81–87 of 87 posts
I remember the brown paper bag being an iconic part of American movies, when I was growing up. What happened to that?
Yes, we just keep repeating history.
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Based on a bit of extra research 30g is pretty middle of the road for the bags in question. 120g is for actually reusable bags, what folks are calling "bag for life"
I’m definitely talking about the actually reusable bags, which is often all that is available these days. It’s got more and more extreme over the last couple of years. The two supermarkets near me (Morrisons and Waitrose) only sell these stiff heavy duty bags that cost about £2. I’m sure they’re well over 100g. (I think Sainsbury’s and M&S do still have the slightly thick kind that are probably 30g.)
And unless people frequently throw out the expensive kind of reusable bag their weight isn't relevant anyway.
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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…
> How many "reusable" bags are sold every year? My question is how many "reusable" bags are being used once and then thrown out, effectively becoming massively wasteful single use bags? My guess is a lot. Maybe not as many as single use plastic bags, but they must be even worse for the landfills, surely... > who only offer single use bags in online deliveries My mom gets online grocery deliveries from walmart and eve…
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…
Are single serving aluminum cans, if recycled, really worse than the alternatives? Plastic bottles or glass both have their own emissions and recycling issues.
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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…
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…
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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