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Comment by TexanFeller | Hacker News Reader

Bag bans are one of the most perfect examples of how American environmentalists focus on all the wrong things and miss the forrest for the trees. The plastic bag in the grocery store contains multiple products packaged in 100x more volume of plastic than the plastic bag. It also contains a bunch of single serving aluminum cans. Banning plastic bags moves the needle the least and greatly annoys customers. It would be far better to promote banning of single serving aluminum cans for drinks and plastic/styrofoam packaging for goods within the store.

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Your argument is a popular contrarian take, but it doesn't seem to hold up to the evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/governme...

If California has a problem it isn't because bag bans don't work, it's because they've screwed up their implementation.

And yes, supermarkets do still use a lot of unnecessary plastic in packaging, but that's another issue that can also be tackled, and I haven't seen evidence that it has actually got worse since the plastic bag levy.

Arguing that plastic bags shouldn't be tackled because something else could be done is an argument to do nothing.

Plastic carrier bags were an absolute scourge a decade ago, they were everywhere. Their use has been absolutely decimated.

The arguments that people are secretly using more because they're no longer re-using them as bin bags or because they're buying "bags for life" instead are bad faith arguments that just don't hold up to the statistics or the reality of the situation.

Over 7 billion less plastic bags produced per year in the UK. That's a tremendous achievement.

The OP was talking about "bag bans". Your linked article talks about a "bag charge". Those are totally different things. Bag bans force forgetful people to buy "reusable" bags that take more plastic to produce, and inevitably pile up an need to be disposed of. Bag charges don't have that issue, because you can continue to buy thin bags, just at a steep markup.

Most shops in Ire/UK have stopped providing thin plastic bags for sale. All bags are either bags for life or (much) more expensive reusable plastic bags. Only small convenience stores still have the thin bags available.

Taxes are almost always the best way to implement "bans", you get huge benefits:

1. People feel less aggrieved if they still can technically access something at a price. ( Less accusation of Government overreach. )

2. Economically nudging behaviour is extremely effective. People will do a surprisingly amount of work/effort to avoid even a small cost.

3. If people continue the behaviour you want to ban, you get a good revenue stream, and can escalate taxes ( e.g. Tobacco taxes )

4. It reduces the size of a black market emerging for the banned goods ( i.e. Don't make the mistakes of USA during Prohibition. )

That California didn't realise this and naively implemented a concrete ban is screwing up implementing a ban.

That's a very selective statistic from a government department.

How many "reusable" bags are sold every year? Each one weighs 50-100x more than the old bags and I guarantee they aren't used proportionally more times.

The statistic given doesn't even cover most businesses. It only covers the major supermarkets - who only offer single use bags in online deliveries and make everybody else buy a much more expensive reusable bag. Pretty much every small business still offers a 10p bag.

> How many "reusable" bags are sold every year?

My question is how many "reusable" bags are being used once and then thrown out, effectively becoming massively wasteful single use bags?

My guess is a lot. Maybe not as many as single use plastic bags, but they must be even worse for the landfills, surely...

> who only offer single use bags in online deliveries

My mom gets online grocery deliveries from walmart and everything comes in "reusable" bags.

They never take them back or anything so every time she gets groceries they just accumulate.

It's to the point where she's using them as bin liners just like single use plastic because she needs to get rid of them just the same.

You could argue she should stop ordering from them, or there should be consequences for her. Maybe you're right.

Maybe people should have thought about other possible downstream consequences of banning single use plastic bags before enacting such a ban. I don't think "this could cause even more pollution in the long run" ever even crossed their dimwitted minds.

Too focused on the short term "we reduced single use plastics by 90%" KPI. Government policy by MBA.

If you take plastic bags and stuff them into a pillow case and then seal the pillow case with a zipper, you can make plastic bag pillows. The more bags inside, the stiffer the cushioning. Reuse is important too.

> Each one weighs 50-100x more than the old bags and I guarantee they aren't used proportionally more times.

Previously I'd get a bag from the shop which would be used that one time. Now, the "bag for life" I own has been used for years already. That's easily more than "50-100x more".

Reused for food? Is it dishwasher safe?

It seemed crazy to me. We (California) banned the thin/light grocery bag, then covid happened and all takeout food came in the heavy reusable bags. I didn't do a lot of takeout but still ended up with way too many, and had no use for since I had already shifted to a reusable basket for groceries. And they are as you said so much heavier than the thin type, so we're only creating more plastic waste.

There are plastic film recyclers. An expose last year showed that some US retailers with plastic film recycling bins (IIRC Target was one) were just sending the contents to landfills, but others are legit. Trex, which makes wood-look plastic decking, seems to have set up a recycling program partnering with a number of grocery stores. There's a downloadable list[1] online.

[1] https://nextrex.com/jsfapp/cdocs/20231201223810_9_jsfwd_493_...

> Arguing that plastic bags shouldn't be tackled because something else could be done is an argument to do nothing.

How does that follow?

Any cherry-picked stat can look good. What replaced those 7B? Cloth? Paper? Exercise for the environmentalist: which has a larger impact on the planet? Compare and contrast.

Nothing is wholly a win here. Just by existing we impact the planet. Seriously, the principle effective way to reduce environmental impact is to have 7 billion fewer people on the planet. Anything else can be seen as theatre.

Environmentalists can also focus on environmental beauty - which is the primary rationale for reducing single-use plastic bags so they don't end up in trees and on the street. This is more of a hedonistic environmentalism but it's totally valid. We can also push for other big ticket items like better sewage control and highway runoff management at the same time.

>which is the primary rationale for reducing single-use plastic bags so they don't end up in trees and on the street.

Except that wasn't really an issue before the ban. Sure, I noticed a few bags laying on the street sometimes, but it's not like the streets were clogged with them[1]. In the same vein, I guess banning plastic straws does cause a non-zero amount of plastic straws from entering the environment, but it's not like it was a serious issue that warranted government intervention.

> This is more of a hedonistic environmentalism but it's totally valid

I agree with this statement, but probably not in the way you originally intended: it's a feel-good measure to make people think they're helping the environment.

[1] eg. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/955ff575a1da022b144dfffd34d0f...

Aluminum cans contain about 73% recycled aluminum, in case anyone else was curious. I'm not sure why I thought it was 95%+

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/aluminum-cans-recycled-t...

> I'm not sure why I thought it was 95%+

You may have been remembering numbers for the aluminum recycling rate in goods like cars.

> On average, about 97% of the aluminum content in an end-of-life vehicle is recycled. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2022/whats-holding-back-alu...

Or that recycled aluminum takes 95% less energy than virgin aluminum.

https://international-aluminium.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/...

But still a heck of a lot more than the reused container that should be used instead. Focusing on recycling instead of reducing and reusing is a good way to let Coca Cola off the hook for continuing to sell single use beverage containers.

This is where fun protests like https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-43559636 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWz_p445Oh0 help. I've noticed a more concerted effort by supermarkets to reduce plastic in their packaging (it's still a lot though) and to provide "soft plastic" recycling (at their expense).

I had a girlfriend who unpackaged a lot of stuff she bought at the checkout so she wouldn't have to deal with the trash. I thought it was insane for a bit but no it's quite reasonable actually when you think about it.

I've seen this in places where they charge by the bag for trash pickup. Stores have bins set up for exactly that purpose. (Not sure if that's required or if they volunteer it.)

I've seen it in Germany and Switzerland, but I have no idea how widespread it is.

Are single serving aluminum cans, if recycled, really worse than the alternatives? Plastic bottles or glass both have their own emissions and recycling issues.

Aluminium cans are probably one of the most effective packing tools we have. They are light, they are volumetrically efficient compared to let's say bottles. They can be recycled effectively. Also they keep stuff good longer than plastic.

Glass on other hand is heavy, and washing it to food standard requires surprisingly hot water and caustic chemicals. Plus all the care in the handling and extra tooling in handling the bottles.

They’re far worse than the alternative of using reusable containers. Single serving containers should be replaced with reusable containers filled from fountains in public places or from concentrate in something like a sodastream. Coca Coka would prefer we talk about the benefits of recycling so it doesn’t affect their business practices.

All waste has issues. Time reduce, reuse, recycle. Products should be sold in containers that can be used again as much as possible.

> It would be far better to promote banning of single serving aluminum cans

Uh, what? Aluminum cans are actually one of the things that can be easily recycled, and it's economic too. If anything should be done it is to mandate the introduction of bottle/can recycling machines like "Tomra" in the US.

> and plastic/styrofoam packaging for goods within the store.

That plastic packaging does actually serve a purpose which is not easy to solve in other ways though. People think plastic wrapped vegetables is stupid, but it helps keep the vegetables fresh for longer, which reduces waste.

There are organic compostable "plastic" films that should eventually be used instead. But it's work in progress.

Meanwhile, replacing a single use grocery bag for a reusable one is something that can be done instantly today.

If plastic bag bans annoy customers, wait until you ask people to wash and refill their single-use aluminum cans. Reusable bags are actually a pleasure to carry items and a minor inconvenience to schlep to the store.

With the goal of less plastic in the ocean and landfills, the solution should not be to make a very narrow and specific form of plastic illegal while everything else is acceptable. Thick plastic and aluminum are both terrible at decomposing at the bottom of the ocean. Natural fibers however tend to dissolve quite well in water.

Recycling and plastic waste initiatives seems like two completely different goals. Recycling reduce energy usage in the industry, but the effect on ocean waste can be anything from beneficial, marginal to negative. In order to address single serving aluminum cans, one of the more effective solution is container-deposit. When 1/5 of the counter price is in the deposit, people seems to litter a lot less. It need to hurt a little to throw the can into the ocean or just randomly in the street.

But thick plastic and aluminum are much less likely to end up in an ocean than a plastic disposable grocery bag. Plastic disposable grocery bags catch the wind very easily and are great kites. They can easily travel hundreds of miles in the air.

Also, decomposing in the ocean is exactly what we don't want. Plastic disposable grocery bags decompose into microplastics, and we're finding out how bad that is. A heavier bag stays intact.

People don't generally see how much trash end up in the ocean since water surface naturally obscure visibility, and pollution obscure it even further. It far from just grocery bag. Littering is very common behavior, and cities located near rivers or the ocean has trash ending up in the water all the time.

To get a bit of sense of the scale, every single dive center teaches divers about trash, and basically every employee of such places pick up trash as a matter of being able to do education. It is simply not a good practice to have students training diving when trash is littering around them. Measure a square meter and almost regardless where it is, there will be trash in it if located close to a city. In a city river there seems to be more trash than rocks.

Decomposing nature fibers like paper or cloth does not leave microplastics. It also don't survive long time in the water so water near cities with bans on plastic bag and plastic eating utensils tend to be significant cleaner. The sad thing is that it is mostly just divers who will see this since the water tend to still have poor visibility (traffic, eutrophication, and other runoffs).

I have never had trouble recycling aluminum cans when I live in a place with curbside recycling or in public with clearly marked recycling containers. Nobody even had to pay me to do it. I know littering will happen and deposits can help with that, but it also seems like the percentage of cans that get littered vs recycling would be small in a place with convenient recycling.

I know that some will end up in landfills and oceans, but is aluminum in the ocean an ecological problem in the way plastics are?

One of the big issues with the thin plastic film shopping bags is that they aren't easily recyclable at home or in public. Recently I have seen grocery stores near me offer such recycling as a service, but home recycling pickup doesn't accept them.

> is aluminum in the ocean an ecological problem in the way plastics are?

It depend a bit on how one want to measure it. Imagine walking in a forest and for every 10 step you see a can laying on the ground. Would that be a ecological problem? Cans and bottles are often home to a lot of insect and other small animals so there could be an argument that in terms of ecology it is beneficial.

The other side of the argument say that any such man made littering is harmful, and since they do not really decompose at a fast pace, its a problem that steadily increase each year. The only trash that realistically get removed from the ocean floor is by divers, generally as a hobby, which is only a tiny sliver of all trash that do end up in the ocean floor. The rest accumulate and do so at an increased rate.

Aluminum cans are plastic lined on inside. Paint is toxic technically. Aluminum is beat when recycled.

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