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California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

latimes.com

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Re: California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

#11

Post by AdamN »

TexanFeller wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

#12

Post by AdamN »

dawnerd wrote: post #8

Oregon did similar. Before their law almost everyone in the Portland metro used nice easy to curbside recycle paper bags. Then they all switched to plastic. If you’re going to force recycling make it easy. Those plastic bags are not and still can’t be curb side recycled and will end up in the landfill as that study found.

Plastic bags are far cheaper and even if they are not really recyclable, they have less of an upstream impact on the environment (a few grams of oil from underground vs a percentage of a tree farm that disrupts an ecosystem).

In the end reusable bags or boxes are the only sustainable solution regardless.

Re: California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

#13

Post by bdw5204 »

> Thick plastic bags are “not what consumers demanded when they overwhelmingly voted to support California’s bag ban at the ballot box when the policy was challenged,” Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) told reporters recently in reference to Proposition 67, a 2016 ballot measure that would have negated the 2014 law.

The word "overwhelmingly" apparently means 53.27%[0] in a state that is an outlier politically compared to the rest of the country (the 2016 presidential election there was 61.73% to 31.62%). It's fascinating to me how little effort there has been on the east coast to oppose and overturn these kinds of laws, probably because the political faction that would be expected to oppose them loves passing off videos of people leaving stores without bags as shoplifting videos to play into the "blue cities and states are legalizing shoplifting" narrative.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_California_Proposition_67

Re: California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

#15

Post by thimp »

milliams wrote: post #6
TexanFeller wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

#16

Post by PaulHoule »

dachworker wrote: post #14

I remember the brown paper bag being an iconic part of American movies, when I was growing up. What happened to that?

I worked for a supermarket in the late 1980s and we were always trying to give people as few bags as possible because... the bags cost money and come out of our profits.

We used to get a lot of requests for what we called a "Boston Bag" (this was New Hampshire) which was a large paper bag inside two plastic bags. The claim was that people who had to go up the stairs in apartments in Boston demanded this sort of bag.

Re: California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

#17

Post by acover »

TexanFeller wrote: post #4

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…

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...

Re: California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

#19

Post by flaminHotSpeedo »

This doesn't pass the sniff test for me... The article claims that plastic bag waste went from 4.08 tons to 5.89 tons per 1000 people from 2014 to 2022, then attributes that to the new heavier bags.

I don't have good numbers but as a terrible estimate let's say an old single use bag was 5 grams and a newer one is 30 grams.

If plastic bag weight really went up almost 50% per capita, using that assumption that an individual bag (which can now hold more since it's sturdier and doesn't need to be double-bagged, but we'll ignore that for the sake of estimation) increased in weight by a factor of 6, that means (unless I've done my math, if you use the term loosely, wrong) roughly one in five people never re-uses grocery bags.

Considering that a lot of people would be inconsistent about remembering reusable bags, you'd expect to see more than one in five people using the store provided bags on any given trip to the grocery store, and that doesn't align with my anecdotal observations whatsoever

Re: California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

#20

Post by raisedbyninjas »

TexanFeller wrote: post #4

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…

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.
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