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Comment by blackle | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree, however if you're the kind of person who orders groceries, then what ends up happening is that you start collecting reusable bags that you have no way of reusing. I hope that someone starts some kind of "reusable bag recycling" system so I can give the scores of bags I have to a good home

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If the bags are actually reusable, it doesn't seem very hard to coordinate to have the delivery person pick up the last delivery's bags next time they're at your house.

For home grocery delivery, I could imagine that using stackable or collapsible crates or similar containers might even make more sense, assuming the delivery is via car/truck. Why stick to a container optimized for walk-out customers at all?

Ocado does exactly that in the UK, refunds them too.

I had that problem, but then the supermarkets in Australia all switched to paper bags. Now I just chuck them in recycling. Even if they do end up in landfill or a creek, they are paper, in a month they will have disintegrated.

In my area, one of our grocery chains has "Compostable Bags" which they package the "Pickup / Delivery" orders in.

My area also mandates municipal composting so the discussion of "But is it _really_ compostable" is moot.

It does not matter much how they do in a landfill. What matters is what happens when left out in the environment, aiui they weather and breakdown pretty fast.

Anything that ends up either in a landfill or in the environment (fwiw landfills are usually part of the environment, but that's a different discussion) is something that doesn't get to amortize production costs over several uses, so arguably both are best to be avoided, if at all possible.

Yes I can attest to how quickly they start breaking down even just sitting in the container for about a week. Almost need a scheduled reminder to replace it no matter how full it is.

It's really a farce. The old bags were really, really thin. Now, they're reuseable, and so they have to be much thicker, but they're still only used once. This just means that we're making more plastic waste.

I don't know what the average number of uses for a reusable bag is, but it's certainly not one. We've got about a half dozen, including a few freezer bags that do most of the work, plus a few that have been repurposed as the "beach activities bag" and "kid's soccer stuff bag" and so on. The ones used for groceries have been used at least once a week for going on four years.

The old bags also averaged slightly over one use, but the mandatory "bag of bags" in the pantry got depleted much more slowly than it filled.

If someone is throwing their reusable bags in the landfill and getting new ones every time, they're using it wrong...which I admit isn't entirely their fault at this societal scale, but let's at least agree it's the expected way to use the tool.

The only grocery delivery service I've used let you return bags the next time they drop food off. I'm not sure how many of them get reused though.

Good idea! But unfortunately the reason I always have more bags is that I forget my bags in the first place.

Maybe you get a few cents back when you return them?

What’s wrong with paper?

making paper is much more environmentally damaging than making plastic

i'm not joking, look it up

It uses more energy, but doesn’t create plastics which last thousands of years.

Energy usage of shopping bags isn’t that big of a deal. The trash created after use is.

the trash created after use of shopping bags is not a big deal either; a typical non-reusable shopping bag weighs 200 milligrams, so if you use three per day for 72 years, you produce a grand total of 16 kilograms of shopping bags. that's less than even your own bones, which will also last thousands of years

the issue with paper mills is not their energy consumption, which generally is fueled by the same biomass they process (and is thus carbon-neutral), but the toxic waste they produce

do the math instead of just posting stuff without thinking

When I go fishing at the creek it is not a ton of paper bags littering it. Single-use plastic bags are terrible and people overly use them. Go get a pack of gum from a bodega and you'll be offered a plastic bag by default.

Maybe we shouldn't necessarily ban them, but we should definitely tax them to make people question "do I really need that bag?"

it sounds like your assessment of environmental harms is mostly guided by surface appearances, but things like paper mill pollution are not easily visible or understandable

When did I advocate for paper bags? I don't seem to see that anywhere. It seems like your argument is mostly guided by straw men and reading comprehension failure. How is paper mill pollution relevant then? There weren't paper bags available where I went either. So it's not like banning plastic bags increased paper usage.

Either way, we can also have regulations protecting against paper mill pollution. It's not like we have to have one or the other. We can do both!

But in the end my argument is we should do much to eliminate the wastefulness of single-use bags in general. Not that we should substitute one for another. Quit throwing so much shit away every day of your life is my argument.

I fully acknowledge there's absolutely useful places for disposable things. Medical equipment, certain kinds of packaging, etc makes a lot of sense; there's often not really any good alternatives. But being given a throw away bag after buying a pack of gum is a simple example of the egregiousness of our throw away culture.

Go kayaking on most rivers in the US and get absolutely inundated with single use plastic trash of the worst kinds and continue telling me how bad doing anything is. Fuck single use plastic shopping bags, I can't wait to see them disappear.

> you start collecting reusable bags that you have no way of reusing

I use them as trash bags for the various small trashcans in the home (office, bathroom, etc). Works great.

Also fantastic for any trash (like fish) you have that you don't want stinking up the big trash can for several days and needs to be taken out asap.

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