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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

> I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near the amount of required precision.

The main one I can think of is the plastic bubble mailers and also the air packaging bubbles Amazon uses. The city says not to put them in the blue recycle bin. The mailer itself says take it to a grocery store. I take it to Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, ask the Amazon return staff where to put it, and they refer me to the general recycle bin in the front. Then there's a web address on them that says the same thing as above.

I don't know what to actually do with them or where a magic plastic mailer dropbox is at.

No one uses plastic bags around here anymore, so I don't have to worry about them. When I did have them, I typically reused them until they basically became trash.

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Also note that the Amazon padded packaging says to remove paper labels before recycling, but it practically impossible to remove the Amazon paper labels (at least in my experience).

They cut out quickly (with the plastic attached) with our kitchen scissors in a pushing motion. Those go in the trash and the plastic to our supermarket plastic bag collection. (I’m not 100.00% sure that’s right, but I’m pretty sure and enough to do it.)

I currently use grocery plastic bags as household garbage bags. I've not bought trash bags in a decade. It'll be slightly more pricy and less convenient if plastic bags go away. But maybe it's still good on the greater whole.

Many people do that too, hence why the observation that banning them as "single use" when they're not, and forcing people to buy garbage bags instead, which are then actually single-use, is even worse.

Worse how? Carrying groceries home in a plastic bag, then using that bag for trash, costs one plastic bag of resources. Carrying groceries home in a cloth bag, then using a plastic bag for trash, costs one plastic bag of resources. Those are pretty much the same, as long as you're not burning through cloth bags.

To put it simply: Using something twice is not better than avoiding a use and then using it once.

And when I get plastic bags at the grocery store, a third of them end up too damaged to put trash into. The small size also makes them a lot less efficient at containing trash, despite them saving material by being half as thick.

Cloth bags take up more volume and weight for the same capacity, and also cost a lot more to make. Of course you can reuse them many more times, and you need to do that to break even, but the former point still holds.

And when I get plastic bags at the grocery store, a third of them end up too damaged to put trash into.

That's unfortunate, but a natural consequence of optimising for profit based on a self-fulfilling prophecy: the belief that the bags will only be used once, leads to them being made so that they can barely be used once. The same optimisation for profit is likely happening with cloth bags too, but it's just not as obvious yet.

That said, there are countless other occasions where a thin film of plastic comes in handy.

Let's forget cloth bags for a moment. Using a bag once instead of twice but still getting the same job done means you're reducing instead of reusing. That's not a bad thing by itself. It's only bad if your other costs are causing problems.

> That's unfortunate, but a natural consequence of optimising for profit based on a self-fulfilling prophecy: the belief that the bags will only be used once, leads to them being made so that they can barely be used once.

Yeah but better bags require more plastic. I'm not convinced that a sturdier bag will get enough people to increase their reuse enough to have a net benefit.

>Let's forget cloth bags for a moment. Using a bag once instead of twice but still getting the same job done means you're reducing instead of reusing. That's not a bad thing by itself. It's only bad if your other costs are causing problems.

You can't forget the cloth bag but then still count its use.

I'm not counting it. Please point at where you think I am?

Lack of using a plastic bag does not mean you're using a cloth bag.

Growing up, we always had a plastic bag full of plastic bags. They had many uses—garbage bags, lunch bags, carrying dirty soccer cleats, etc. Sometimes they got reused once, other times they got reused a lot. They were surprisingly sturdy.

Cloth might be better, but it depends how much energy is required to make the cloth bags.

One particular benefit of cloth bags is they result in less litter.

I've seen estimates that cloth bags are like 100x+ more resource intensive. I doubt that most people get 100 uses from cheap cloth bags.

Of course, there's another option. There are cheap durable bags.

IKEA plastic bags are close to literally indestructible and cost $1USD. Although the smaller version ($0.89) is probably better for groceries. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/frakta-shopping-bag-large-blue-...

IKEA might not be great for the environment overall but these bags are an insanely good win. Essentially infinite reuse. Unless you're dragging cinder blocks around in them I'm not sure how they'd ever really wear out.

I've been using the same $5 cloth bag 2-3 times a week for the past 10 years...

Same, one of my cheaper bags started to come apart at the seams. I sewed it together because I liked the print on it.

So far after going to cloth bags in around 2009 or so ive yet to throw one away.

Same, those cloth/linen bags are indestructible. Can’t remember having thrown a single one away yet and the oldest one I can accurately date is from before the 07/08 financial crisis. They’re also much more comfortable to carry than any plastic bag I’ve seen.

> I doubt that most people get 100 uses from cheap cloth bags.

Cloth bags are impossible to destroy, light, easy to repair and easy to clean.

I would be surprised if anyone gets less than 100 uses out of them.

I also have reusable plastic bags but they are a lot more annoying to use and store.

A friend of mine has used an IKEA bag to lug around a dozen or so board games (including some heavy ones) to every game night for years. Those things are incredibly durable.

Actually, plastic bag bans may increase overall emissions:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-...

TLDR: garbage bags are thicker plastic, so the ban increases overall plastic use. Replacing plastic grocery bags with paper or cloth also is more resource intensive; cloth bags have to be used an average of 130 times to break even.

Maybe if you're buying 4 gallon garbage bags. When it's 13 or 30 gallon bags, the volume:area ratio is so much better it easily overcomes a lot of thickness.

And if you're picking up dog poop, grocery bags are a lot bigger than you need so most of the plastic is wasted.

Oh, I just noticed this part of the article: "They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment."

Oof, that's a huge hit to credibility. I remember this number. The study did not say that. That's cherry-picking the very worst impact number out of a bunch of different categories. Specifically I think it was the impact of fertilizer on water supplies. And organic cotton had numbers three times as high as normal cotton. The reuse estimate for climate for normal cotton was about 50.

Store-provided bags are perceived as brand vehicles by management, so they'd rather be on the safe side when deciding about which gauge to get, wether recycled bags from stocks might be good enough and so on. Purpose-bought bags? Unless you get the heavy duty stuff like someone planning to dispose of their hacked-up murder victims will be much less material per bag.

But the main issue with ubiquitous bags is that not all of them make it to disposal, und that just doesn't happen that much with bags specifically bought for that very purpose.

I take them to Kroger, there's usually a bin at the entrance by where they store the shopping carts. I noticed the other major chains tend to have these too, in more or less the entrance location

Yea, I have found a few places, but they're rare I think because plastic bags are banned by most cities in my area. But my overall point is that the process requires trial and error, and even the creator of the packaging doesn't give accurate directions to properly recycle the material.

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