Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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New York banned plastic bags at grocery store checkouts a few years ago, at least in the area I live.

I don't think it did that much because they didn't ban plastic bags in the fruit and vegetable section where you can peel bags off from a roll. They also require you to individually bag each fruit or vegetable type at most grocery stores I've seen. They're always free too.

That means if you buy a few apples, oranges, avocados, cucumbers and tomatoes you're using 5 plastic bags of substantial size. If you get fresh romaine lettuce or something bushy they have plastic bags that are bigger than the old plastic bags they used to provide at checkout.

You're also not limited to fruits and vegetables. Some people will put bread and other lighter items in these plastic bags in case they didn't bring a bag of their own into the store and have a couple of things to carry out but don't want to use a cart.

The only thing the ban did was to get most grocery shoppers to bring their own bags to carry or cart your items out at checkout. In this case, sure you saved a number of bags no question about it, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it solved much.

Would most of that not have all happened before, and then those plastic produce bags would have been put into plastic grocery bags at checkout?

The same process for buying fruits and vegetables occurred before and after the ban.

It really depends on how you shopped:

Example 1: You buy 5 assorted fruits and vegetables types and have 5 plastic bags with you at checkout. I can't speak for everyone but I'd typically walk out of the store with these bags in my hand because the bags are usually thick enough to not break. I wouldn't use another bag to bag all of the bags because I generally only buy 2-3 of each type at a time.

Example 2: You make a decent grocery run (fruits, vegetables, bread, meats, snacks, drinks, whatever) where you'd probably have 4-5 plastic bags before checkout and then another 4-5 bigger and thicker plastic bags (pre-ban bags) to hold everything at checkout.

In example 2's case you're saving a number of plastic bags with the ban but example 1 isn't or even if you got 1 additional bag to carry everything out you're talking about 5 bags vs 6 here which isn't that big of an impact.

Not all places used plastic bags too. Costco never had bags and some places have paper bags although I rarely see places with paper bags in my area.

When the ban hit in my area the grocery store started to sell their own bags which are pretty robust, these bags will outlive all of us.

In the UK, we don't have those rolls near produce any more. Instead you would be expected to buy a reusable net bag.

Once forced to buy or carry bags, you quickly realise you don't actually need to keep everything in it's own little baggy fiefdom. Nothing bad happens if an onion touches a cucumber! You can just put loose produce in a basket, weigh it with it's friends, and put it into a reusable shopping bag.

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