It’s not plastic bags and straws that make it to the landfill that are the problem - it’s the ones that don’t make it to the landfill. I haven’t seen a plastic bag stuck in a tree for years!
Starbucks straw less lids use more plastic than the old lid ands straw. With a lot of them ending up in the trash instead of recycling, it may not be a net benefit.
The changes being made aren’t having quite the impact people had hoped.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/25/new-je...
The article seems to argue that the goal is very narrowly to reduce the amount of plastic bags created/consumed and then claims a study shows that the bans do indeed achieve that goal. It's hard to imagine this goal not being achieved, but it's too narrow.
I haven't seen any study showing that total plastic trash, incorrectly disposed, is reduced. It could be hard to study, I admit. I'd love to know the amount of the reduction as well. My guess would be there is a reduction, but it is fairly small.
For example, in the San Jose survey: https://web.archive.org/web/20230512013405/https://www.sanjo... pre-ban creek and litter surveys only showed 9% single-use plastic bags and this dropped to 2%.
I'd imagine 7% reduction is the upper bound on the impact, but it could be smaller than that if other litter increased. Maybe that's high enough to make the ban worth the inconvenience, I don't know what the right threshold should be.
Broader goals could include reducing total plastic production, reducing fossil fuel mining, etc. I'm more suspicious that these goals are not being meaningfully affected by bag bans.
Also I note that mid-income countries like Thailand are also getting in on plastic bag reduction. The kind interpretation of that is that muang thai has finally discovered its eco-consciousness, but an alternative one is that they’re copying rich countries ‘cuz it’s fashionable, and that that effect might trickle down to the countries who are serious polluters
Should other places that also have that potential problem also do that? Sure, probably, if it's practical. But people in country X usually don't get to make local policy for people in country Y.
Eventually, every country in the world should have it. And one shouldn't wait for others to do good.
Even worse, they clog up the recycling machinery.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2015/07/30/plastic-bags-a-hea...
Some of it is maybe well intentioned, but it is an intentional distraction that we have to do thing to save the planet.
No. Sanction countries that have rivers of plastic flowing into the ocean. Put the CEOs of chemical companies in prison when they have accidents. Eminent domain the entire farm when some crusty old fart refuses to allow a 15 foot wide section of land to be used for high speed rail.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to do better though. But there are no doubt a lot of complex variables at play
My wife is Irish, and they started the removal of plastic bags over 20 years ago. It was carefully phased in over time. It led to a 90% reduction in plastic bag use [0]. They also weigh your trash (in Dublin, anyway) as a means of cost pressure to reduce waste and encourage recycling. It is stated to have reduced waste by 50% [1].
[0] https://www.irishenvironment.com/iepedia/plastic-bag-levy/ [1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/why-it-pays-to-c...
They weigh country-wide. In Ireland waste collection is done by private companies and they charge by weight. As I recall, they have something like subscription plans [1]. I'm Irish but I live in New Zealand now, and here the rubbish collection is paid for by your Council rates.
I was still living in Ireland when the plastic ban was introduced. There was push-back from some companies that make plastic bags, unsurprisingly, but it worked really well.
There was a bit of push-back here in NZ too, similar to what happened in Ireland. The usual grumbling, about interfering greenies, loss of freedoms, etc.
[1] This is an example of one company's offerings:
https://cportal.barnarecycling.com/signup/signup_page2.php?S...
https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/how-does-new-zealand-pa...
"We were the second-worst country for packaging recyclability. Here in clean, green Aotearoa, 57% of the packaging we assessed wasn’t recyclable in practice. That’s not too bad when compared to Brazil (92%), but we have a lot of room for improvement. Especially when our Aussie cousins beat us by a mile with just 14% of packaging not being recyclable."
A big part of the problem is the commercial conflict of interest, which among other things means that robust data isn't available. For example, if we had year-on-year graphs showing domestic plastic production, consumption, sales, in different regions and industries, for different purposes, we could start to build a true big picture. Instead, the populace is reduced to arbitrarily celebrating visible wins, without really knowing whether we're winning or not.
I sometimes wonder if that’s the real agenda
Like recycling. Keeping us busy sorting things in to different bins. Without thinking about the absolute torrent of crap people order on a daily or weekly basis. But it’s ok because the cardboard and plastic packaging is going in a magical bin (which often isn’t that magical…)
When I was at school they used to talk about the 4 Rs, reduce, renew, reuse, recycle (I'm sure different variations exist). With recycling being essentially a last resort as it's so difficult and inefficient. But now it seems there is barely any mention of the first 3.
you tell someone, "hey don't order so much, it's bad for the environment", and they reply "you can't stop me doing something i want", like all the plastic-straw fans in this post
given a person who will make the same order regardless, recycling is better than not.
we need both things
The plastic bag ban is a good start, but seeing how Germans reuse glass bottles is an eye opener, and I really don't understand why we have individual cucumbers wrapped in plastic?!
Weirdly I did see cassette tape stuck in a tree recently though!