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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

#61

Post by flaminHotSpeedo »

cfn wrote: post #30
flaminHotSpeedo wrote: post #19

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 indiv…

We introduced similar laws here in Portugal last year and my anedoctal observation is that most people buy the thicker bags at 10-20 cents. It is also very obvious that many items that used to be sold loose are now packaged or bring their own plastic or paper bag. I'm looking forward to the statistics next year. EDIT: It is not clear above, I mean that most people don't reuse the bags, they just buy new ones each tim…

Out of curiosity, would you consider the grocery stores you visit to be relatively representative of the country overall?

That was the biggest flaw with my line of reasoning, I'm not sure how representative my grocery store experience is, though I'm basing it off of visits to grocery stores across multiple states and varying levels of affluence

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

#62

Post by belorn »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #56
belorn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the goal of less plastic in the ocean and landfills, the solution should not be to make a very narrow and specific form of plastic illegal while everything else is acceptable. Thick plastic and aluminum are both terrible at decomposing at the bottom of the ocean. Natural fibers however tend to dissolve quite well in water. Recycling and plastic waste initiatives seems like two completely different goals. Recycli…

But thick plastic and aluminum are much less likely to end up in an ocean than a plastic disposable grocery bag. Plastic disposable grocery bags catch the wind very easily and are great kites. They can easily travel hundreds of miles in the air. Also, decomposing in the ocean is exactly what we don't want. Plastic disposable grocery bags decompose into microplastics, and we're finding out how bad that is. A heavier b…

People don't generally see how much trash end up in the ocean since water surface naturally obscure visibility, and pollution obscure it even further. It far from just grocery bag. Littering is very common behavior, and cities located near rivers or the ocean has trash ending up in the water all the time.

To get a bit of sense of the scale, every single dive center teaches divers about trash, and basically every employee of such places pick up trash as a matter of being able to do education. It is simply not a good practice to have students training diving when trash is littering around them. Measure a square meter and almost regardless where it is, there will be trash in it if located close to a city. In a city river there seems to be more trash than rocks.

Decomposing nature fibers like paper or cloth does not leave microplastics. It also don't survive long time in the water so water near cities with bans on plastic bag and plastic eating utensils tend to be significant cleaner. The sad thing is that it is mostly just divers who will see this since the water tend to still have poor visibility (traffic, eutrophication, and other runoffs).

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

#63

Post by flaminHotSpeedo »

gruez wrote: post #60
flaminHotSpeedo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't read your own source, that website your linked cited 2.5 mil. I guess I was off by a factor of 1

Before accusing people of not reading the source, you should double check your understanding of the same source. The table does list 2.5 mil, but that's for "Thick plastic bag". The thickness for "Thin Plastic Bag" is indeed 0.5 mil.

Right. Thin plastic to thick plastic is 0.5 to 2.5.

That's a factor of 5, I guessed 6, off by one.

The factor of 40 you originally cited is based off the site's 20 mil figure for actual reusable bags.

It's ok to misread, no need to play the victim when both your comments make it clear what happened

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

#64

Post by cptskippy »

flaminHotSpeedo wrote: post #19

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 indiv…

> that doesn't align with my anecdotal observations whatsoever

Are you factoring in all of the people you don't see? What about everyone who picks up groceries or has them delivered? 100% of those transactions use the "reusable" bags.

You even provide an example of how your reasoning fails:

> ...which can now hold more since it's sturdier ...

Just because something can hold more, doesn't mean it will. Someone who needs a disposable bag to hold 3 items they just bought now has to use the heavier duty bag.

People don't want to over-pack bags because certain items will be crushed or damaged. They tend to under pack or individually pack certain items. Those people are now using heavy duty reusable bags for a task that the old light weight bags would have sufficed.

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

#65

Post by gruez »

flaminHotSpeedo wrote: post #63
gruez wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before accusing people of not reading the source, you should double check your understanding of the same source. The table does list 2.5 mil, but that's for "Thick plastic bag". The thickness for "Thin Plastic Bag" is indeed 0.5 mil.

Right. Thin plastic to thick plastic is 0.5 to 2.5. That's a factor of 5, I guessed 6, off by one. The factor of 40 you originally cited is based off the site's 20 mil figure for actual reusable bags. It's ok to misread, no need to play the victim when both your comments make it clear what happened

> Right. Thin plastic to thick plastic is 0.5 to 2.5. [...]

>The factor of 40 you originally cited is based off the site's 20 mil figure for actual reusable bags.

???

At what point were we discussing thin vs thick bags? I thought the whole point of the conversation was talking about regular bags vs reusable bags?

>It's ok to misread, no need to play the victim when both your comments make it clear what happened

This is an absolutely bizarre accusation to make. I'm not sure how asking someone to re-read a source is "play[ing] the victim", especially when it's in response to a comment asking the same thing. If anyone is engaging in bad faith accusations, it's you.

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

#66

Post by stetrain »

belorn wrote: post #51
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…

With the goal of less plastic in the ocean and landfills, the solution should not be to make a very narrow and specific form of plastic illegal while everything else is acceptable. Thick plastic and aluminum are both terrible at decomposing at the bottom of the ocean. Natural fibers however tend to dissolve quite well in water. Recycling and plastic waste initiatives seems like two completely different goals. Recycli…

I have never had trouble recycling aluminum cans when I live in a place with curbside recycling or in public with clearly marked recycling containers. Nobody even had to pay me to do it. I know littering will happen and deposits can help with that, but it also seems like the percentage of cans that get littered vs recycling would be small in a place with convenient recycling.

I know that some will end up in landfills and oceans, but is aluminum in the ocean an ecological problem in the way plastics are?

One of the big issues with the thin plastic film shopping bags is that they aren't easily recyclable at home or in public. Recently I have seen grocery stores near me offer such recycling as a service, but home recycling pickup doesn't accept them.

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

#67

Post by xethos »

lurking15 wrote: post #54
thimp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's about it. They slowly made them prohibitively more expensive. I've actually had the same shopping bag for 27 years and have gone from being seen as a hippy weirdo to never being questioned. It was just normalised that you got bags free before. That should have never been the case in the first place!

> and have gone from being seen as a hippy weirdo to never being questioned you're still a hippy weirdo

Sure, but nobody calls them on it any more. Sounds like the Overton window shifted to people using less plastic too.

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

#68

Post by fallinghawks »

lozenge wrote: post #32
xnorswap wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is a popular contrarian take, but it doesn't seem to hold up to the evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/governme... If California has a problem it isn't because bag bans don't work, it's because they've screwed up their implementation. And yes, supermarkets do still use a lot of unnecessary plastic in packaging, but that's another issue that can also be tackled, and I haven't s…

That's a very selective statistic from a government department. How many "reusable" bags are sold every year? Each one weighs 50-100x more than the old bags and I guarantee they aren't used proportionally more times. The statistic given doesn't even cover most businesses. It only covers the major supermarkets - who only offer single use bags in online deliveries and make everybody else buy a much more expensive reusa…

It seemed crazy to me. We (California) banned the thin/light grocery bag, then covid happened and all takeout food came in the heavy reusable bags. I didn't do a lot of takeout but still ended up with way too many, and had no use for since I had already shifted to a reusable basket for groceries. And they are as you said so much heavier than the thin type, so we're only creating more plastic waste.

There are plastic film recyclers. An expose last year showed that some US retailers with plastic film recycling bins (IIRC Target was one) were just sending the contents to landfills, but others are legit. Trex, which makes wood-look plastic decking, seems to have set up a recycling program partnering with a number of grocery stores. There's a downloadable list[1] online.

[1] https://nextrex.com/jsfapp/cdocs/20231201223810_9_jsfwd_493_...

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

#69

Post by thimp »

lurking15 wrote: post #54
thimp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's about it. They slowly made them prohibitively more expensive. I've actually had the same shopping bag for 27 years and have gone from being seen as a hippy weirdo to never being questioned. It was just normalised that you got bags free before. That should have never been the case in the first place!

> and have gone from being seen as a hippy weirdo to never being questioned you're still a hippy weirdo

Glad to know that :)

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

#70

Post by cptskippy »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #3

> The problem, it turns out, was a section of the law that allowed grocery stores and large retailers to provide thicker, heavier-weight plastic bags to customers for the price of a dime.

I love that half the people here didn't bother to read the article to understand that key point. The easy fix is just to swap out the HDPE bags for LDPE keeping everything else the same.

However there's a degree of dishonesty or perhaps naïveté with the rationale behind the law. It assumes people will always act in good faith. There will always be a legitimate exception to compliance. Exceptions will be accommodated because of the assumption of good faith. Some people always choose to be bad actors because they know there will be accommodations made.

The supermarket itself is full of examples:

1 - Handicap spots are meant to support people with mobility issues. In practice they don't differentiate between mobility issues and other handicaps, so anyone with a sticker/plate uses the spots regardless. Growing up, my friend's family use to take grandma's car to the store because she had handicap plates and they could park up front. Spirit of the law be damned, it's about complying with the letter.

2 - Shopping carts are provided free for use while shopping, the store just asks that you return them to the cart corral when you're done. There's no accountability and lots of people do not return the carts to corrals, people leave them full of garbage and dirty diapers, and people steal them.

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