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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

I don't remember the exact figure off the top of my head, but if memory serves well it was in the ballpark of a decade that you could buy a new plastic bag every day and throw it away after, and it would still create less CO2 in total than one reusable cloth bag. Modern plastic is ridiculously cheap to manufacture whereas reusable bags waste a lot of energy and water. A good example of a movement where people feel good about themselves, but actually they're not making things better.

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Last I read that was debunked. It was based on one study or article that made a really bad assumption and then it spread. Someone went and did the figures again and it was way off by a few orders of magnitude and in fact only a few uses of a reusable bag means it’s better. Like you I don’t have the link to hand sorry.

Externalities are hard.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-c...

By estimated impact: cotton > paper > plastic, but more constructively:

> Ultimately, the single use of any bag is the worst possible choice. The key to reducing your environmental impact is to use whatever bags you have around the house as many times and in as many ways as possible.

So it's better that I need to pay for thicker bags just to put in my wastebasket to collect trash? How is that better than getting a t-shirt bag from the store to carry my items home, then use the bag to line my trash, then throwing the mess away?

By volume I throw away more diapers in a month than an entire lifetime of plastic bags. Fighting plastic bags is what the rich companies making actual pollution want you to focus on so you aren't fighting real pollution.

> Fighting plastic bags is what the rich companies making actual pollution want you to focus on so you aren't fighting real pollution.

Why can't we fight both? Reducing both plastic bag pollution and "real" pollution seems better than just one or the other.

People have limited campaigning energy and politicians have limited political capital, so it probably does divert some attention from the bigger problems.

CO2 is not the only factor. You also have to look at the plastic bags that are floating around in rivers and oceans.

That's not all they're [ultimately] floating around in...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/...

Here are some numbers on reusability vs single-use plastic bags https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...

Bottomline, it depends, but for most commons cases it seems worth it to reuse reusable plastic bags.

but you are correct about cloth bags, those are not worth it at all

CO2 isn't the driver here, it's mountains of non biodegradable plastic bags getting into rivers, oceans, everywhere.

That basically doesn't happen in the USA so there's not a reason to switch here.

Exactly. I don't understand why this isn't acknowledged more.

Banning plastic bags in the US does absolutely nothing for the plastic bags clogging waterways in Asia.

Sometimes people think plastic recycling in the US is shipped to Asia where it ends up in waterways but that's not a thing either. It might get buried in a landfill there rather than recycled, but compressed pallets of plastic recycling aren't getting dumped into rivers. That's not a thing. The bags aren't flying away in the wind or something either. All the plastic clogging rivers -- that's all local consumer littering.

That's because the US exports plastic waste to other countries. So yes, there is good reason.

I was under the impression that Americans landfilled their garbage. I don't doubt that waste export is a thing, but is it really that large a proportion?

The US is the only country in the developed world that hasn't ratified the Basel Convention [0] and the US exports close to a billion tons of plastic waste to other countries per year [1]. The trash you see building up in third world countries is in large part from the United States, not from those countries themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_Convention

[1] https://www.invw.org/2022/04/18/rich-countries-are-illegally...

According to [2] 35.7 million tons of plastic waste is produced per year, and 0.61 million tons are exported.

That leaves 35 million tons, and with only 5% being recycled, there's plenty of plastic left to go into 'rivers, oceans, everywhere'.

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-us-recycled-ju...

Most reusable bags here in Italy are still made of plastic, but much sturdier than single use shopping bags. Personally I like them. My only issue is the few times when I forget to put them back into my car.

> when I forget to put them back into my car

I permanently keep two or three in there.

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