that it takes more effort to remember the bags, but after a few false starts, it becomes habit.
Also, most of the points made are moot, e.g.
> If there’s anything a person that orders from Whole Foods regularly needs is a dozen reusable plastic bags every few weeks and $10 added to their bill.
Anything delivered by Costco doesn't come in plastic bags, but reused boxes. Order from Costco, then, as they seem to have fixed it already.
> This is all based on a false notion of landfills being bad or the idea that we’re running out of landfill space.
Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
> Most of the trash that ends up in the ocean is coming from a handful of countries which are overwhelmed from recyclables sent from the US.
The disconnection here is palpable. If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them? Are these other countries to blame for not recycling our trash properly?
The recycling point is about the fact that much of the US is greenwashing their actions by thinking they're doing some noble deed by recycling, when they're really just spending a lot of money shipping their trash to other countries that end up throwing a lot of it in the ocean when we could have a sane policy of using landfills.
I only see the author's hypothesis about why not having paper bags is a bad thing. The only firm statement is that it seems "inconvenient", while all the other points are firmly based on a supposedly unavoidable need for bags.
Bags are just containers. Why wouldn't we be reusing boxes for grocery delivery? There are reusable bags, why did the author assume that using a cotton bag a hundred plus times is not reasonable?
Just stating that landfills aren't "bad" is not much of an address, either.
This law could easily end up with a net negative environmental impact.
It seems that the author main point is that they are "inconvenient":
> This law is a huge inconvenience for most people in the state. How can I tell? Because from my experience, the overwhelming majority of people choose not to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags.
To which anyone would reply that, if you are going grocery shopping, just bring your bags?
I mean, I'm old enough to remember when stores didn't give bags away, and people were doing just fine. Why the fuss over bringing a good practice back?
I don't know how often you go shopping, but 132 shopping trips is a lot. If you go shopping once a week with the same bags every time, your four-year-old bags would have crossed the threshold less than a year ago.
It's good that your bags are recycled, and I have no idea if the author's metric was assuming recycled materials. However, since the recycling process is not particularly clean, I suspect the numbers still aren't great.
> if you are going grocery shopping, just bring your bags?
The problem is, what happens when I get to a store and I don't have a bag with me? I'm going to need to buy a new one. If this happens on more than 1 out of 132 shopping trips, I'll end up with a greater carbon impact than if I'd used a single-use bag.
Now, maybe you'd argue that I should never forget my bag. Maybe so, but I can tell you that I'm going to forget, and I'd posit that a lot of other people are going to forget too. The question is not what people should do, but what this law will in fact cause them to do.
IMO, a simple 10¢ surcharge per plastic bag would be far more effective.
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(It is admittedly worse for me because I live in Manhattan and don't have a car. I often go to stores I pass while on a walk, when I don't have a bag with me because I was not explicitly planning to go shopping. Even so, I suspect car owners will also forget their bags from time to time. Also, environmental policies should encourage no- and low-car lifestyles.)
And then it would make it an actual problem for the poor, more so than OP hypothesis that the law "affects poor people the most as they are the most likely to reuse single use bags as garbage liners".
Because a surcharge on single use bags is essentially turning them into a luxury, i.e. if you are poor, you may not go grocery shopping without planning it first.
I don't see how that's fair.
Secondly... I consider myself on the liberal side of the political spectrum, I think income inequality is a huge problem and we need stronger social safety net. However, I really reject the idea that if some comfort wouldn't be available to poor people, it shouldn't be available to anyone. We want to achieve equality by raising the standard of living at the low end, not lowering the high end. The latter just makes everyone worse off.
Personally I think people should avoid grocery delivery unless they really need it. In any case, many people don't have access to Costcos.
> Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
Landfills are a practical solution for waste production levels we have now. Striving to have less of them is the right thing to do but it's not happening tomorrow.
> If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them?
Sure, one solution is to take responsibility for long-term management of our wasteful consumption and put them in landfills stateside instead of shipping them around the world. Then we can reduce our waste over time and, hopefully, find ways to clean up these landfills.
For environmental/waste reasons? It's not obvious that the world is better served by you driving to the supermarket yourself instead of someone else doing it for you.
Sure, maybe you were passing by anyway, and can combine multiple trips. But the economies of scale mostly work the other way: the delivery driver can deliver to multiple households, the supermarket can deliver straight from a warehouse instead of spending time stacking shelves optimized for display.
Or do you just think people these days shouldn't be so damn lazy as to need someone else to do their grocery shopping? Perhaps they should also grow their own food and sew their own clothes.
They are not as bad as is generally thought. Landfills are essentially big compost piles, and the heat generated from decaying organic material breaks down almost everything, including most plastics. The few things that are left, such as metals, are actually valuable enough to extract in a lot of cases. The primary thing to worry about is lead contamination but this is less of an issue now that lead has been removed from most consumer products. Compare that to recycling, which is extremely energy intensive and has its own impacts on climate change, while landfills can actually generate a net positive amount of energy.
Are you saying that yet another source of heat production, when we already have global warming going on, is a good thing?
Reducing waste is good as well, this law is a silly way to do it.
The source they get their info from is interesting, though. (Linked below.) According to this, depending on which study you're looking at, it may actually be impossible to reuse any bags enough times that they become worth it compared to ditching them in general.
The lowest possible seems to be paper bags with 3 reuses, followed by plastic bags at around 10, then if you have a durable enough cotton bag to get through 130 uses it becomes the better option environmentally speaking. I've never known anyone that could reuse any of those bags enough to get through that many uses before they tear to the point of uselessness though.
I wonder if it would be advantageous to encourage stores and individuals to start using crates or woven bags again, which may be able to withstand the number of trips necessary to make their environmental impact neutral compared to plastic bags.
Their source: https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/08/heres-how-many-times-y...
That' what we do in Fairfax County. At the end of check-out, you have to enter how many bags you used, and get charged a small fee for each. I wish the fee was a bit larger, to try an dissuade more people from simply paying it, but it seems better than an outright ban.
The core issue is that any tax on bags like this is a regressive tax. A tax that is big enough to make changes in how upper middle class households operate would have a highly disproportionate effect on lower middle class and those in poverty.
The result is areas like the DC metro doing things like a $0.05 bag tax. A number probably too small to change any behaviors at a relevant scale.
I don’t have a nice solution to these topics either— it’s just that these bag taxes feel like the poster child for middle of the road policies that fail to have a meaningful impact on the issue they’re seeking to address
It certainly feels like part of the problem is the way we've built our neighborhoods. It's inconvenient to shop regularly, so we all go weekly and buy a trunk full of food. Lots of bags. Lots of packaging. Etc.
The same material could probably be used to make sturdier shopping bags if they increased the thickness and added handles. Exceptions to these anti-plastic bag ordinances should be added for this type of recycled bag, to encourage its use.
Similarly, make an exception for recycled paper bags. Just banning all disposable bags seems overly broad and counter-productive.
I see this trend where environmentalist writing will try to convert every "environmental" change into a single unit, some kind of "Equivalent Trees Saved". The environment is too complex for something like that. Plastic waste isn't meaningfully convertible to CO2 emissions for the purposes of environmental impact, and deforestation, oil/chemical spills, and invasive species aren't either.
Tough brown paper and cardboard is made from the trashiest of trashy recycled paper material.
All you're doing by eliminating paper bags or cardboard is reducing the number of times that a tree will benefit anyone from the time it is cut to the time it is either land-filled or burned.
If you want to see a larger fraction of paper and pulp products "go around again" then you need to do things that increases the market size of the low end products that get made with the source materials that can't be made into anything else.
An obvious case of this is minimum square footage laws on residential housing. They seem to show up in many areas across the south east United States. Setting a minimum square footage of 1500 sq. ft. clearly does not impact the millionaire building a 6500 sq. ft. home with a pool and a 4 car detached garage. But someone trying to purchase their first home does get impacted by it, as they probably don't need 3 bedrooms but can't find housing with anything less.
Don't hurt yourself bearing that cross of "doing good" though.
The real critique is what percentage of bags can actually be reused that way? I can see dog owners keeping up with the constant influx of shopping bags, but I would think anyone else would develop a surplus quite quickly.
The biggest saving on waste comes from a single re-use. If every plastic bag was used twice we'd need half as many. (If course a third re-use is better, only need 1/3 as many etc.)
I see the downvotes are already communicating this, but there's no need to be so cockstrong when talking to other nerds. Most people here are just normal folks like us, its easier to just chill out and talk. Your point travels further when it isn't deployed as an attack.
https://thesavvyage.com/turn-your-plastic-bags-into-sleeping...
Wow. Excellent analysis! Haha. Figure. It. Out. You're an adult. I keep a bag of bags in my car, and for when I walk to the grocery store, I have another bag of bags. So far my life hasn't changed much.
I have a spoiler alert for the future for this author: The overwhelming majority of people will start choosing to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags when they need to.
For me the shift was very akin to masking up during COVID-19. I found it hard and weird for about 3wks, now it's just part of going out. Leaving the house? You need a mask and your bags.
Also, i used to be poor and we took cardboard/wood boxes to carry our vegetables, it was used to lit our fireplace. We rarely took single use plastic bags, and it was before 2005
If anything, banning plastic bags would be a better fit for the narrative. Plastic bags are water resistant, and used to be more resilient and thus more reusable than paper bags. In some Asian countries, plastic bags are used to carry food, even soup, replacing more expensive containers.
Let's suppose because of bag laws, 100,000,000 cars in the U.S. are now carrying around 1 extra pound wherever they go. And that all the cars are gas. (My car's electric, but I don't want to confound the calculations).
Let's assume that the average car travels 12 miles/day (this is probably low).
The fuel cost to haul 2.5 pounds 12 miles/day 100,000,000 times/day is not insignificant. And nobody ever calculates this when comparing reusable bags to disposable bags.
Those ones aren't fungible with disposable bags, which don't insulate.
The weight in the car is also an irrelevancy, because just tire pressure will absolutely swamp the difference, by which I mean there would be no way to extract the cost from the noise no matter how hard you tried.
Further point: You don't need to keep a bunch of bags in your car all the time for every trip you ever take. The fact that this is how you choose to address the issue is personal, and not at all the only way this new paradigm can be solved.
That's a thousandth of the weight of a small 2500lb car, but much of the inefficiency is due to drag, so the impact is not even 1:1. In absolute terms, you can successfully argue that tons of CO2 are emitted as a result, but that's extremely marginal, at less than a tenth of a percent of emissions. I'm pretty sure you know how ridiculous your argument is, but if you were that much of a hippie, you'd know that shucking your clothes, ditching your spare tire, and driving on empty would be even better for the environment.