Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

Why is everyone using straws as an example? First, they are not what I am talking about -- we used to get beverages in re-usable containers and now it is almost impossible to find anything in glass. We don't need plastic to-go containers, we don't need everything in a plastic wrapper or vacuum sealed in a thick plastic container (as evidenced by companies not doing that and having zero problems with their products being damaged). These are just a few things that could be changed with zero inconvenience to the consumer. In fact, the plastic sealed packages that require a chainsaw to open being discontinued would be a convenience for consumers, since I have never met a person who didn't hate them.

Keep your plastic straws.

View on HN

I would be so far from shocked if we found out soon that plastic grocery bag / straw bans were a psi-op by big oil/plastic manufacturers to make people hate the idea of reducing single-use plastic. I couldn't have picked a more inconvenient and inconsequential place to start legislating if I had tried.

A ban on plastic soda bottles? Great! There's are existing non-plastic solutions, nobody would be negatively impacted, and we'd see that reducing our plastic use can be easy and not require major sacrifices. Instead we come up against it every time we buy a beverage or go to the grocery store.

The paper straws are pretty inferior but the grocery bag taxes just aren't that annoying. If you live in a place that charges for bags you quickly get used to just bringing bags with you and it's no big deal. Plus it significantly reduces the number of plastic bags blowing around in the wind. Since bags are so light they easily become airborne, sometimes posing a traffic safety hazard and often blowing into waterways.

My city outright banned single-use grocery bags. I was already in the habit of bringing re-usable bags, but every so often I'll have forgotten to grab bags or I'm stopping in on my way home from something else so I don't have them on me. Before the plastic bag ban, I'd just grab a "single-use" bag, and then use it as a trash bag for my kitchen or bathroom. Since the ban I regularly buy kitchen trash bags, I have about a dozen re-usable bags stuffed in the back of a closet, and half the stuff I buy at the grocery store still comes wrapped in a layer or two of excess plastic. For me, net loss. For the city? Probably a minor win in terms of plastic usage and street trash, and a significant loss in terms of people's willingness to ban other forms of single use plastic.

Before the plastic bag ban, I'd just grab a "single-use" bag, and then use it as a trash bag for my kitchen or bathroom. Since the ban I regularly buy kitchen trash bags

I wonder if those who come up with these ideas realise the irony of forcing people to buy bags which are truly going to be single-use instead of reusing what they would've already had.

How many people in your life re-use grocery bags? I'm fairly certain grocery bag bans are a net-win when viewed from the perspective of total plastic usage, because MOST people would have to be using them at least twice for the result to be anything other than a net-win from any perspective but mine. I only managed to use about as many as I was given because I got pretty good at remembering my re-usable bags...

The problem is not the burden of changing my behaviour, or the extra cost of buying exactly as much single-use plastic as I need in the form of a box of trash bags a couple times a year - the problem is why are we starting with this?? I'm dead certain that there are a ton of single-use plastics we could ban that would have close to ZERO impact on 99.9% of people's lives, because it would be handled entirely by industry doing a single re-tooling of their lines, but we're not doing those for some strange reason?

Everyone I know reuses them; not just for trash, but they're handy for whenever you need a bag (or even just a film of plastic) for whatever reason, because they take up almost no room.

Single use grocery bags are problematic in the sense they use almost no resources individually. Anything you're replacing them with uses far more plastic and/or energy to produce. A reusable bag tends to need reused dozens to a hundred times for the material needed to make it. Then add in you need to wash the reusable to avoid spreading food borne contamination and the ratio gets even worse.

I just use a backpack.

My in-group used them extensively. For just about everything.

It doesn't really matter though; the ban on straws and taxes on shopping bags have resulted in a noticably lower amount of said products blowing around main roads. Totally worth it in my opinion.

Now, if we could just get biodegradable coffee and soda lids...

I think you are on to something. It isn't unprecedented -- they did the same thing with 'recycling' -- using a political and media campaign to convince people that plastics weren't bad because they could be recycled, then getting legislation passed to require recycling by households. It is absolutely villainous.

I understand I am the weird one here, but I have the feeling must have missed the great straw usage conditioning everyone else went through. I find straws to be something for small children, not grownups.

I'm not sure I've used a straw in my adult life, yet I see people drinking coffee with a straw. Isn't the taste affected? Lots of what we think of as taste is actually smell and texture.

No wine connoisseur would order a straw with their expensive wine! I fail to see why one would be necessary for coffee or water, except for long distance runners and other situations where one needs to drink while moving.

We must not inconvenience anyone at any cost! Even if it creates a layer of plastic on earths surface and we get microplastic in our spines.

It would have been easier to believe in a better future if people could stomach tiny inconveniences.

> we don't need everything in a plastic wrapper

I bought a celeriac the other day, it was in a vacuum wrapped plastic cover. What a waste of resources.

In case anyone else has no idea what a 'celeriac' is:

> Celeriac (Apium graveolens var. rapaceum), also called celery root, knob celery, and turnip-rooted celery (although it is not a close relative of the turnip), is a variety of celery cultivated for its edible stem or hypocotyl, and shoots. Celeriac is like a root vegetable except it has a bulbous hypocotyl with many small roots attached.

Because more cities have banned plastic straws than have banned plastic bottles.

But I want to leave the store with the beaverage and throw away the container afterwards. Another great horror: Thin plastic bottles! Drinks in crinkly plastic bottles that feel like you could just roll them into a ball. Yuck. I want the thick plastic ones you can use to bonk someone on the head. I want back my cheap single use plastic bags that I could just throw away after use, instead of managing storage and availability of reusable ones.

I mean you’ve read the same news as I did, but you still cannot be bothered with not throwing stuff away immediately and managing grocery bags in a drawer at home? Why is it so hard for people like you to contribute a teeny-tiny thing to society once in their lives?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com