The study found that, to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times and a cotton tote would have to be used an astonishing seventy-one hundred times. “How many of those bags will last that long?” Franklin-Wallis asks. Walker-Franklin and Jambeck also note that exchanging plastic for other materials may involve “tradeoffs,” including “energy and water use…
It's very responsible of the New Yorker to bring this up. For individual studies it definitely depends on how "environmental impact" is defined. For example, looking at only GHG emissions, you'd have to use a ceramic mug 500 times (without breaking it!) before the GHG emissions of creating the mug was less than the GHG emissions of creating 500 styrofoam cups. That's because a styrofoam cup is 99% air and merely cont…
Of the many things we need to change, this is NOT a hard sell, I have been doing it for several years now, and for the past few years I have even gotten a discount... there's a caveat though : it's a plastic cup (unlike their paper cups with what I assume is an extremely thin plastic layer), and I now realize that I haven't really done the kind of math they did there, neither did I double-check my university where I got it about just how harmful this cup was supposed to be.
Still, some countries (like Germany ?) successfully resisted the phasing out of the (unbroken) glass bottle deposit system, that plastic bottle sellers are trying to get rid of.