Hacker News Reader

Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Here in the NL, plastic bags are an extra charge (at least where I shop), it costs just a tiny bit extra to get nice reusable ones or bring your own - you can return most other single use plastics — like bottled water — and get your money back.

This alleviates #1 above, but I don’t think it would ever fly in the US. Here, grocery shopping is almost a daily experience in the city. You can’t walk 10 minutes without passing within shouting distance of a grocery store of some kind. You buy what you can carry or load on your bike. Bulk purchases get delivered.

In the US, I went shopping about once a week and loaded up on a trunk load of groceries at a time.

I don’t know if this is a product of many tiny stores, making it easy to walk/bike to a store; or a cultural one. But charging (and refunding on return) for these things would be a big step in stopping the use of them.

View on HN

> plastic bags are an extra charge (at least where I shop), it costs just a tiny bit extra to get nice reusable ones or bring your own - you can return most other single use plastics — like bottled water — and get your money back.

All of this is true of where I live in the US, though the 'return single use plastics for money' is fairly specific to beverage containers. And the single use plastic bags are banned outright. Most grocery stores provide paper bags, and charge a fee.

They probably need to bump the fee for bags a bit higher, though. We tried doing the reusable bag thing, but as of yet we haven't successfully built the habit of bringing old bags back to the store, so we just end up buying the paper bags every time. It's something like 5 cents a bag, which is so little that it doesn't inspire.

> Here in the NL, plastic bags are an extra charge (at least where I shop), it costs just a tiny bit extra to get nice reusable ones or bring your own - you can return most other single use plastics — like bottled water — and get your money back.

It's the same in the UK at the supermarket, but then in the same shop I can buy a packet of chocolates in a plastic bag of their own, with each individual chocolate wrapped.

Same for other goods: I bought a new lamp, it came in a box with styrofoam, plastic wrapping around each individual component, a plastic cover over the plug, temporary plastic clips to hold the cable together.

The bastard material is just everywhere.

Looking at a full lifetime you need to reuse cloth bags thousands of times to break even on their higher impact. For sturdier plastic reusable bags you need to reuse them a few hundred times to break even.

Could you explain what you mean?

I find it hard to believe that the environmental impact of one sturdier plastic bag is equivalent to hundreds of slightly flimsier bags.

I’ve shopped in a few European countries, and found the reusable plastic bags have maybe twice or three times the mass of the “non-reusable” one. I can’t see how they would have multiple orders of magnitude environment impact.

I have not yet verified the references, but this SciShow episode seems to propose exactly that: https://youtu.be/JvzvM9tf5s0

Maybe I'm quoting the wrong part of the video but he suggests you need to use the re-usable heavy bag six times not hundreds of times to equalise the environmental impact?

This looks about right to me - he's comparing with the very heaviest re-usable plastic bags which I could imagine have at least 6 times the mass of the single use bags.

I typically use the lighter re-usables plastic bags - unless I need to carry a lot of heavy stuff - which are maybe half the weight/thickness of the ones he uses for the comparison.

You're correct, it appears I was conflating reusable plastic with cotton canvas. The multiplier goes up for "Total environmental impact" - but 'only' to 54x on average.

> This alleviates #1 above, but I don’t think it would ever fly in the US.

Both of these are already the case in many parts of the US. My home state had refunds on plastic/metal/glass containers for ages, and CA (for instance) has a statewide plastic bag fee that I believe passed in a public referendum years ago. This is still the exception both in the US and Europe, from what I can tell.

though the amount of single use plastics encasing so much of the food (like at AH) seems to be a problem as well...

The problem with bags is - let's call it the bachelor shopper. A modern man's clothes may have pockets, but he rarely wears any kind of handbag in which to hold the reusable shopping bag.

So it doesn't matter if they cost 1c, 10c or 1 eur - I am always buying new bags, have nowhere to put the bag when I am going outside. At least I also use them to throw away trash.

Since NY doesn't have plastic bags for most shopping anymore, you see a lot more men carrying bags for shopping.

Fwiw, I throw a canvas bag in my pocket when I'm going to shop somewhere. And a lot of people carry backpacks anyway.

> A modern man's clothes may have pockets, but he rarely wears any kind of handbag in which to hold the reusable shopping bag

typical store-issued reusable shopping bags easily fold to pocket size, and bags that fold into convenient, integrated pocket-size holders are readilt available, too.

“I don’t have a way of carrying reusable bags” is a rationalization, not a reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com