Hacker News Reader

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.