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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this.

Heavy duty plastic bags might work great if you always keep them in your car.

But I live in NYC where you carry everything by hand -- and people certainly aren't always carrying empty bags with them, the way you might if you had a trunk.

There are two supermarkets I go to where they don't have paper bags, but will charge you $0.25 to $0.45 for a heavy duty plastic bag (two sizes).

I'd say that about a third of the time the person in front of me buys between 1 to 3 of them.

So at least at those locations, the overall usage of plastic has gone way, way up compared to the old thin plastic bags.

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There was just an article about how this happened in New Jersey as well.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/25/new-je...

Oh wow -- "New Jersey's plastic consumption triples after plastic bag ban enacted, study shows".

And most people drive there. In NYC it might be even worse than just tripling.

That article sources the same report commissioned by the plastic industry lobbying group, so take it with a large grain of salt.

...wait, wouldn't the plastic industry be delighted that people are using more plastic?

Indeed, which is why it is strange they are pushing this narrative that reusable is "bad", rather than keeping quite.

Maybe the narrative is obscuring something with statistics. If reusable doesn't really make plastic use go up, and that bag bans are effective in reducing plastic use, the industry opposing them has an incentive to make it look like they are ineffective. They're using the same tactics the tobacco industry used to counter the facts about cigarettes.

Yes, which is why they'd have a interest in publishing studies that make bag bans look useless or counterproductive, because they want to persuade people not to pass or to repeal bans.

There are a number of bag that pack down to self enclosed things smaller than a phone. When I lived in Chicago, and rarely drove anywhere, I had two of them in my coat pocket.

Summer time I was always biking anyway, and used my backpack.

> There are a number of bag that pack down to self enclosed things smaller than a phone.

Are the bags of a reasonable size when expanded? Can you please link me? I've never found anything both big enough to be useful and small enough to keep in my pants pocket at all times.

Ijust linked above. I never used these specifically, but similar. Plenty big enough (definitely better for carrying things than disposable plastic bags)

https://www.ulsterweavers.com/collections/roll-up-bags

Those are too bulky unfortunately. If I walked around with one of those in my pants pocket, it would look like... well, you know what.

These are the type I use:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zuimei-Reusable-Waterproof-Lightwei...

They fold flat and wouldn't cause much bother in a pocket but I personally don't like anything at all in my pockets. I keep them in my satchel and they are unnoticeable in one of those flat pouch sections that are pretty useless for anything even as slim as a wallet or phone.

They won't last forever but good for a few years so far. They have survived when I have stocked up on canned goods.

But I live in NYC where you carry everything by hand

In the NYC I've been to (and large city I live in), everything is carried in a back pack, laptop bag, shoulder bag, etc.

That's what I meant by carrying by hand. In bags.

But a lot of people aren't stashing 2 or 4 reusable grocery bags in their laptop bag. And people often aren't carrying any bag at all.

Why would you ever unexpectedly need four bags in addition to your backpack or whatever? Or two for that matter.

When wouldn't you?

When I go grocery shopping, I'm buying probably 20 pounds of veggies, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, etc. along with bulky items like tortilla chips. If you use the woven plastic bags that you carry in your hands (like the old plastic bags but twice the size), you need 4 -- two for each hand.

There are also the jumbo super-heavy bags you get from e.g. FreshDirect where you only need one and you sling it over your shoulder, but those things are huge even folded up and I don't want to be carrying around one of those regularly. Folded, they're thicker than my laptop...

Do you not plan to go grocery shopping or do you always do it on the spur of the moment? I'm not sure what the issue is. If you need to pick up something small from the store on the way somewhere you can definetly get a small always carry on you bag that will fit in a pocket. When you're going to actual go grocery shopping just bring the bigger reusable bags. If the purpose of the journey is shopping it's not inconvenient to carry those bags and you'll have to carry the grocies back anyhow.

I get that it's less conventient to have to remember a bag but it's not some insurmountable task and it does seem to reduce the amount of plastic bags that get caught by the wind and blow around as trash.

Spur of the moment -- my schedule is always changing. I know I need to go sometime during the week but it's totally going to depend on when I happen to have free time on the way home, and I generally won't know that until I'm heading home. It might be Tuesday, or it might not be till Friday.

Always having a bunch of bags on me just isn't a thing, not when you walk and take the subway everywhere and don't want to be lugging around a backpack when you go out for drinks and have nowhere to put it when you're standing around a bar.

I'll take the big bag when it's on the weekend and I'm making a special trip to the supermarket, but there isn't always an opportunity for that either.

I live in NYC and I don't carry a bag when I go out, which is the problem. I don't think this is entirely uncommon.

Now that you understand the problem, you can address it :)

Why doesn't NYC have paper bags?

Some stores in NYC do, but it's up to the store.

In my experience, higher-end national chains offer paper bags for $0.05 each (Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, etc.) and don't sell the $0.50 plastic ones at checkout, while the local chains (FoodTown, Associated, etc.) only sell the plastic ones and don't offer paper.

I have no idea why.

Yeah, at $0.50 I’m just going to buy a few and throw them away after. It’s not worth $1.50 of my time to shlep a bag to the grocery store. You’d have to make the bags a lot more expensive to influence primary behavior.

When I went to Germany for the first time in around 2009 they didn't have any bags at the grocery store checkout. You either carried you shopping in your arms or took one of the cardboard boxes they brought out from the deliveries, if there were some left.

You remember your own bags after that.

At that time in the UK free disposable bags were in full force. Although i do remember when i was young we used to take shopping home in cardboard boxes stacked at the front of the store in the same way as they had in Germany still.

> It’s not worth $1.50 of my time to shlep a bag to the grocery store.

We keep a few reusable bags in the way-back of the (cross-over) vehicle; it's now a habit to grab the bags as we're getting out of the car in the grocery-store parking lot. Then after we get home and put the groceries away, we return the bags to the way-back of the car before closing the garage door.

So it's not a big deal.

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