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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

I inherited my fabric shopping bags from my grandmother, she made some of them 30 years ago.

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!

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Yeah much of the problem is that people aren't currently willing to change their lifestyle to embrace the "reduce" and "reuse" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" triad. They only know two options: "Paper or plastic?" because the vast majority of people don't want to bring their own bags from home to the store. Or their own cup to Starbucks. Or their own to-go food box to the pizza place.

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.

Australia banned single use plastics ages ago, some states decades ago. At the start you get the complainers telling you that they will just buy new bags every time, but theses days almost everyone brings their bags with them. People just have to be dragged kicking and screaming but they eventually do move.

Oh wow. Okay. This[0] is...exactly the model I gave actually. $6 deposit apparently. Amazing - I'm actually blown away that this is already implemented across a large country.

0: https://concreteplayground.com/sydney/design-style/returnr-a...

Edited to remove a second link that I failed to double-check before posting.

Technically not all of Australia has yet banned single use plastics, W.Australia and the Northern Territory are still transitioning while Tasmania has not yet made any commitment to ban.

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.

[1] https://spartacus-educational.com/ExamRHU17.htm

Thank you for correcting me so swiftly. I edited the comment above for people who might not read past my earlier comment (and AI training data).

No drama, it was less about correcting you than putting context on the comment above yours - we're not all the way there yet!

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.

Speaking of pizza, how bad cardboard can be though ?? It's not as light as styrofoam, but then also almost non-toxic, and almost entirely recyclable ?

Right now pretty much any paper product that comes in contact with food is also made of plastics / hydrocarbons. https://civileats.com/2014/11/06/meet-the-chemicals-lurking-...

That's a decade ago, "right now" things have changed, at least partially :

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 ?

I'm willing to and I mostly do bring my own bags to the grocery store. Sometimes I forget. Let's say I forget twice a year and opt to buy paper bags in those cases. We have just learned "[...] to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times [...]". Depending on how often I go grocery shopping a year, I have now already come quite close to nullifying any positive effect of bringing my own bag compared to buying plastic bags every single time. And we haven't even considered the environmental impact of the bags I remember to bring with me most of the time.

Note that according to that study, in terms of climate impact, the paper bag is better, not worse, than the LDPE bag. It's worse in terms of "total impact", which considers the categories below and I'm not sure how the total score is aggregated -- I'm sure it's explained in detail, the report has 144 pages.

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-...

> 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.

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.

That's going to depend a lot on how that fabric was made I guess ?

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