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Comment by leonixyz | Hacker News Reader

The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!

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If I bought one cotton bag and used it for my whole life, the argument would seem silly.

In reality, a household can easily gain 5-10 new tote bags a year as businesses hand them out as swag or with legitimate collections of items or paperwork. There's no way to use them all enough to justify their manufacturing.

The point the article is making is that the "use fewer plastic bags" thing was well-intended, but it incentivized an alternative with too many tradeoffs. Businesses could order a ton of bags, and feel like they were being "environmentally friendly" by handing them out. But in reality, they just flooded the marketplace with so many bags that didn't need to be made in the first place.

If you have enough bags, you don’t need to keep accepting new ones. We have used the same collection of bags for over 15 years.

Yet they continue to be manufactured.

Very few people are using a bag to the expected life cycle limit, and even fewer are doing it without WASHING, which is key in doing full LCA (life cycle analysis).

Washing and cleaning are surprisingly inefficient and costly (in terms of $, energy, resources, and emissions) compared to manufacturing, and many assumptions about recycling and reuse go out the window once the realistic numbers descrbing how people actually behave replace idealistic assumptions that go into a manufacturers internal emissions calculations.

As someone who loves to use cotton everything- it pretty much never makes sense to use from an LCA perspective (and that's OK).

I would wager the median number of uses per cotton bag is way below 173 store visits.

Why would it be that low? I am using 3 if them that are around a decade old.

The average cotton bag has an artificially low number by misleading statistics. Alice uses one bag 100 times, Bob uses 99 bags one time each. If you sample a grocery purchase and check how many times that bag is used in its lifetime it is 50.5 on average. But if you sample a bag and check how many times it is used in its lifetime, it is 2.

Based on my own usage patterns i'd get really roughly that number before they fell apart. The trader joes "burlap" style bag I like would get me about 1 trip a week for about 3 years. It is, notably, plastic lined though.

"fell appart", really?

Or do they sometimes have a part of the stitching failing that takes 2 minutes to repair with a needle and a cotton thread?

catastrophic failure, like objects falling through and fraying that makes repair silly for a $3 bag

I bet you're right. Why though? I've gotten thousands of uses out of mine. Even if you shop infrequently that just means they'll wear out more slowly, so surely that's viable for everyone else, maybe with a 7yr break-even point for an every-2-week shopper?

Because people forget their bags sometimes, and now they have 2 more they they need to use every week for 3 years to break even, on top of their previous bags. Because people take home leftovers from restaurants and the restaurant sometimes puts them into reusable bags, but you already have 10 reusable bags at home so it's not like getting another is helping. Because you get takeout or delivery once in a while and the food comes in a reusable bag that you are never going to reuse 100 times, because you already have 20 reusable bags from forgetting them while grocery shopping and taking home leftovers.

Because I remember to take mine maybe 25% of the time

Yeah they need to stay in the car. It’s a hard habit to break because we have lived our entire lives bringing the groceries in and unloading.

We actually just get paper bags and reuse them for our recycling items. The paper bag goes into the recycling bin with the rest of the paper.

I actually don’t care if recycling takes more energy. We should save plastics for where they can be best used, and that’s not a one-shot trip to the landfill

> It’s a hard habit to break because we have lived our entire lives bringing the groceries in and unloading.

So... how are you bringing in the groceries? Making 10 trips stacking things in your hands?

Not just that, but they go as far as claiming that single-use Solo cups are more environmentally than using a mug. Literally anything made cheap and quick and with little energy is better by their calculus. Doesn't pass the sniff test, IMO.

Not to mention the microplastics. Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs.

> Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs.

As opposed to ceramic mugs that just materialize in your house? Not sure about you, but I don't have a dilithium powered transporter in my kitchen.

My mug only had to be transported to my house once. With disposable cups that's a recurring expense. Unless you have a dilithium powered replicator.

I have a handful of mugs that I've had for decades at this point, a couple even from my parents kitchen that they used some 30 years and probably before then.

And then there's thrift store mugs - sure they were almost certainly trucked to _somewhere_ a long time ago.

I was in a city that did a bag ban. Informally I observed a lot of perfectly fine reusable bags being discard. I believe later on this was confirmed that the total amount of waste from bags actually went up since the bag ban was enacted. This doesn't even count the material and energy use to make the reusable bags. I think you be shocked about the actual number of reuses a reusable bag gets.

The author of this comment thinks everyone is like him or her.

the author of the article does the same

Maybe but there are different things going on: The author of the article suggests that many people are advocating different things, and is trying to present evidence to convince people. The commenter simply says "problem solved" because reuse is possible and everyone is already doing it. But that's just not the truth.

Engineers are often the worst at human understanding. They may understand systems and solutions, but they don't understand people. And often what is needed is to advertise to people the thing they ought to do - so they can come up to the level of the engineer's understanding of said thing. Then the engineer also says Advertising is Bad.

Fun paradoxical world we live in.

Do you realize that plastic bags can be reused too? Some of my plastic bags are clocking up to 10 years now with semi-regular use. My first ever shopper is plastic one and it's closing on two decades of regular use. I also reuse thin single use bags, sometimes multiple times if they hold up. E.g. a single use plastic bag I use for my swimming pool slipper had been reused dozens of times by now, just fine. I also have reusable cotton bags too, I only discard bags if they fail completely, regardless of material or construction.

Point is - blindly assigning black and white, all or nothing labels to generic materials is not smart. And the total lifetime environment harm of each product is not so clear cut as both radical greens and CC deniers try to push on us.

I’ve encountered this same inability to think or count when people claim that the lifecycle emissions of solar panels or batteries wipe out any potential emissions savings from use. It’s easy to confuse people with big numbers!

I bought 4 quite large heavy duty canvas bags in like 2005 and have been grocery shopping with them since then. I almost never buy more than will fit in those (actually, most trips I just take two of them).

Also the best way to manage waste is to not generate it in the first place.

I visited some places that package nearly all their vegetables and fruits in 1 use plastic containers, this is bonkers.

Plastic, when used properly, significantly reduces food waste. It's a trade-off curve. Like most trade-offs, optimal is likely somewhere in the middle rather than on either extreme.

Right, if we have a limited resource of something valuable, should we just use it up once and throw out the product entirely?

If plastic is so efficient, why wouldn’t we make reusable bags out of it instead of cotton? Why is the argument to waste it?

We aren’t getting more oil.

Plastic can be made from synthetic oil; it's often higher quality as a result. Oil is not a limiting factor.

Plastic is a good mechanism for carbon sequestration. Pull some carbon from the air and use it to make something both useful and permanent.

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