5617

I always preferred paper, but they took that away from us long ago.

5618

Apparently the grocery chain I usually go to in Canada will be banning plastic and bringing back paper bags if you ask for them.

5619

This is both interesting and helpful, thanks!

5620

Sadly Aldi is not a thing in Portland where I am moving to.

That said the Winco about two months back stopped using plastic bags and went to only paper or reusable.

5621

Living here we produce far less trash than we ever have. Mostly because we buy a lot of fresh produce rather than packaged stuff. That said, we still have to deal with manufacturer packaging for many things that you can’t buy fresh, and I don’t really know how to improve that.

5622

In our area, the schools collect them and any plastic film and turn them into the company that makes Trex decking. They get prizes based on mass turned in. We save our Amazon shipping bubble wrap and reusable bags for their program.

5623

Guessing you can’t, really, at least I don’t think so. Much of it will have to be up to manufacturers.

Here’s a Wiki on the zero waste concept (warning: long)

There’s also a subreddit where people share their reuse strategies:
r/ZeroWaste

5624

Yeah, this is kind of what i was thinking. I get groceries once a week, so you’re taking 52 bags a year… It doesn’t seem like it ever get close to using a bag enough times to make it beneficial.

5625

Speak for your self. We go grocery shopping two or three times a week (I like to keep things fresh, and it’s a 5 minute drive away).

It should only take us about 45 years to get the full value out of my tote bag.

5626

But I don’t think the environmental damage from plastic bags comes from the energy cost of production. What fraction of CO2 emissions is plastic bags? 0.1% 0.001%? It’s the fraction of bags that end up in the oceans and waterways and other parts of the biosphere that seems like the more important impact.

5627

Are you saying you only use one plastic bag per weekly grocery trip?

5628

One side effect of removing plastic bags from grocery stores and requiring totes is psychological, I would bet. It reminds people that we overspend our allotment of earthly resources faster and faster each year.

Sure, a few old arseholes will gripe, but arseholes gripe about everything, including when the weather forecasters say there’s a 20% chance of rain, and it rains.

5629

Yeah, the 7100 example in the linked study was close to a worst-case scenario: A bleached cotton bag. The reinforced plastic bags that you find everywhere nowadays generated more reasonable numbers… like 45 or 84 re-uses.

So basically if you use a reusable bag for a year, you’ll break-even with the manufacturing impact, and that’s not taking into account the indirect benefits.

5630

I listened to a thing on NPR about the side effects and indirect effects of banning plastic bags (which they did in California or maybe one city in California) and they were able to compare it to a neighboring region. They noticed the sale of other disposable plastic bags go up. They also talked about the “how many times you need to use it” argument and total energy costs and paper vs plastic. Overall I think they were basically completely down on banning plastic bags and it was a fascinating discussion. A couple times they mentioned the cons of plastic bags in passing like they didn’t matter.

It was only afterwards, maybe the next day, that I realized that a lot of their arguments were really bad. Plastic is just bad. We need to get plastic out of the oceans before they suffocate. It doesn’t matter that paper bags require 20% more energy to produce or whatever because they will degrade where plastic won’t. Paper bags won’t end up in a whale’s breathing apparatus. I’m not some ocean nut, but there are temporary effects and permanent effects and I think we need to focus on the permanent ones.

I wish I was better at spelling out all my thoughts on this but I feel like overall people are focusing on the wrong things and using that to rationalize their decisions rather than looking at it from a truly fair viewpoint.

5631

The costs and benefits can really get quite weird when you dig into them, and separating the wheat from the dross can take a great deal of work.

For instance, take paper bags: They are fully biodegradable and can be fairly easily re-used. Good things, presumably.

But, they take more energy to produce and the chemicals used to produce them are themselves toxic. And since they’re made of paper, you have to cut down trees to make them! All bad things, presumably.

Well, not all those are what they seem.

Paper bags ARE biodegradable, but if you toss them in the trash they’ll be buried in a landfill, and the time it takes a paper bag to degrade while buried under tons of soil is actually pretty close the amount of time it takes a plastic bag to degrade in those same circumstances. So if you toss a paper bag in the trash, you’re probably not helping the environment too much… at least if you only look at energy spent.

Paper manufacturing can use a lot of nasty chemicals, like sulfuric acid and chlorine. But unlike petrochemical production, a large amount of the paper-making chemicals can be reduced to non-toxic compounds fairly easily… and are. The actual waste from a paper plant is fairly minimal, even if the waste from one particular process within that plant might be quite high.

Paper bags requiring trees to be cut down is true. But what people don’t typically think about is that paper trees are a CROP, albeit one with a harvest cycle of years rather than months. For the most part, paper companies aren’t roaming the planet looking for old-growth trees to harvest; they cut down trees in the same places every ten years or so, like clockwork. That’s land that might be used for non-forest use if it weren’t reserved for the tree crop. We have a horror towards cutting down trees as a crop that we don’t have for, say, corn or wheat… but there’s precious little logic behind those feelings…

5632

This is a renewable resource though, one that we can and know how to manage. We just need to spend more effort and money on it and stop cutting ancient areas and the rain forest… you know, stick to the farming and cultivating… forest management.

oops, yeah, this.

5633

I might be misunderstanding your point, but old growth absolutely is logged (I think Europe has like only a few old growth forests left, not counting Russia.) The US and Canada to this day continue to ‘mine’ it (I posted a story up thread about the plight of the pacific rain forests in BC, Canada) and the Tongass, the last ‘intact’ pacific rain forest in Alaska (which has seen industrial logging since the end of WWII) is targeted for increased logging by the current regime.

World wide, deforestation itself especially in the tropics is a huge issue but I don’t think you’re referring to that so I’ll leave out those depressing statistics.

Following the second world war, the United States granted 50-year contracts to pulp companies, inaugurating an era of industrial-scale logging. Despite their venerable age and size, the trees were felled and pulped to make the raw material for rayon, cellophane, and “fluff-puff” – a key ingredient for disposable diapers. Ancient cedars were brought down and left to rot to allow crews access to large-diameter spruce and hemlock

5634

Uh… mainly because whales don’t have gills.

5635

Oh absolutely. But generally the old-growth forests are sought after by the lumber and specialty woods industry looking for large slabs of hardwoods are are difficult or impossible to come by otherwise.

The paper industry may possibly want access to some old-growth wood for specialty products, but for run-of-the-mill (literally!) paper bags or printer paper, they almost certainly prefer access to the fast-growing pines, birches and spruce trees that are located on easy-to-access lands close to major highways.

5636

Haha I literally was writing “gills or whatever, I don’t know how whales work” but decided not to. :D

Thanks for the correct.

Edit:

Progress.

I mean duh, they breathe air not water, I knew that, but I am just dumb enough to not bother to go deeper than my brain’s first inclination.