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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between "stop using single-use items completely" and merely reduce their usage. There's a lot of excessive packaging in supermarkets that can be addressed without compromising usability/user-experience and ultimately reducing the plastic footprint significantly.

Most produce doesn't need stickers or rubber-bands for example, nor does it need individual packaging - the packaging can be provided at the supermarket in the form of a single plastic bag.

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Living in Germany, I don't even need plastic bags - I take produce from large bins, and carry it home in my bag pack (or shopping bags if I'm out doing a week's groceries). Why do we even need single-use plastic bags at all? Supermarkets over here sell more robust, reusable shopping bags at the checkout. These are a good alternative if you forget your own.

Problem with reusable bags is that you have to have it on-hand. Fine if you plan your visit to the supermarket or have a car where you can always have a few stashed.

If you don’t have a car and only go to the supermarket occasionally on the way back from somewhere else you’re very unlikely to have a bag with you, so you end up buying the “reusable” bag every time and at this point I’ve thrown away several hundred of those over the last couple years as they accumulate at home and I have no use for them.

I’m a bit reluctant to not see how your problem could be solved with minimal planning of your shopping trips, going outside with a bag pack or having a shopping bag stuffed somewhere. It’s not that hard - this falls into the „get your adult life together“ category to me.

It’s not a problem for me, I was just making an observation that the bans on thin plastic bags may be counterproductive with some people.

Accumulating & eventually throwing away the reusable bags in bulk is a minor inconvenience compared to making sure I’ve always got one on hand which I pretty much always fail at.

I also go occasionally to the supermarket and I just put a tote bag or any kind of other bag into my big bag in case the stuff doesn‘t fit.

That can‘t be too hard and you should be able to figure that out without wasting several hundred reusable bags

We might have to train people to think about things before they do them. Or heck, even plan things ahead of time, like adding things to a shopping list instead of buying one item at a time on impulse. Though I admit this might be too radical an idea for the majority of today’s youth.

Sure, reduction is a reasonable goal, but this thread started with

> The only way is to reuse and stop using single use items.

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