Why am I not surprised.
The problem with these sort of equivocations is that they conveniently side-step the categorical argument. One something like; do not surround yourself with trash.
realshadow has rule 7, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503179, "quality over quantity". That is a value argument, not an efficiency argument. Only arguing from efficiency is essentially internalizing the logic of the machine. If everything is evaluated whether it minimized/maximizes one metric or another, quality of life will, inevitably, decline. In this case, surrounded by plastic trash, ingesting, drinking plastic trash.
Plastic bags must die. Why? Because they are trash. That's the value system I would love to see in this world.
Exactly this, I wish I could upvote you a thousand times.
If we stick with the plastic vs cotton bag example, we are considering two factors: some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n. If n=1, would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality? Isn't it also mostly trash in this case? What is trash? I'd argue it's a product that we cannot or do not squeeze any additional utility out of. How about n=10? n=20?
Actually, I would agree with that for sure. The real world is grey, and multiple things are true at once. I'm certainly guilty of leaning to the other extreme here.
> some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n
I believe I understand, and I appreciate the overall push back.
But starkly put, and to be a little flippant ..
> would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality?
.. absolutely yes. Certainly in this case. The reuse number is incredibly (incredibly) flexible. In no world n=1 will be a given. The only reason we have reuse of one for a bag, is out of habit, simply put. Habits change all the time. A cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. It is more expensive to begin with. It could hold sentimental value. It may have a lot of other uses. Do we even need a bag? 80% of time, the store clerk gives you a bag out of muscle memory, not because you can't hold a couple of items in your hands or stuff in your pockets. The utility of a plastic bag might even be closer to 0 than 1.
> It's maximising a single (ill-defined) metric as well, no?
I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
I agree that on average, a cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. Some cotton bags absolutely will only be used once, however. Sometimes it's even predictable that a cotton bag will only be used once. Ideally, we would get people to use whatever product is best suited for the situation at hand on a quality-environmental impact pareto front. There is no catch all that's going to be the best solution in every situation. We shouldn't give out plastic bags like their going out of style, but I'm also not sure we should eliminate them completely.
> I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
Yes, I was trying to say that quality is hard to measure by calling it an ill-defined metric. You are still trying to maximise it, even if you cannot measure it. I get that, I'm with you most of the way, but I just don't think you can only look at quality. We could be creating the most high quality neighbourhood at the cost of increasing entropy outside of it. Nothing comes for free.
The relevant section is 6.3. The cited number is relative to a LDPE carrier bag (page 25 has pictures of what that is). When considering only climate impact, cotton bags are better after 52 times reusing them.
Note that those numbers, as I understand it, assume that the reference LDPE bag is reused as a garbage bag (EOL3), which is optimal but probably not what usually happens? But EOL3 only differs by a factor of about two (page 59) from the other two EOL options, incineration and recycling; I think landfill is not an EOL they looked at because it's not done in Denmark, nor did they consider the impact if the plastic bag is not properly disposed of, ie. it ends up in the environment.
For example, looking at only GHG emissions, you'd have to use a ceramic mug 500 times (without breaking it!) before the GHG emissions of creating the mug was less than the GHG emissions of creating 500 styrofoam cups. That's because a styrofoam cup is 99% air and merely contains 4.4 grams of plastic (about 4mL of volume before it's foamed up and pumped full of gas). Whereas a ceramic mug weighs 200-400 grams. Just kilning the 400g of the mug to dry the clay uses a lot of energy / creates a lot of GHG emissions, compared to processing 4 grams of plastic.
However, GHG emission is just one part of styrofoams environmental impact. The ceramic mug can be crushed up and essentially become part of clay again. The styrofoam just ... never decomposes. The styrofoam contains (and literally is itself) an endocrine disruptor -- so even as it does "decompose" it pollutes the environment with itself and other chemical additives in the polymer. The styrofoam is likely to contaminate your food as well, especially when restaurants put hot food in it and it melts small holes in the styrofoam box, or when kids chew on the styrofoam cups. But then, ceramic mugs may have various harmful metals in them or toxic chemicals/metals in its paint and glaze.
Basically, it's very, very important for us to start doing full hazard and lifecycle analyses of the materials we use at large scales. Overall, I think we're currently greatly underestimating the hazards of most of the newer modern materials. I also think the energy requirements to switch back to traditional materials would be untenable -- and still require ubiquitous quality control to minimize harmful heavy metals / etc in the raw materials.
But I think anyone who says "well it's just too hard then, forge ahead!" is terribly misguided or callous. And most people who say "we need to go back to metal/paper/wood/glass for everything!" needs to be fully prepared to describe to listeners/readers how that would affect daily habits -- you'd have to bring your own $5 drinking vessel to Starbucks because there probably wouldn't be a "to-go" cup available without petrochemical-based cups. I don't think everyone who pontificates on this is a hypocrite -- many of them do advocate for reducing consumption above all else. It's just a very hard sell.
But we don't have any roadmap at all for taking these contaminants out of the environment once they disperse throughout it.
Of the many things we need to change, this is NOT a hard sell, I have been doing it for several years now, and for the past few years I have even gotten a discount... there's a caveat though : it's a plastic cup (unlike their paper cups with what I assume is an extremely thin plastic layer), and I now realize that I haven't really done the kind of math they did there, neither did I double-check my university where I got it about just how harmful this cup was supposed to be.
Still, some countries (like Germany ?) successfully resisted the phasing out of the (unbroken) glass bottle deposit system, that plastic bottle sellers are trying to get rid of.
Tens of thousands of people already do this, if not more.
Most people here now use these all the time.
They are also many times thicker than the cotton bags you can buy in stores, so they might very well need another couple generations before they are carbon neutral!
I'm trying to imagine how DoorDash would even work without single-use plastics? Maybe we'd have standardized reusable containers with deposits on them that could be returned to a central location for $1-2 refunds per container, where they'd get sanitized and re-distributed via restaurant supply companies.
0: https://concreteplayground.com/sydney/design-style/returnr-a...
Edited to remove a second link that I failed to double-check before posting.
But that's most of the population doing away with them and most of the population (by my in Australia networked experience) being pretty happy with that.
I'm not aware of any public health campaign either overt or guerilla to convince the public that they're bad healthwise .. your link is to the UK's Daily Mail which is well known for making big drama for click bait and loving to stir up contraversy.
The article linked, reduced to it's core, is reporting on the findings of Associate Professor Dr Mark Green from some years past:
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/individuals/dr-mark-green
which all looks very sound .. but it hasn't (yet ?) turned into any wide spread official public campaign to warn people away from microwaving food in plastic containers.
The Daily Heil [1] loves to manufacture faux outrage and hysteria.
As for the link, small potatoes, many get taken in by overly bombastic Daily Mail | Sky News headlines and copy - there's usually always some kernel of truth in them, but a lot has to scraped away to get there.
https://chemtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/PFAS-UK-food-packag...
A rule of thumb seems to be that oil drop test : PFAS make fibers grease-repelling.
Of course it could also just be from a very thin (and much less toxic I assume ?) layer of polyethylene that those non-recyclable "paper" cups seem to use ?
CC Climate change
OD Ozone depletion
HTc Human toxicity, cancer effects
HTnc Human toxicity, non-cancer effects
POF Photochemical ozone formation
IR Ionizing radiation
PM Particulate matter
TA Terrestrial acidification
TE Terrestrial eutrophication
ME Marine eutrophication
FE Freshwater eutrophication
ET Ecosystem toxicity
RDfos Resource depletion, fossil
RD Resource depletion, abiotic
Water Water resource depletion
They also come to the conclusion that it's always better to incinerate paper bags (at end of life) rather than recycling them, which is interesting? If you intend to recycle your paper bag, you need to reuse it 73 times before you do so, because recycling paper is bad (recycling the plastic bag: also bad!). Again, in terms of "total impact"; I think in terms of climate change they say recycling either is good.
And I'm not sure if the paper bags they looked at were themselves made from recycled paper, which they usually are in stores here and which presumably changes the calculation (in either direction). It's odd because they look at like 5 or 6 LDPE variations, including breaking them down as recycled/non-recycled, but I can't find any mention of the paper being recycled or not. Again, 144 pages, maybe I've overlooked it. They do distinguish bleached and non-bleached paper.
Last but not least, they assume you need two paper bags for each LDPE (reference) bag (not enough weight capacity). The same is, hilariously, true for the organic cotton bag (but not the non-organic one!), not because of weight but because of volume constraints. So if they had chosen a slightly smaller -- or larger! -- shopping trip, lots of numbers would go up or down by a factor of two.
I'm not saying the report is bad or anything -- I'm not qualified to say either way --, turns out lifecycle analyses are complicated and full of judgement calls which inevitably get compressed to single statements like the one in the fine article.
Here's the report: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
That reminds me of how much better to-go containers are in some other countries! I was blown away by the quality of to-go containers when I ordered delivery in Beijing, the containers could easily have been used more than once.
I actually would be interested in seeing what a world with zero disposable packaging would look like. Imagine if everything you bought at the grocery store used packaging that you had to return afterward. Think peanut butter put in jars that get returned and cleaned.
Related, I remember when Costco ketchup came in giant gallon sized aluminum cans.