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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting is that there's no single definition of "green". Sometimes tradeoffs have to be made. Personally, I would tend to say that a single concentrated pollution event is less important than global runaway climate-change.

Another interesting example of environmental trade-offs is the plastic bag ban (where the disposable, ultra-light-weight plastic bags at supermarkets are banned in favor of heavier, reusable plastic and paper bags).

The lighter bags:

- break more easily, making them harder to re-use

- tend to blow around and get stuck in trees, rivers, etc, causing visible pollution

However, the heavier bags:

- emit a lot more carbon through their transportation (because of the extra weight)

- put more total plastic into the world at the end of the day unless everyone reuses all of them (which many people don't)

Just like there's no single definition of "healthy food", there's no single definition of "good for the environment".

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Or you could just use reusable bags...

That said I fully agree with the larger point. We have to be willing to weigh and accept tradeoffs.

Reusable bags support the argument the GP was making about tradeoffs. Reusable bags are good for stopping the production of plastic waste, but the resulting CO2 emissions are much greater that single use thin plastic bags, unless you reuse the reusable bags thousands of times.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/12/17337602/plastic-tote-bag...

"unless you reuse the reusable bags thousands of times."

That is not what the report in that article says[1]. In Table IV, for a conventional cotton bag, it has to be re-used 52 times in order to equal the LDPE plastic bag in the climate change metric.

For a woven PP bag (which is the most common plastic re-usable bag in my experience), the numbers it has to be re-used is only 5.

[1] https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

The Verge article references more than the one study. I was referring to the Danish study, which I heard about on this planet money episode: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-...

> A 2011 study by the U.K. government found a person would have to reuse a cotton tote bag 131 times before it was better for climate change than using a plastic grocery bag once. The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution. These factors make cloth bags even worse. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment.

It would appear I was misremembering somewhat, but I think my point (and the GP's that I was referring to in my earlier comment) still stands: These decisions are often about tradeoffs. Sometimes things can be green on one axis, and not so green on another.

Honestly, the long-term answer is to not make these things out of plastic. If we were to use net or cloth bags, and if all new bags (and fabrication materials) were taxed to the point that the only economically viable choices were sustainable overall, then that would achieve sustainability (e.g., people would repair bags--by sewing or weave--instead of discarding. This is the actual way to solve the problem.

The issue there, of course, is that we have a whole modern civilization built around consuming and discarding, and it's hard to achieve change once these habits are built and there's little direct incentive for change. It's entirely feasible--sometimes people point to "labor specialization", but it takes a day (if that) to learn to do basic sewing and weaving pretty well--but we would need to drastically shift (back) to a rather un-capitalist society of home industry with very strong incentives for mending rather than replacing.

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