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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Even single-use items like plastic forks/spoons that typically come wrapped in a ton of plastic these days, it's everywhere. In a typical delivery order they'll give you several of these even if you don't ask for them. CA tried to reduce single use plastic bag waste by mandating the 10c surcharge and "sturdy" bags, but now you just added a meaningless cost to the consumer who's going to largely use the bags in the exact same manner as before, but now they're even HEAVIER plastic.

It's just a mess.

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The western concept of "dirty" has contributed a lot to waste. In certain other cultures, human hands are considered to be clean (with the onus being on the handler to make sure their hands are, in fact, clean) and it's quite OK to touch something someone else will touch with their bare skin (or even eat from).

It's not even a rational obsession with zero human contact. A (true) chef is not expected to cook with gloves on. His hands are going to be all over your food while he's in the back. Chefs probably will taste something out of the pot to see if it's coming along ok. We know this (though perhaps try to avoid thinking about it). We'll eat nasty hotdogs at the ball game that have been handed to you down the bleachers by eight pairs of hands, but insist that our plastic cutlery come wrapped in further plastic.

That hot dog is wrapped in foil and probably was prepared by someone wearing gloves though. Health depts around the country are more and more insisting on glove wearing for basically everything, though that has its own problems and is debatably less sanitary in certain ways.

Health depts are particularly obsessed with utensils too. The plastic is because of all of the hands that might be reaching into wherever they are if they're self-serve, if they're dropped, etc.

I wonder, is this obsession with sanitary utensils founded on some real-life study? Or is it pure paranoia and made-up lab tests ("What would happen if I dip my fork in this anthrax solution?").

Some of it is “real” but some of it is kind of cargo-cult. Someone wearing gloves for their entire shift doesn’t really provide anything protective. You have to regularly change gloves to make it worthwhile.

Well, the fecal oral route of transmission of things like norovirus is very real. If you just set out a big bin of utensils, I've no doubt gross people will spread gross diseases that way.

That certainly is not a slam dunk case for individually wrapping forks though. If the fork is in a plastic wrapper, you touch that and can still pick up the germs from it. It's some amount of reduction of spreading pathogens I am sure, how much I do not think we know. It is also, however, cheap and easy and not a really big hit to the environment, plastic wrappers on utensils probably don't make the top 1,000 sources of carbon emissions or landfill space.

The best solution (and you see this at places like stadiums now, and spreading to fast food) are the little machines with a hopper that dispense the utensils. You can get a sanitary supply with no individual wrapping. But they're not practical in situations like a hot dog vendor who is walking around passing stuff out. And you're still touching the little lever that 1,000 people before you did.

Nothing's perfect, it's all tradeoffs, but to a health department, they get no thanks from the public for sparing landfills from plastic wrappers, but they do get blamed whenever an outbreak happens, so you can expect them to err on the side of caution.

Also, eho is eating a hotdog with a fork and knife? At a baseball game.

You kind of addressed the gloves thing, but I want to express my confusion how gloves make things cleaner. Where you put your hands, you put your gloves hands, so cross-contamination works the same way.

Gloves work to:

- not get your hands dirty - easily switch between a dirty state to a clean state (remove dirty glove) - prevent.. body contamination? How much is that a real concern though?

Right so gloves are an obvious win if you have a cut on your fingers or something like that. Chefs could generally be relied on to use them in that situation anyway, for their own protection. There are a lot of acidic salty things that hurt.

In other situations, food-borne illness mostly happens through cross contamination. Gloves would help there too if one changed them frequently, but people tend not to and it’s hard to make them do so at appropriate times. Some studies show that basically they are more likely to wash their hands when needed (likely because you feel that chicken juice on your hands) than change gloves. That’s why it’s debatable. People either wash their hands or change their gloves, and (excepting things like a cut on your fingers) whichever they do more is probably safer.

Western culture? What?

Besides some filthy cultures in the East, the majority of Eastern cultures have cleanliness even baked into their faith affecting everything from how they shower to how they pray to how they eat.

I put "dirty" in quotes for a reason. People are just expected to hold themselves to a higher standard of cleanliness in other cultures instead of hacking around it with copious amounts of plastic.

Much of the rest of the civilized world holds cleanliness in high(er) regard, but they're not germophobes.

I'm not sure what "dirty" is, but a major reason for Western cleanliness was Florence Nightingale, a pioneer of medicine and statistics:

Washing of hands wasn't a big thing before her.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale

The argument being made is that in terms of achieving cleanliness, wrapping things in plastic is the opposite of washing your hands.

Your hands get raw after washing too much.

Wrapping things up is a natural progression from constant hand washing.

Hand washing doesn't need to be constant to be effective in the vast majority of situations, especially the situations where you're setting up a big bunch of items and you could wrap them.

Which reminds me of this most likely apocryphal quote:

"Interviewer: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think about Western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/23/good-idea/

I don’t think that it is about hands being clean or not clean. The wrapper on a disposable utensil is a kind of tamper evident “seal” attesting that this particular utensil hasn’t been used yet.

I can see that having started as a marketing ploy and have very little to do with hygiene reasons. I.e., how much can one manufacturer differentiate their disposable plastic forks? Very little. They're all plastic, they're all forks.

Until someone put them in a plastic wrapper and marketed them as "sealed for your protection". They hit a nerve in the society, and soon people demanded them and they became the norm.

I don't think it has to do with cleanliness per se... might be about legal liability? An unopened package tells you that it's there as-is from the manufacturer. It seems more like it's about ensuring the product's integrity through the chain of custody than anything else.

It absolutely is not a western concept. China takes the spirit you describe, but not the gloves or food example, and ramps it up to 10. There was no such thing as a cloth mask in China, for instance. There is also no market for used goods. If its not new its dirty.

And just talking plastic waste in general, East Asia is far and away the biggest polluter.

Single use plastic bags are not really a problem in the amount of plastic they use, these are something like 5 grams. They are actually better in that regard than most reusable bags because it takes a lot of reuses to beat that, often more than their typical lifespan.

Where they are a problem however is that they have a tendency to fly away and end up where you don't want them. In the ocean, in nature, littering the city, they are en eyesore, cause problem with some animals, and end up as microplastics everywhere.

Sturdier, paid-for bags may not result in less plastic being used, but it results in less litter, which is good. And yes, it works. Some people will continuously pay their 10 cents, grumble and throw away their bags, but most will do the smart thing and just reuse their bags.

Now compare to paper bags.

And account for microplastics.

Nothing beats HDPE. See softcopy page 7 of this report: <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...>

  The paper, LDPE, non-woven PP and cotton bags should be reused at least 3, 4, 11 and 131 times respectively to ensure that they have lower global warming potential than conventional HDPE carrier bags that are not reused. The number of times each would have to be reused when different proportions of conventional (HDPE) carrier bags are reused are shown in the table below.

With regards to the plastic bag surcharge, this is a policy that has largely worked in some parts of Europe as far as I can see.

They charge typically 10c for a single use bag, and 30c for a reusable bag[0] (which is much heavier plastic indeed). And people actually reuse the bags, or bring their own cloth bags, to the supermarket.

Additionally, single use plastics have been mostly banned and I can't recall seeing any (apart from straws, which were banned more recently) in the last 15 years. This was met with some grumbling early on, but people got used to it rather quickly.

[0] To give you an idea about how sturdy these 30c reusable bags are, I routinely use these to transport car parts (like brake disks & calipers, or suspension parts), fluids, power tools, or even lead batteries around.

Anecdotally, this seems to be much less prevalent in the US due to cultural differences. I live in Chicago and their is a 7 cent surcharge for bags. I'd say 1/3 of people actually bring their own even after this has been in place for years.

33% is a change over 0 at scale.

People brought their own bags long before plastic bags were banned.

I don’t think we were starting from 0

The heavier plastic means those bags have a longer reusable life. Unlike the thin plastic bags which were often only good for single use yet still takes centuries to breakdown.

As for the plastic bag tax, in other counties which that has been introduced there has been a reduction in the use of new bags. Every culture is different though, so it might not work in CA. But what they’re doing is far from untested.

Longer reusable life also means they stick around for longer when improperly disposed. Think about that for a second.

We have thought about it. We are already taking about hundreds of years for plastic to degrade and even then, it’s to microplastics that are just as harmful to biological life.

So if “bags for life”, as the heavier bags are often referred to, means fewer plastic bags are made and thus thrown away, then that’s still a net positive.

Because the time scales we are talking about are massive, what’s matters more is reuse.

If fact, that’s a key factor to consider regardless of the material you’re trying to conserve. Reuse is far more important than recycling.

Being heavier plastic is good in a couple of ways. It makes them less likely to blow away from containers and get into the environment. They are less likely to float in the ocean looking like the jellyfish that turtles and other animals eat.

there may be other problems, but there are at least those two advantages.

> They are less likely to float in the ocean looking like the jellyfish that turtles and other animals eat.

Everyone knows turtles eat straws. Through the nose.

At least in Seattle (not sure if this is WA wide) the UberEats et al are actually required to have people opt-in to utensils rather than opt-out.

Ireland introduced this bag tax decades ago and it really made a difference, here's some of the details.:

https://ieep.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/IE-Plastic-Bag-Le...

A chinese takeout by me recently switched from paper bags....insulated plastic bags, complete with that reflective liner...all for the same $12 takeout cost. It's insane but this is in NY.

And many more restaurants are trending torwards "flashier" packaging as part of "branding".

I don’t disagree with you on single use plastics but I think another thing flies under the radar. There is just so much STUFF. Without plastic Id wager people would probably own about 20% of the number of items that they currently do.

I often think about my grandparent’s house. She never seemed to be missing anything that was needed, and didn’t seem to want for anything, but it never felt like there “stuff” everywhere, like so many homes today. Everything was used and had a purpose, and many things were reused. My grandpa’s workbench was all organized with old glass jars to hold various sizes of nails and screws. These days people buy a plastic organizer and throw the glass jars away.

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