Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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Does everyone else plan their grocery shopping in advance?!?!

I don't have a family. I work non-regular hours and in non-regular locations. I live in New York City.

I can't plan when I go grocery shopping. It's always when I'm coming home from... somewhere... and I have a free half-hour, and I'm lucky enough for it to be before all the grocery stores have closed... but I simply don't have a way to carry reusable bags with me all the time. And when I get a chance to shop it's usually ~3 bags' worth.

What exactly are people like me with non-predictable schedules and no car to keep reusable bags in supposed to do? This is a genuinely serious question.

Reusable bags are great for people with cars. I don't get how it fits NYC though.

Plus, I re-use every single bag for trash anyways. So now I'll have to buy trash bags, which are always much thicker than grocery bags, i.e. far more plastic. :( This will be inconvenient AND much worse for the environment in terms of plastic used. Literally lose-lose.

For most of the country with cars, I get it. But here in NYC, I'm not getting it. Especially since pollution/littering from plastic bags doesn't seem to be a problem here locally.

I'm really not trying to be difficult here. And I already do my best to live environmentally responsibly -- public transport and shared bicycles (Citibike), small apartment, responsible consumption, I recycle everything I can. But this just isn't thought-out.

IME these discussions are almost always driven by people that drive to the grocery store once a week to do their shopping and can't imagine life any other way. Then they can get on their high horse against people like us with much lower carbon footprints. Like you I don't know ahead of time whether I'm going to go shopping until I do and my plastic shopping bags become rubbish bags on a nearly 1 to 1 scale.

Things like this are usually just feel good measures all around, in the western world most of these bags will end up at rubbish sites and there are a million other sources of plastic waste that get left unaddressed. When they introduced laws against single use plastics here the number of bags used dropped 80%, but the 10c "reusable" ones have a lot more plastic, making it a net wash. And even then when you buy fresh veggies like potatoes and carrots they'll be bundled into a single use bag, either by the shop themselves or the customer.

They're are tonnes of ways to cut down plastic and other waste but everyone is preoccupied with this one convenient and hard to avoid use.

> when you buy fresh veggies like potatoes and carrots they'll be bundled into a single use bag

Simple - don't bag produce like potatoes or carrots if you're buying them loose. You can put them directly in your shopping cart/basket and transfer to your grocery bag after checking out. The only produce I bag is leafy greens and stuffy like green beans/okra (many small units hard to keep together).

Might I suggest carrying a small bag with you for your personal effects? Sure it's a change of habit for you, but with the ban you're going to have to change your habits anyway, and this means you can buy a nice, durable canvas shopping bag or something to that effect.

> So now I'll have to buy trash bags, which are always much thicker than grocery bags,

I re-use produce bags for trash. And I don't even bag all of my produce.

The produce bags at my supermarket are significantly smaller than the (normal-sized) grocery bags -- they can hold maybe 4 green peppers or large potatoes. (I've seen other supermarkets with much larger produce bags, but not at my local ones.)

They just don't hold enough volume to be useful as even small trash bags, on top of which they don't have handles so you have to use the top 1/3 of the bag to tie off, which makes them even smaller.

So they're too small to line even a small trash can with, or to hang from inside a cabinet door.

I have a 32oz yogurt container that I keep on my kitchen counter and line with a produce bag. That's the only "trash can" I need and most trash fits into it, believe it or not. I also compost food scraps at home though, which isn't an option available to everyone. If you compost food scraps and recycle, there honestly isn't that much trash left over. Most of my trash these days is non-recyclable plastic packaging.

> What exactly are people like me with non-predictable schedules and no car to keep reusable bags in supposed to do?

There are full-size reusable bags that fold into the approximate size of a pocket square; three of them can probably be carried easily in a typical pants pocket.

> So now I'll have to buy trash bags, which are always much thicker than grocery bags, i.e. far more plastic.

The trash bags that are roughly the same capacity as grocery bags are much thinner, and less plastic; large kitchen bags are thicker, but also hold several times the volume and mass that a grocery bag would handle.

My jeans pockets are already full with my wallet, keys, and cell phone. The idea that I have room to keep three folded up bags as well in my pockets at all times is ludicrous.

I mean, seriously, I couldn't even wad a single existing super-thin grocery bag into my pocket without it bulging uncomfortably and no room for anything else, let alone three.

And I have never in my life seen trash bags sold that are thinner that grocery bags. Grocery bags are the thinnest plastic I've ever seen, which makes sense for economic reasons. (I'm not talking about some gourmet thick grocery bags, I'm talking about your cheap-supermarket ones, which is where I shop.)

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