Grocery bag comparisons of environmental impact
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
The "environmental impact" is defined pretty broadly, but intuitively it feels like I'd rather have the one bag go to the dump when it wears out than have 50 flimsy plastic ones blowing about or getting into every nook and cranny.
As always of course, while it's good to be aware of your own wasteful habits, they're probably a rounding error compared with industrial and commercial waste, things like enormous fishing nets and lines being cut off in the ocean, or pallets of packages being wrapped by hundreds of feet of plastic wrap for transport.
Our current crisis was because we more or less decided “shipping plastic away” was as good as “recycling plastic.”
So we stopped burying our plastic in a very safe way, and instead we burned fossil fuels to ship it to Asia, where they just let it get into the ocean.
If we just do back to burying our plastic (and trying really hard to collect it all in the trash stream), we’d all be better off.
For example cotton bags critique often involves mentioning how much water is needed to produce it. But is it really a problem on the planet mostly covered by water? By tweaking the formula you can put cotton bags where you want on list like that.
The basics are that your standard grocery store plastic bag is made of a very very small amount of plastic, and thus a very very small amount of oil went into it. The environmental costs of travel were amortized across many many more of them because they travel in these massive multi-packs to be used in bulk, and so forth. I am not sure how disposal enters into the mix, precisely... I’d think the comparison is “here is how much crude oil is needed to make the gas you need to chainsaw down a tree to make a paper bag and ship it to the store, versus how much crude oil is needed to make and ship the plastic one.” That is, the assumption is that they both get sent to the same landfill, compressed into a small little cube, and shuffled off to some corner similarly... No thoughts about plastic bags blowing in the breeze.
In a related note, when I was a kid I remember being shown, as we passed, some recycling center... And I remember being scandalized about the dark smoke being belched out into the air. I am told that they have made great gains since I saw that, so that glass and metal recycling is now fairly clean, but that plastic recycling is still somewhat dicey in whether the recycling process yields a net environmental benefit. I have no idea if that's accurate though, it's a very faint memory.
It's assumed that the LDPE bag will always be reused as a garbage bag, and that 'permeable' bags will not. Effectively, this assumes that every single time you (re)use whatever you have on hand to carry your groceries home in that's not a flimsy new LDPE bag, an entire sturdy plastic garbage bag is destroyed. By this math, carrying home your groceries in absolutely nothing is substantially more harmful than using a new LDPE bag. Just for fun, if we take this math to its logical extreme, the least environmentally harmful thing to do is to take as many LDPE bags as you can carry all stuffed full of nothing but more empty LDPE bags.
[0] https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
However, a look at a similar study in the US (Life Cycle Assessment of Grocery Bags in Common Use in the United States [1]) points out that "A compilation of all of the statistically-based studies of litter in the U.S. and Canada over an 18 year period shows consistently that “plastic bags” (which includes trash bags, grocery bags, retail bags and dry cleaning bags) make up a very small portion of litter, usually less than 1%. "
So our vision of plastic bags getting into every nook and cranny may not be an accurate perception of reality.
1. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
By mass (weight), not volume, area, visibility, or impact on wildlife.
> Stein analyzed 20 years of scientifically-designed, statistically based litter surveys in the U.S. and Canada and concluded that total plastic bag litter was less than 1% (by number of pieces). Combining these data with the estimated annual production of PRBs of 100 billion bags (U. S. International Trade Commission, 2009), and assuming that all of the plastic bag litter resulted from only one year’s production and use of PRBs, leads to the conclusion that less than 0.5% of PRBs end their life as litter
Now a cotton/manila/sisal/* bag if "less pollutant" per se than a plastic one, but cost much much more to be produced and I do not know in ecological term the impact not of cotton per se but enough plantations to satisfy the demand of bags. That's is.
In the relatively recent past plastics was sold as environmentally friendly because with it, coming just from a liquid pumped from underground, we can avoid cutting soooo many trees, bamboos etc and soo much energy to process them just to make packaging. Now the refrain is the opposite.
Long story short the point is not "this pollute more than that" but "on scale using this pollute more than that".
This whole 'single-use plastics' thing seems to be a huge diversion if you ask me.
The one case where a ban might effective doesn't seem to get much focus; cosmetics/toiletries. Shampoos, liquid soap dispensers (esp with pump-action), toothpaste tubes, etc. There's probably more plastic in each of those than 10s or 100s of grocery bags.
Now that plastic bags are banned in New York City, I have to buy trash bags... which are plastic...
From a climate change perspective alone, all the numbers are significantly lower (see page 79). E.g. a cotton bag needs only to be reused 53 times to be as low impact as a plastic bag.
I no longer feel as bad about using my cotton bags, which have been used hundreds of times.
1. https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
As such, a simple chart isn't enough and I think a more in-depth article is called for.
https://www.presidentschoice.ca/product/pc-green-box/2117563...
:|
https://reason.com/tag/plastic-bags/
They are rabid about plastic bag bans, because they're made from fossil fuels.
They also don't like plastic recycling, renewables, efficiency or climate change for the same reason.
Amusingly after years of "don't recycle plastic just landfill it" the public opinion has shifted enough for bans on single use items to be likely, they've recently pivoted to "don't ban it, we will soon be able to recycle plastic"
Compare their recent article
https://reason.com/2022/05/31/environmentalists-ban-single-u...
where the evil environmentalists don't want to recycle, with their decades long jihad against the idea:
https://reason.com/category/energy-environment/recycling/
Often written by the same author.
But who else would bravely defend us from tyrants who want to ban inefficient light bulbs as part of a devious corporate plot:
> The ban was pushed by light bulb makers eager to up-sell customers on longer-lasting and much more expensive halogen, compact fluourescent, and LED lighting. When customers balked at paying more for home lighting, General Electric, Sylvania, and Philips did what corporate behemoths always do: They turned to the government for regulation that rigs the market in their favor.
> So when you throw out that last 40 cent 40 Watt light bulb, remember that you're not just tossing out a piece of history, but a piece of what used to be a freer market.
I find it funny when people who buy paper bags few times a month think they are eco friendly compared to me using plastic bags from 10+ years ago (mind it's thicker kind of plastic, not the Tesco thin crap quality which we used to reuse as trashbin bags back in days when they were free), if grocery doesn't fit into my empty backpack.
As for enviromental impact - people using these paper bags or even better fancy cotton bags are usually same people who were getting tested dozens/hundreds times per month/year and wearing their ecofriendly respirators to save grandma, meanwhile me "nature destroying monster" antivaxxer had like 2-3 home tests since 2020 and rarely worn just ordinary face mask when forced.
And don't get me started on these virtue signalling people driving their cars while I don't even own a car, but yeah, you are saving the nature by using cotton/paper grocery bag while throwing away dozens/hundreds of COVID tests, respirators and driving car to shop, kids to school and everywhere because you are lazy F while I go to shop by tram and walk my kids to kindergarten/school.
What is your solution?
We're like drunk people search for our keys under the streetlight - we only focus on the stuff that we can see, rather than what is actually important.
I’m not saying I have a solution either but not acknowledging that it’s a systemic problem is fairly thought ending.
They’re not a little bit better - they’re dramatically worse.
I think this is a side-effect that provides positive feedback, just like many of these initiatives, they are a way for rich people to feel like something is being done without doing anything, while actively maintaining their position in the world. If you look around, there is a lot of stuff like this.
The idea that people are using reusable shopping bags because they want to virtue signal and not because of any actual desire to do good is a completely baseless and needlessly pessimistic viewpoint. A much more reasonable and likely explanation is that most people can't fully assess the environmental impact of their decisions, so they make the entirely reasonable assumption that if they can avoid throwing away a dozen plastic bags every week, then that's probably a good thing. That assumption may turn out to be incorrect, but that doesn't mean they have the harmful motivations you are accusing them of.
No, such people generally do think they are doing something worthwhile, and worthwhile things are right to do.
If, in fact, they are not doing anything worthwhile, which this graph suggests, then that is a mistake of the facts. It doesn't mean that they were just trying to "virtue signal."
The higher number come from value judgements about other kids of impacts, and reasonable people can disagree over the relative values of those impacts vs climate change.
Does it help? In the grand scheme of things, it won't help enough, but waste reduction is always helpful.