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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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