I don't remember energy use being the problem with plastic bags?
It was plastic bags being absolutely everywhere in the environment. Streets, parks, trees. Wrapped around anything sticking out of the ground. On your face on a windy day.
Pollution is the problem with plastic. Probably health, too, now that microplastics are being recognized as an issue.
My state did away with bags a few years ago, and you now never see bags blowing around or stuck on trees. It also seems everyone stopped complaining about it once we got over the hump of "remember to bring your bags".
So we are just left with a small group of old timers, who would probably bring back metal (pull) tab cans if they could, complaining about it. Ironically its the same group of people who blocked windmills because they are "unsightly".
I think they mean the 1970s-style "pull-tabs" that disconnected from the can. These were frequently discarded as litter, instead of put in a proper bin. I can remember seeing a lot of them in road gutters as a kid.
I think that’s about pull tabs (the old kind where you removed a small disc from the top of a can) vs pop tabs (the kind where you punch a hole into it and nothing detaches).
Every winter in my city, once the leaves all fell, our trees would be draped in shredded plastic bags. Banning single use plastic bags has done a significant amount to beautify this place.
When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere, and also in awe at how clean the city was. Never did the two thoughts cross each other in her head
> When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere
The first part I kind of get, humans get used to stuff they get, and get frustrated when it disappears without them really understanding why, it's kind of understandable.
But why would she be outraged about recycling bins being more readily available? Are the recycling bins like really ugly/disgusting, or why would they upset someone? Sounds like being upset about there being too many libraries or something.
> Sounds like being upset about there being too many libraries or something.
You joke but people who complain about public recycling bins would also likely be the ones to complain about public libraries too. I've encountered many people who think libraries exist to poison the minds of the youth and somehow make homelessness a problem and we should shut them all down to alleviate the homeless issues in our communities and ensure higher community standards in education (mostly, go read the bible at church, that's all you need).
Yeap. In my pantry right now, I probably have 12 reusable bags. Some of them have been used hundreds of times (and have the battle scars and stains to prove it) while others were used once because I had to run into a grocery store unprepared. The math probably averages out to a slight advantage for reusable, and that doesn't take unique use cases into account: for example, I found every container I owned useful during a recent move.
I'm sure skeptics like the article's writers would tweak some numbers to say disposables have an advantage, so who cares? The fact is there are less gunky, sludge-riddled bags in the gutter of my downtown and that absolutely justifies the bans, despite what this article or the NY Post might argue.
They were also so damn cheap that clerks would bag EVERYTHING without asking, so they not only covered the streets like you describe, but often after offering no actual utility to begin with.
CA did the wrong thing for like 12 years. We just finally went back to paper bags for everything. If it ends up on a road, it won't kill animals, it will eventually break apart and turn into particulates. It's what we did before plastic bags rained from the sky into all grocery stores. And the best part: if you have permanent bags you can still use them.
There's [very] biodegradable plastics as well. I found out my local store swapped to them in a pretty amusing way. I'd collect plastic bags to use as trash bags and the like. One day I went to grab some from under my counter there was this mess of orange confetti like stuff everywhere from some of the [orange] bags that'd degraded even in just normal storage conditions.
But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them. Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world.
Since we can't get 100% compliance in rich countries and poor countries can't afford landfills that's a good reason to not use plastic. But it's not a good reason to have plastic recycling programs.
> But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them
We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin and have that bin be cleanly collected and yet you're expecting people to bury them??
No, the solution is to massively reduce how often we use single-use plastic bags. It seems like every time I buy anything from any store its just assumed I want it in a plastic bag. Getting a single bottled drink at a convenience store? The clerk gets a plastic bag ready. Its insane.
It's the town or city that does the disposal whether that's burying, recycling, dumping at sea, or whatever. Again, this article isn't about whether we should produce plastic but how we should dispose of it once its collected.
> It's the town or city that does the disposal whether that's burying, recycling, dumping at sea, or whatever.
> once its collected
Its not the employees of the town or city ensuring that bag ever makes it to the employees of the town or city though, that's my point. Its the user of the plastic bag is where a lot of the breakdown in the chain happens. Its the fact you buy anything and the shop gives you a plastic bag to deal with. Which, a ton of people don't do a good job dealing with them! Similarly, they don't do a good job with drink containers and other packaging either.
Its not like its the city employees putting all the plastic bags in the creeks and the rivers and the fields and the woods. At least, not usually, and not normally in their course of duty.
It's a conspicuous part. But energy use is still a problem. Like, maybe hi-kicking people throwing thrash everywhere would be cheaper solution then letting them do it, but with paper instead of PET. If we won't calculate we can't be sure
Right. This seems to be written by someone who has never been outside and seen the amount of plastic alongside roads or caught in bushes etc. And this is in a country that is supposed to be good at collecting waste.
Another point, to counter the " plastic bags are cheap, cotton is expensive" argument, is that most of the reusable bags are plastic too. They are way cheaper to produce than cotton bags, and earn their keep within about 5 to 10 uses as opposed to 100 or whatever the crazy figure was for cotton bags.
You can use single use plastic bag 50 times or more before it deteriorates, not the thinnest kind, but the average one. They are incredibly strong. The dedicated mult-use ones are insanely strong, but also few times thicker and more unwieldy.
Like with single use shaving razor. They don't need to be literally single use. It depends on the user. You can use it as long as it serves you.
The best thing limiting access to plastic bags did was familiarizing people with the idea of taking bags to the market.
Proper recycling improves national security and the well-being of their citizens.
Good example is South Korea. They were devastated after continual war in the 1950s. So they implemented mandatory recycling. Food waste goings into bin A, metals into bin B, plastics into bin C, ... This allows for reducing the cost of recycling by presorting items. It helped them rebuild and become stronger. To this day they still properly separate their garbage to ease recycling.
Recycling food waste and scraps means creating a nutrient rich fertilize resource. Tossing them into a land fill removes nutrients from the food chain. USA food has less nutrients than years past because of the push for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
The argument that is pro-polyethylene plastic bags over cotton completely ignores the source: Renewable plants that are grown and harvested, vs. finite fossil fuels extracted from the Earth and refined.
> Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 1,725 megajoules, around 3,050 times as much energy.
That conveniently ignores the drilling, extracting, transporting, refining, and transporting again to make "polyethylene resin".
Broadly, I agree with your comment. I have seen a few experimental plastic drink bottles that claim to have a minimum percent produced from plants. It is a little bit insane to imagine the amount of chemical and energy gymnastics required to make plastic bottles from plants, but, hey, the big drinks companies are desparate not to loose PET bottles. To be clear: I am not defending this type of plastic! I am only pointing out that it does exist.
> That conveniently ignores the drilling, extracting, transporting, refining, and transporting again to make "polyethylene resin".
This is really the key point! There are comparing apples to oranges.
Somewhat adjacent, in many rich countries, in the last 10 years there has been a big push to remove plastic drink straws. I think it might have worked. Initially, the designs and performance of wax coated paper straws were pretty terrible, but chemists and material scientists have been working hard to improve the product. I feel like paper-ish drink straws are here to stay.
The energy requirements for growing cotton being largely the sun, and a resource which makes up most of the universe (yes, I know water is several steps from hydrogen). ((And the tangentials like the fertilizers, dieslel etc.))
Compared to the energy requirements of petroleum based products: Incredible density and pressure acting on sufficient organic matter(thousands of times greater than growing cotton), on millenium time scales, then requiring several incredibly expensive and commoditization refining/distribution practices, and the end product is then ceremoniously burned off as poison or discarded into the aether.
It is 100 percent the "gotcha OP thought it is". However I do see/realize the fallacy you're pointing out in that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
"Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture."
Yeah, let's stop doing the fairly well established recycling programs that have knock on benefits like reducing pollution, and instead start scaling an entirely unproven and expensive mitigation program.
These are some prominent Effect Altruism guys so I know "cause prioritization" is their whole thing. But I think this is just basic contrarianism, because you cant fundraise off the fact that the cultural shift to recycling in the first world has been pretty successful and positive.
Like lets think about plastic bags from an object use standpoint. Given you have a collection of stuff to carry would you prefer:
A) A reasonably sturdy bag that can be styled to your preference (like with art or whatever) that you have to remember to bring with you when you need.
B) The literal minimum possible material to be considered a bag. Even money whatever you put into it will punch straight through the bottom, or you'll need to use 2-4 nested bags anyway. And it'll be uncomfortable to hold the whole time.
I think from an object use perspective a reusable bag is more pleasant to use.
But embodied energy calculations are convenient because you can get numbers to compare. But it ignores externalities.
Like if you actually considered the embodied energy of the median tote bag vs the median plastic bag from the point that it was extracted from the ground to the point that it returns to dust, I think the story would look really different. I'll bet a sizable percentage of plastic bags don't even make it through their first use. Meanwhile I've got tote bags that I think are fully 15 years old. Plus if you consider the remediation future generations will need to do for plastic bags. meanwhile I can actually bury a cotton tote bag in the dirt to decompose and it doesn't need infrastructure to prevent poisoning the water supply.
Did the authors consider the embodied energy of the landfill itself? Shipping? Trash collection? Ongoing monitoring? The embodied energy of the future carbon capture system?
It's just so convenient to look only at the materials, equate that to kg of co2, and use that for whatever narrative makes you feel good.
> "Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture."
Carbon capture is a scam to allow fossil consumption to continue as is. The only path forward is rapid destruction of fossil fuel demand and transitioning to clean energy and electric mobility. At this time, there is no effective technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
The push for recycling has been successful at making people feel better about themselves, not successful at saving energy or raw materials. The article also goes on at length about this, but most of what's put in recycling bins gets thrown out anyways and folks regularly put stuff in recycling bins that can't be recycled, just increasing the cost of recycling programs while lowering their effectiveness. Recycling metal cans and containers is a no brainer, recycling most plastics is of questionable value bordering on actively harmful[1].
"In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio."
I think there's a thing about food shopping here. Americans just don't go shopping as frequently, so you're better off with paper bags in the back of your car.
I am a Brit. I have a Lidl cotton bag that I've probably used sixty times already. It augments and will ultimately replace two reusable foldable/pocketable bags from Marks & Spencer that I have used for all of my shopping for at least thirteen years, perhaps more like sixteen.
I shop on foot, about once every four or five days. I wil have used the two M&S bags on more than a thousand journeys. One of them is finally wearing thin. The other goes in my pocket more or less whenever I leave the house. They were themselves made from recycled material.
I use two the majority of the time so I am confident I've avoided using at least 1800 plastic bags.
(Weird timing, but I did end up needing one last night, annoyingly, because I had to shop in an emergency, but it is the first time in five years or so and it already has a reuse purpose)
Reusable shopping bags are easy. A British shopper might even get to 173 uses in a single year.
These arguments tend to ignore that a reusable thing is often just a lot better at whatever it does. You can put a few liters of milk in a reusable bag without triple bagging it. You don't have to worry that it will split open and spill out on the ground. You can use the bag to pack for road trips, to store kid's snacks and toys, as a gym bag, etc. Groceries aren't the only thing anyone caries and people go further than between their boot and fridge.
In Switzerland grocery stores have been promoting reusable (recycled plastic) bags for years, and people use them for everything: I saw someone in Interlaken carrying firewood with one.
So:
- To people promoting reuse: maybe go beyond the environmental impact and appeal to quality of life. Having bag or two in your boot all the time is a good idea.
- To people promoting single use: others have pointed out that you need to address the other environmental problems beyond energy, but also acknowledge that you're asking people to find a replacement for their everyday tote bags as well.
In an apartment, I’ve learned not to even have a garbage bin. If I have garbage I make a small bag and throw it out, or keep it in the freezer until I go out. Frozen trash doesn’t smell and doesn’t attract anything :)
Of course, this requires you to have less trash , which is very easy if you simply take a few seconds to go outside and throw your food out after lunch/dinner. Everything else is just dry scraps usually. There’s always the fridge :)
All in all, there is no concept of “garbage”, “garbage bin” , or any kind of “garbage accumulation” in my apartments.
Oh, you can also just freaking flush small things down the toilet. Seriously, it’s like a little mini garbage. Only advise this for people with great water pressure (lucky you!).
If I had a backyard, I’d be burning and burying garbage too, man.
Last but not least, never ever buy expensive garbage bags. It’s literally going in the garbage, man.
Using the toilet in this manner is the worst option. You’re sending your trash straight into the water treatment system let alone damaging your building pipes and whatnot, though it sounds like you rent.
I respect the approach and find it fascinating even though I think it’s crazy aha. I don’t think this would be very compatible at all with a lot of people’s cooking habits or hobbies, etc. Or if your apartment complex has an inconvenient garbage disposal location.
And there’s a lot of garbage I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting in the freezer.
How do you handle bathroom trash? I’m thinking feminine hygiene products specifically. Surely you don’t recommend flushing those right?
Can you use the cotton bag 173 times? Cotton wears out over time. They also didn't ask about the cost of washing the cotton bag, which really should be done once in a while since they collect dirt and food particles - this will increase the times you need to use the bag. (it isn't clear if it lasts longer with or without washing - dirt is often sharp enough to wear the bag, but washing also puts wear on them)
Similar for the cup - I've dropped and broke several ceramic cups in my life - and I don't drink coffee/tea. Those cups will never get another use since the shards are scrap.
> Can you use the cotton bag 173 times? Cotton wears out over time.
Yeah, comfortably. Shopping bags don't actually get much "wear" in each active use period. The main issue will be the handles but good stitching will solve that.
And it'll go in the washing machine with your clothes (though you might want to tie the handles together).
I have a Lidl bag that is already into the sixties of usage (it has been my food shopping bag for more than a year).
I have other two reusable bags (made from recycled polyester, so recycled plastic bottles and plastic bags) that have seen probably 1800 uses each, maybe more, in their lifetime.
This material is probably a better choice for reusable shopping bags because it is incredibly tough-wearing and because it can be made of PETG that has been deemed unreusable for food grade uses.
Turning a plastic grocery bag into a small bathroom trashcan liner is IMO the perfect reuse. it displaces a thicker plastic bag and ensures the grocery bag goes into a landfill.
My grocery store now uses slightly thicker plastic bags, and I've found that you con reuse them dozens of times; I've had the same bags in my car for over a year.
Unfortunately, when they deliver, they use brand-new bags, and they don't accept them back for reuse, so a lot of them get thrown away after a single use.
I reused all my grocery store plastic bags for disposing of cat litter and other trash. When those bags went away I had to start buying new plastic bags for the first time.
That’s funny because when my locality switched from plastic to paper bags I was annoyed at having to buy trash bags for the bathroom for the first time but found the paper bags were excellent for litter cleanup since they stand up on their own and are easier to scoop into than a smaller fluttery plastic bag.
Burning waste is listed in the article as an even better for the environment, but somewhat more expensive method.
The methane that landfills produce is routinely captured and burned for power, they may otherwise flare it off before it can contribute to the greenhouse effect. This is also mentioned in the article.
The thing with methane is that it has a lifespan of something like 10 years in the atmosphere before it breaks down to CO2 + water, while CO2 persists for centuries. I suspect that burning would release more net CO2 than emitting the methane and having it eventually break down to CO2.
> A molecule of methane traps more heat than a molecule of CO2, but methane has a relatively short lifespan of 7 to 12 years in the atmosphere. CO2 can persist for hundreds of years or more.
The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!
I imagine part of what makes it difficult is that people can and do reuse plastic bags. If I reuse a plastic bag 20 times before it breaks then you now have to reuse your cotton bag 3460 times, which is much harder.
I think it's beyond many people. A typical pattern is that you forget your bag at home and end up buying another one. After this happens a few times you now have an excess of reusable bags such that you will never recoup the "173 times" on all of them.
One solution for this is reusable bags with a deposit that you can give back at the supermarket in exchange for cash. We have this at some supermarkets in Germany.
I am still not sold on those reusable plastic bottles and how these are better for environment and health then regular soda bottles.
I use maybe one PET water bottle each month when i go for outdoor activities. PET bottle i would buy anyway even if i had reusable one, because i've got stuck somewhere without running water or because i craved bottled icetea or orange juice. After carefully rinsing it. I keep using it for month or so and then dispose it. I only use it for clean tap water. No sugar or anything that might promote unnecessary microbial growth. Non-abrasive rinsing. Store with lid off when not in use.
These are usualy made locally in soda bottling companies, so the shipping is cheaper and more ecological than shipping reusable bottles from one central reusable bottle factory (likely abroad). This makes me feel zero guilt when i finaly decide it's used enough to be disposed.
Quite often these are reasonably sturdy to be used for months if you keep them in backpack and don't throw them around too much. And the reusable bottles get damaged over time as well if you don't treat them right.
Reusable bottle people say something about how refilling that water bottle with water makes it leak BPA or whatever chemicals. That's just insane. I've seen huge grocery market chains storing pallets of those in direct sunlight for months, yet somehow magically that's not leaking enough to violate any regulatory limits. But me puting pure tap water into the bottle automaticaly makes it extremely nasty hormonal disruptor according to some people.
On the other hand, i would like to see some sensible regulation on amount of packaging materials vs amount of product these are holding. Shrinkflation and cost cutting caused some products to be ridiculously small compared to amount of packaging they need. (especialy when you realize the relationship between volume of product and surface area covered by packaging is geometricaly increasing the packaging to product ratio when shrinking down). Sometimes it kinda makes sense (pills/medications), sometimes it's kinda stupid (100ml water bottles - and yes, i am aware of airplanes and conference rooms).
Yes… I don't think the author is thinking on a long enough time horizon.
I'm curious what happens to these landfill sites in 100, 1000 and 10k years. Do they inevitably break down and leak into the water table? Do they eventually stop off-gassing and become inert? Do they become fossilized layers of sediment on a long enough horizon? If we maintain our current waste levels, how much land is required by the year 3000?
Such a reductive title/framing. Yes, plastic recycling doesn't work very well. But that doesn't mean that getting rid of trash is simple/there aren't opportunities to reduce waste. Metal recycling, compost, glass bottle reuse, and proper management of landfills are all super important!
Also:
> In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic.
They make it seem like this is a bad thing but surely the average cotton bag gets used more than 173 times. I've probably used some of my oldest reusable bags like ~1k times.
In New York City where disposable bag bans occurred I’m quite certain the average “reusable” bag gets used a single-digit number of times. Grocery stores charge 25c for a “reusable” bag in the case that you forgot to bring your own, and every household has a bag full of bags that never get used. Now they’ve re-allowed disposable paper bags, which seems sensible to me.
The article mentions the energy benefits from recycling aluminium but fails to mention the also large (but not as large) savings from recycling glass. Please recycle your aluminium and glass even if it's probably wiser to throw out plastic in most localities.
This all makes tons of sense. Recycling metal works, other recycling may not. Cloth bags make sense if you have a few of them and use them hundreds of times. Reduce still makes sense so why not focus on reduce.
Kinnaman, Thomas C. "Determining the Socially Optimal Recycling Rate." Resources, Conservation and Recycling, vol. 85, 2014, pp. 5–10, doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2013.11.002.
Hopefully energy used will become less important. CO2 emissions seem like the biggest threat to our long term health. Microplastics also matter, a bit.
How much plastic is escaping into the environment from the recycling process vs. landfill? What are the CO2 output of landfill vs. recycling? I imagine burning would be the worst option for these.
Not surprised that the market forces tended towards the most energy efficient waste disposal systems; glad we don't have mountains of trash or poor landfills.
Every now and then I'd come across articles from this source and thought that they were decent. Perhaps not the best, but reasonably well researched and argued. But coming across this statement kind of sealed the deal for me in the wrong way:
> Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture.
Pure unadulterated bollocks, I'm sorry to say. I shall flag this source whenever emerges in my feed.
> Sufficiently well-worn cotton tote bags can beat plastic for environmental cost, but only for the most consistent among us.
We simply don't need to rely on the "most consistent among us", because these things -- and so, so many others -- can be legislated, enforced, stopped, controlled etc. Businesses make and sell plastic bags because no one stops them and they're convenient (as well as a serious environmental problem). Should governments do the job they are supposed to do (or simply step aside and let the society organise in that particular respect), plastic bags would cease to be a problem.
I suppose you're correct, and it's my frustration speaking there. That said, the internet is absolutely immense in terms of articles to read, an arguably poor source is simply not worth the effort.
> A returnable milk bottle takes much more energy to produce and much more fuel to transport than a plastic carton, and has to make around ten or more trips to use less energy than a bottle made from polyethylene plastic.
This seems like the weakest of presented arguments. Just 10 trips and it's more environmentally friendly? Yeah, seems like reusable milk bottles wins over plastic. That's what, ~10 weeks for payback?
Returned bottles have a finite lifetime after what they have to be trashed. Glass bottles tend to be reused some (small) tens of times, plastic bottles certainly last a lot less.
Strongly agree. I wish more things came in jars, cans and sacks. I would pay a premium for this alone. The plastic liner in a tall box workflow adds so much friction to storing using and disposing groceries. I despise cereal boxes.
In the Netherlands the cradle to cradle hype of some years ago has created a paper reality where waste is turned magically into building material and can thus be effectively dumped anywhere in the environment.
There’s precious few places on earth that don’t have room for landfills, and those places will be shipping their refuse whether it is sent as “recycling” or as trash. The article also points out that incineration is an option to reduce volume, but expensive.
There are cases of shipping trash around, but it has more to do with it being cheaper to send a container of garbage somewhere than dispose of it locally.
It's much more the case that we ship plastic to be recycled to other countries than trash. The problem is that then the unrecyclable plastic mixed in often ends up in rivers.
Absolutely, but green activists are actively fighting against burning trash. This needs to stop. Even if a country doesn't burn coal it should still burn trash instead of sending it to poor countries. People need to take responsibility for the trash that they generate.
I'd say it depends. Amager Bakke in Denmark is a combined heat and power plant that burns waste and emits 687 grams of CO2 per kWh vs natural gas at 290 to 930 grams per kwh and coal at 900 to 1,050 grams per kwh. This makes burning trash CO2 competitive with Natural Gas. Using it for district heating probably improves the picture here because resistive electrical heating on a standard grid emits more CO2 than natural gas heat or pumped district heating.
It plausible that in cold climates burning trash has significant advantages.
90% of countries use some kind of fossil fuel to generate electricity or heat, so burning trash instead won't increase the CO2 emissions. The rule is simple: if you already burn fossil fuels, you should burn trash instead.
I think you misread the Wikipedia page. Plasma gasification air emissions are cleaner with costs being somewhat higher than incineration. Plasma gasification breaks matter down at the molecular level versus combustion of incineration. With plasma gasification, you are paying more to end with a more inert end material and reduced hazardous process byproducts.
I interpret "can be cleaner than X and similar to that of Y" to mean "inferior to that of Y, but kinda close". Otherwise, it would be "cleaner than X and Y".
> a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic
So what? That's like a year of grocery shopping maybe. I easily use a tote bag for way longer than that and I'm not trying that hard to live an environment friendly life.
Penn & Teller have a Bullshit! episode about this (Season 2, Episode 5). Well, it's technically about recycling, but it makes the claim that landfills are not a bad thing, and much better than the current recycling situation, in most cases.
That episode has always stuck with me, and I've always wondered how valid their argument is.
I remember watching that as a young teen with a libertarian bent. As an old man who no longer identifies as libertarian that episode for some reason has stuck with me as the arguments were pretty compelling. I agree and would like to know if the calculations have changed today or if their argument is still valid.
Before anyone gets all excited by they cherry picked evidence and extremely confident tone, remember this isn't being written by a veteran waste disposal professional, environmentalist, logistics expert, or professor.
It's by a "magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world". Aka, contrarian armchair experts who did some googling and are now throwing spitballs made to be shallowly convincing enough to make money off it with no skin in the game. Catnip for HN, but 100% unreliable.
I don't remember energy use being the problem with plastic bags?
It was plastic bags being absolutely everywhere in the environment. Streets, parks, trees. Wrapped around anything sticking out of the ground. On your face on a windy day.
Pollution is the problem with plastic. Probably health, too, now that microplastics are being recognized as an issue.
My state did away with bags a few years ago, and you now never see bags blowing around or stuck on trees. It also seems everyone stopped complaining about it once we got over the hump of "remember to bring your bags".
So we are just left with a small group of old timers, who would probably bring back metal (pull) tab cans if they could, complaining about it. Ironically its the same group of people who blocked windmills because they are "unsightly".
Your state has eliminated metal tab cans? Huh. What do you drink 12oz of pop out of?
I think they mean the 1970s-style "pull-tabs" that disconnected from the can. These were frequently discarded as litter, instead of put in a proper bin. I can remember seeing a lot of them in road gutters as a kid.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drink_can#Opening_mechanisms
I think that’s about pull tabs (the old kind where you removed a small disc from the top of a can) vs pop tabs (the kind where you punch a hole into it and nothing detaches).
Decades ago they used to pull completely off the can (think Jimmy Buffet "stepped on a pop-top").
Every winter in my city, once the leaves all fell, our trees would be draped in shredded plastic bags. Banning single use plastic bags has done a significant amount to beautify this place.
When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere, and also in awe at how clean the city was. Never did the two thoughts cross each other in her head
> When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere
The first part I kind of get, humans get used to stuff they get, and get frustrated when it disappears without them really understanding why, it's kind of understandable.
But why would she be outraged about recycling bins being more readily available? Are the recycling bins like really ugly/disgusting, or why would they upset someone? Sounds like being upset about there being too many libraries or something.
> Sounds like being upset about there being too many libraries or something.
You joke but people who complain about public recycling bins would also likely be the ones to complain about public libraries too. I've encountered many people who think libraries exist to poison the minds of the youth and somehow make homelessness a problem and we should shut them all down to alleviate the homeless issues in our communities and ensure higher community standards in education (mostly, go read the bible at church, that's all you need).
Yeap. In my pantry right now, I probably have 12 reusable bags. Some of them have been used hundreds of times (and have the battle scars and stains to prove it) while others were used once because I had to run into a grocery store unprepared. The math probably averages out to a slight advantage for reusable, and that doesn't take unique use cases into account: for example, I found every container I owned useful during a recent move.
I'm sure skeptics like the article's writers would tweak some numbers to say disposables have an advantage, so who cares? The fact is there are less gunky, sludge-riddled bags in the gutter of my downtown and that absolutely justifies the bans, despite what this article or the NY Post might argue.
They were also so damn cheap that clerks would bag EVERYTHING without asking, so they not only covered the streets like you describe, but often after offering no actual utility to begin with.
People used to love giving out plastic bags for one item. Who needs a bag for a single item??
I remember a debate in Texas politics a few years ago because livestock were dying from consumption of littered plastic bags.
The state government response was to ban the ban of plastic bags.
CA did the wrong thing for like 12 years. We just finally went back to paper bags for everything. If it ends up on a road, it won't kill animals, it will eventually break apart and turn into particulates. It's what we did before plastic bags rained from the sky into all grocery stores. And the best part: if you have permanent bags you can still use them.
There's [very] biodegradable plastics as well. I found out my local store swapped to them in a pretty amusing way. I'd collect plastic bags to use as trash bags and the like. One day I went to grab some from under my counter there was this mess of orange confetti like stuff everywhere from some of the [orange] bags that'd degraded even in just normal storage conditions.
>The state government response was to ban the ban of plastic bags.
Anything to own the libs.
But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them. Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world.
Since we can't get 100% compliance in rich countries and poor countries can't afford landfills that's a good reason to not use plastic. But it's not a good reason to have plastic recycling programs.
That doesn't solve the problem of people littering. Obviously if trash gets into the trash can it ends up at the landfill.
> But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them
We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin and have that bin be cleanly collected and yet you're expecting people to bury them??
No, the solution is to massively reduce how often we use single-use plastic bags. It seems like every time I buy anything from any store its just assumed I want it in a plastic bag. Getting a single bottled drink at a convenience store? The clerk gets a plastic bag ready. Its insane.
>We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin
We can, or more precisely it depends on culture norms. Places where littering is rare do exist.
It's the town or city that does the disposal whether that's burying, recycling, dumping at sea, or whatever. Again, this article isn't about whether we should produce plastic but how we should dispose of it once its collected.
> It's the town or city that does the disposal whether that's burying, recycling, dumping at sea, or whatever.
> once its collected
Its not the employees of the town or city ensuring that bag ever makes it to the employees of the town or city though, that's my point. Its the user of the plastic bag is where a lot of the breakdown in the chain happens. Its the fact you buy anything and the shop gives you a plastic bag to deal with. Which, a ton of people don't do a good job dealing with them! Similarly, they don't do a good job with drink containers and other packaging either.
Its not like its the city employees putting all the plastic bags in the creeks and the rivers and the fields and the woods. At least, not usually, and not normally in their course of duty.
It's a conspicuous part. But energy use is still a problem. Like, maybe hi-kicking people throwing thrash everywhere would be cheaper solution then letting them do it, but with paper instead of PET. If we won't calculate we can't be sure
Right. This seems to be written by someone who has never been outside and seen the amount of plastic alongside roads or caught in bushes etc. And this is in a country that is supposed to be good at collecting waste.
Another point, to counter the " plastic bags are cheap, cotton is expensive" argument, is that most of the reusable bags are plastic too. They are way cheaper to produce than cotton bags, and earn their keep within about 5 to 10 uses as opposed to 100 or whatever the crazy figure was for cotton bags.
You can use single use plastic bag 50 times or more before it deteriorates, not the thinnest kind, but the average one. They are incredibly strong. The dedicated mult-use ones are insanely strong, but also few times thicker and more unwieldy.
Like with single use shaving razor. They don't need to be literally single use. It depends on the user. You can use it as long as it serves you.
The best thing limiting access to plastic bags did was familiarizing people with the idea of taking bags to the market.
> Streets, parks, trees
You forgot the biggest and probably the most sensitive dump: the (deep) sea.
Shirley, the most sensitive dump is in testicles? Microplastics in balls. Like a ball pit.
Proper recycling improves national security and the well-being of their citizens.
Good example is South Korea. They were devastated after continual war in the 1950s. So they implemented mandatory recycling. Food waste goings into bin A, metals into bin B, plastics into bin C, ... This allows for reducing the cost of recycling by presorting items. It helped them rebuild and become stronger. To this day they still properly separate their garbage to ease recycling.
Recycling food waste and scraps means creating a nutrient rich fertilize resource. Tossing them into a land fill removes nutrients from the food chain. USA food has less nutrients than years past because of the push for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
The argument that is pro-polyethylene plastic bags over cotton completely ignores the source: Renewable plants that are grown and harvested, vs. finite fossil fuels extracted from the Earth and refined.
> Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 1,725 megajoules, around 3,050 times as much energy.
That conveniently ignores the drilling, extracting, transporting, refining, and transporting again to make "polyethylene resin".
Broadly, I agree with your comment. I have seen a few experimental plastic drink bottles that claim to have a minimum percent produced from plants. It is a little bit insane to imagine the amount of chemical and energy gymnastics required to make plastic bottles from plants, but, hey, the big drinks companies are desparate not to loose PET bottles. To be clear: I am not defending this type of plastic! I am only pointing out that it does exist.
This is really the key point! There are comparing apples to oranges.Somewhat adjacent, in many rich countries, in the last 10 years there has been a big push to remove plastic drink straws. I think it might have worked. Initially, the designs and performance of wax coated paper straws were pretty terrible, but chemists and material scientists have been working hard to improve the product. I feel like paper-ish drink straws are here to stay.
> That conveniently ignores the drilling, extracting, transporting, refining, and transporting again to make "polyethylene resin".
It also ignores the energy requirements to grow the cotton. This isn't the gotcha you think it is.
The energy requirements for growing cotton being largely the sun, and a resource which makes up most of the universe (yes, I know water is several steps from hydrogen). ((And the tangentials like the fertilizers, dieslel etc.))
Compared to the energy requirements of petroleum based products: Incredible density and pressure acting on sufficient organic matter(thousands of times greater than growing cotton), on millenium time scales, then requiring several incredibly expensive and commoditization refining/distribution practices, and the end product is then ceremoniously burned off as poison or discarded into the aether.
It is 100 percent the "gotcha OP thought it is". However I do see/realize the fallacy you're pointing out in that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
The energy to make the cotton bags presumably also involves lots of drilling and extracting, at least currently.
If we used oil only for plastics it would probably last us 1000 years. By that time we'd figure out how to grow plastics.
"Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture."
Yeah, let's stop doing the fairly well established recycling programs that have knock on benefits like reducing pollution, and instead start scaling an entirely unproven and expensive mitigation program.
These are some prominent Effect Altruism guys so I know "cause prioritization" is their whole thing. But I think this is just basic contrarianism, because you cant fundraise off the fact that the cultural shift to recycling in the first world has been pretty successful and positive.
ALSO, what is the obsession with embodied energy?
Like lets think about plastic bags from an object use standpoint. Given you have a collection of stuff to carry would you prefer:
A) A reasonably sturdy bag that can be styled to your preference (like with art or whatever) that you have to remember to bring with you when you need.
B) The literal minimum possible material to be considered a bag. Even money whatever you put into it will punch straight through the bottom, or you'll need to use 2-4 nested bags anyway. And it'll be uncomfortable to hold the whole time.
I think from an object use perspective a reusable bag is more pleasant to use.
But embodied energy calculations are convenient because you can get numbers to compare. But it ignores externalities.
Like if you actually considered the embodied energy of the median tote bag vs the median plastic bag from the point that it was extracted from the ground to the point that it returns to dust, I think the story would look really different. I'll bet a sizable percentage of plastic bags don't even make it through their first use. Meanwhile I've got tote bags that I think are fully 15 years old. Plus if you consider the remediation future generations will need to do for plastic bags. meanwhile I can actually bury a cotton tote bag in the dirt to decompose and it doesn't need infrastructure to prevent poisoning the water supply.
Did the authors consider the embodied energy of the landfill itself? Shipping? Trash collection? Ongoing monitoring? The embodied energy of the future carbon capture system?
It's just so convenient to look only at the materials, equate that to kg of co2, and use that for whatever narrative makes you feel good.
Almost all EA takes I’ve read strike me as basic contrarianism
> "Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture."
Carbon capture is a scam to allow fossil consumption to continue as is. The only path forward is rapid destruction of fossil fuel demand and transitioning to clean energy and electric mobility. At this time, there is no effective technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Global heating will hit at least 1.8C, UN warns, and there are ‘no good outcomes’ - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/02/global-h... - September 2nd, 2026
Ex-oil engineer warns about potential climate collapse [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49335833 - August 2026
Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions - https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/ - May 15th, 2025
Carbon capture has a long history. Of failure - https://thebulletin.org/2022/09/plagued-by-failures-carbon-c... - September 1st, 2022
The push for recycling has been successful at making people feel better about themselves, not successful at saving energy or raw materials. The article also goes on at length about this, but most of what's put in recycling bins gets thrown out anyways and folks regularly put stuff in recycling bins that can't be recycled, just increasing the cost of recycling programs while lowering their effectiveness. Recycling metal cans and containers is a no brainer, recycling most plastics is of questionable value bordering on actively harmful[1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...
"In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio."
I think there's a thing about food shopping here. Americans just don't go shopping as frequently, so you're better off with paper bags in the back of your car.
I am a Brit. I have a Lidl cotton bag that I've probably used sixty times already. It augments and will ultimately replace two reusable foldable/pocketable bags from Marks & Spencer that I have used for all of my shopping for at least thirteen years, perhaps more like sixteen.
I shop on foot, about once every four or five days. I wil have used the two M&S bags on more than a thousand journeys. One of them is finally wearing thin. The other goes in my pocket more or less whenever I leave the house. They were themselves made from recycled material.
I use two the majority of the time so I am confident I've avoided using at least 1800 plastic bags.
(Weird timing, but I did end up needing one last night, annoyingly, because I had to shop in an emergency, but it is the first time in five years or so and it already has a reuse purpose)
Reusable shopping bags are easy. A British shopper might even get to 173 uses in a single year.
These arguments tend to ignore that a reusable thing is often just a lot better at whatever it does. You can put a few liters of milk in a reusable bag without triple bagging it. You don't have to worry that it will split open and spill out on the ground. You can use the bag to pack for road trips, to store kid's snacks and toys, as a gym bag, etc. Groceries aren't the only thing anyone caries and people go further than between their boot and fridge.
In Switzerland grocery stores have been promoting reusable (recycled plastic) bags for years, and people use them for everything: I saw someone in Interlaken carrying firewood with one.
So:
- To people promoting reuse: maybe go beyond the environmental impact and appeal to quality of life. Having bag or two in your boot all the time is a good idea.
- To people promoting single use: others have pointed out that you need to address the other environmental problems beyond energy, but also acknowledge that you're asking people to find a replacement for their everyday tote bags as well.
In an apartment, I’ve learned not to even have a garbage bin. If I have garbage I make a small bag and throw it out, or keep it in the freezer until I go out. Frozen trash doesn’t smell and doesn’t attract anything :)
Of course, this requires you to have less trash , which is very easy if you simply take a few seconds to go outside and throw your food out after lunch/dinner. Everything else is just dry scraps usually. There’s always the fridge :)
All in all, there is no concept of “garbage”, “garbage bin” , or any kind of “garbage accumulation” in my apartments.
Oh, you can also just freaking flush small things down the toilet. Seriously, it’s like a little mini garbage. Only advise this for people with great water pressure (lucky you!).
If I had a backyard, I’d be burning and burying garbage too, man.
Last but not least, never ever buy expensive garbage bags. It’s literally going in the garbage, man.
Using the toilet in this manner is the worst option. You’re sending your trash straight into the water treatment system let alone damaging your building pipes and whatnot, though it sounds like you rent.
I respect the approach and find it fascinating even though I think it’s crazy aha. I don’t think this would be very compatible at all with a lot of people’s cooking habits or hobbies, etc. Or if your apartment complex has an inconvenient garbage disposal location.
And there’s a lot of garbage I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting in the freezer.
How do you handle bathroom trash? I’m thinking feminine hygiene products specifically. Surely you don’t recommend flushing those right?
Erm, was that part about keeping trash in the freezer serious?
For me a freezer is for food, I don't mix that with garbage by intention. (small particles of it will remain)
I think using a cotton bag 173 times to beat plastic bags and a mug 1,000 times to beat disposable cups sounds completely reasonable.
Can you use the cotton bag 173 times? Cotton wears out over time. They also didn't ask about the cost of washing the cotton bag, which really should be done once in a while since they collect dirt and food particles - this will increase the times you need to use the bag. (it isn't clear if it lasts longer with or without washing - dirt is often sharp enough to wear the bag, but washing also puts wear on them)
Similar for the cup - I've dropped and broke several ceramic cups in my life - and I don't drink coffee/tea. Those cups will never get another use since the shards are scrap.
> Can you use the cotton bag 173 times? Cotton wears out over time.
Yeah, comfortably. Shopping bags don't actually get much "wear" in each active use period. The main issue will be the handles but good stitching will solve that.
And it'll go in the washing machine with your clothes (though you might want to tie the handles together).
I have a Lidl bag that is already into the sixties of usage (it has been my food shopping bag for more than a year).
I have other two reusable bags (made from recycled polyester, so recycled plastic bottles and plastic bags) that have seen probably 1800 uses each, maybe more, in their lifetime.
This material is probably a better choice for reusable shopping bags because it is incredibly tough-wearing and because it can be made of PETG that has been deemed unreusable for food grade uses.
I don't have a use count, but I do have cotton bags I've been using consistently for 15 years.
thats assuming the plastic bag is used once, but i've always reused them, sometimes had the same bags for 10 years
however i have never re-used a paper bag because they are awfully loud and cannot be compressed. it is the worst kind of bag.
Turning a plastic grocery bag into a small bathroom trashcan liner is IMO the perfect reuse. it displaces a thicker plastic bag and ensures the grocery bag goes into a landfill.
My grocery store now uses slightly thicker plastic bags, and I've found that you con reuse them dozens of times; I've had the same bags in my car for over a year.
Unfortunately, when they deliver, they use brand-new bags, and they don't accept them back for reuse, so a lot of them get thrown away after a single use.
I reused all my grocery store plastic bags for disposing of cat litter and other trash. When those bags went away I had to start buying new plastic bags for the first time.
That’s funny because when my locality switched from plastic to paper bags I was annoyed at having to buy trash bags for the bathroom for the first time but found the paper bags were excellent for litter cleanup since they stand up on their own and are easier to scoop into than a smaller fluttery plastic bag.
I have been using the same mug for 50 years.
Absolutely.
Just burn your trash
https://www.energimyndigheten.se/en/news/2025/from-waste-to-...
My understanding is that biological decomposition of waste creates methane which is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2.
That's only if it's buried. Properly managed compost is the best option.
Is that something I can do with plastic though?
Burning waste is listed in the article as an even better for the environment, but somewhat more expensive method.
The methane that landfills produce is routinely captured and burned for power, they may otherwise flare it off before it can contribute to the greenhouse effect. This is also mentioned in the article.
Landfills control for that and usually dispose the methane on a less polluting form.
The thing with methane is that it has a lifespan of something like 10 years in the atmosphere before it breaks down to CO2 + water, while CO2 persists for centuries. I suspect that burning would release more net CO2 than emitting the methane and having it eventually break down to CO2.
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/meth...
> A molecule of methane traps more heat than a molecule of CO2, but methane has a relatively short lifespan of 7 to 12 years in the atmosphere. CO2 can persist for hundreds of years or more.
I you emit the methane, you have one molecule of CH₄ for 10 years, then one molecule of CO₂ for x years.
If you burn the methane, you have one molecule of CO₂ for x years.
Burning seems strictly better.
(If you use the heat of the burning to offset other emissions, it gets even better)
The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!
I imagine part of what makes it difficult is that people can and do reuse plastic bags. If I reuse a plastic bag 20 times before it breaks then you now have to reuse your cotton bag 3460 times, which is much harder.
I think it's beyond many people. A typical pattern is that you forget your bag at home and end up buying another one. After this happens a few times you now have an excess of reusable bags such that you will never recoup the "173 times" on all of them.
One solution for this is reusable bags with a deposit that you can give back at the supermarket in exchange for cash. We have this at some supermarkets in Germany.
I am still not sold on those reusable plastic bottles and how these are better for environment and health then regular soda bottles.
I use maybe one PET water bottle each month when i go for outdoor activities. PET bottle i would buy anyway even if i had reusable one, because i've got stuck somewhere without running water or because i craved bottled icetea or orange juice. After carefully rinsing it. I keep using it for month or so and then dispose it. I only use it for clean tap water. No sugar or anything that might promote unnecessary microbial growth. Non-abrasive rinsing. Store with lid off when not in use.
These are usualy made locally in soda bottling companies, so the shipping is cheaper and more ecological than shipping reusable bottles from one central reusable bottle factory (likely abroad). This makes me feel zero guilt when i finaly decide it's used enough to be disposed.
Quite often these are reasonably sturdy to be used for months if you keep them in backpack and don't throw them around too much. And the reusable bottles get damaged over time as well if you don't treat them right.
Reusable bottle people say something about how refilling that water bottle with water makes it leak BPA or whatever chemicals. That's just insane. I've seen huge grocery market chains storing pallets of those in direct sunlight for months, yet somehow magically that's not leaking enough to violate any regulatory limits. But me puting pure tap water into the bottle automaticaly makes it extremely nasty hormonal disruptor according to some people.
On the other hand, i would like to see some sensible regulation on amount of packaging materials vs amount of product these are holding. Shrinkflation and cost cutting caused some products to be ridiculously small compared to amount of packaging they need. (especialy when you realize the relationship between volume of product and surface area covered by packaging is geometricaly increasing the packaging to product ratio when shrinking down). Sometimes it kinda makes sense (pills/medications), sometimes it's kinda stupid (100ml water bottles - and yes, i am aware of airplanes and conference rooms).
I recently learned of Dandora Kenya (Nairobi) and the megadump there and ors waste pickers.
It’s worth reading about and considering what happens to your waste.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/kenya-aid-waste...
The total plastic waste in subsaharan africa is expected to increase by 100 Million tons by 2060.
I don’t understand how plastic bags for “100 years at current rates” is an argument FOR its longevity/being fine?
Yes… I don't think the author is thinking on a long enough time horizon.
I'm curious what happens to these landfill sites in 100, 1000 and 10k years. Do they inevitably break down and leak into the water table? Do they eventually stop off-gassing and become inert? Do they become fossilized layers of sediment on a long enough horizon? If we maintain our current waste levels, how much land is required by the year 3000?
Such a reductive title/framing. Yes, plastic recycling doesn't work very well. But that doesn't mean that getting rid of trash is simple/there aren't opportunities to reduce waste. Metal recycling, compost, glass bottle reuse, and proper management of landfills are all super important!
Also: > In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic.
They make it seem like this is a bad thing but surely the average cotton bag gets used more than 173 times. I've probably used some of my oldest reusable bags like ~1k times.
In New York City where disposable bag bans occurred I’m quite certain the average “reusable” bag gets used a single-digit number of times. Grocery stores charge 25c for a “reusable” bag in the case that you forgot to bring your own, and every household has a bag full of bags that never get used. Now they’ve re-allowed disposable paper bags, which seems sensible to me.
The article mentions the energy benefits from recycling aluminium but fails to mention the also large (but not as large) savings from recycling glass. Please recycle your aluminium and glass even if it's probably wiser to throw out plastic in most localities.
This all makes tons of sense. Recycling metal works, other recycling may not. Cloth bags make sense if you have a few of them and use them hundreds of times. Reduce still makes sense so why not focus on reduce.
Other papers/articles on this topic:
Tierney:
"The Reign of..." https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...
Kinnaman:
"Is it Time to..." https://www.vox.com/2016/2/13/10972986/recycling
Kinnaman, Thomas C. "Determining the Socially Optimal Recycling Rate." Resources, Conservation and Recycling, vol. 85, 2014, pp. 5–10, doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2013.11.002.
Hopefully energy used will become less important. CO2 emissions seem like the biggest threat to our long term health. Microplastics also matter, a bit.
How much plastic is escaping into the environment from the recycling process vs. landfill? What are the CO2 output of landfill vs. recycling? I imagine burning would be the worst option for these.
Not surprised that the market forces tended towards the most energy efficient waste disposal systems; glad we don't have mountains of trash or poor landfills.
Every now and then I'd come across articles from this source and thought that they were decent. Perhaps not the best, but reasonably well researched and argued. But coming across this statement kind of sealed the deal for me in the wrong way:
> Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture.
Pure unadulterated bollocks, I'm sorry to say. I shall flag this source whenever emerges in my feed.
> Sufficiently well-worn cotton tote bags can beat plastic for environmental cost, but only for the most consistent among us.
We simply don't need to rely on the "most consistent among us", because these things -- and so, so many others -- can be legislated, enforced, stopped, controlled etc. Businesses make and sell plastic bags because no one stops them and they're convenient (as well as a serious environmental problem). Should governments do the job they are supposed to do (or simply step aside and let the society organise in that particular respect), plastic bags would cease to be a problem.
I am somewhat disappointed, I guess.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying but flagging a post because you no longer trust the source is a misuse of the functionality.
I suppose you're correct, and it's my frustration speaking there. That said, the internet is absolutely immense in terms of articles to read, an arguably poor source is simply not worth the effort.
> A returnable milk bottle takes much more energy to produce and much more fuel to transport than a plastic carton, and has to make around ten or more trips to use less energy than a bottle made from polyethylene plastic.
This seems like the weakest of presented arguments. Just 10 trips and it's more environmentally friendly? Yeah, seems like reusable milk bottles wins over plastic. That's what, ~10 weeks for payback?
Returned bottles have a finite lifetime after what they have to be trashed. Glass bottles tend to be reused some (small) tens of times, plastic bottles certainly last a lot less.
Just let me buy things without forcing me to buy so much trash too. Every grocery store item is over-packaged.
Strongly agree. I wish more things came in jars, cans and sacks. I would pay a premium for this alone. The plastic liner in a tall box workflow adds so much friction to storing using and disposing groceries. I despise cereal boxes.
In the Netherlands the cradle to cradle hype of some years ago has created a paper reality where waste is turned magically into building material and can thus be effectively dumped anywhere in the environment.
Meanwhile, New York exports its trash to the mid west and microplastics are found on the top of Mount Everest.
Canada also ships trash to the US.
Not every place has space for landfills... which is why we often ship trash over to low-income countries.
There’s precious few places on earth that don’t have room for landfills, and those places will be shipping their refuse whether it is sent as “recycling” or as trash. The article also points out that incineration is an option to reduce volume, but expensive.
There are cases of shipping trash around, but it has more to do with it being cheaper to send a container of garbage somewhere than dispose of it locally.
Cost is the constraint, not available space.
There's a very nice park near where I live that used to be a landfill. Space isn't really a concern.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/vCeyDb9tbm29zr549
It's much more the case that we ship plastic to be recycled to other countries than trash. The problem is that then the unrecyclable plastic mixed in often ends up in rivers.
>Not every place has space for landfills... because we're stupid and let the anti-landfill people decide what acceptable space is
Fixed that for you.
My municipality is staring down getting screwed bad in the 2030s so I've gone down the rabbit hole.
If a country burns coal. It should burn trash first, before the coal.
This is the way to go.
China cracked the pollution issues of burning trash, and built a lot of high-temperature incinerator to burn trash and generate electricity.
The overcapacity leads to a shortage(!) of new trash to burn, and it has started to dig out landfills accumulated from the past decades.
The video from Asianometry is very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuIEBSb2xiE
Absolutely, but green activists are actively fighting against burning trash. This needs to stop. Even if a country doesn't burn coal it should still burn trash instead of sending it to poor countries. People need to take responsibility for the trash that they generate.
Yeah, burning trash isn't a great answer
I'd say it depends. Amager Bakke in Denmark is a combined heat and power plant that burns waste and emits 687 grams of CO2 per kWh vs natural gas at 290 to 930 grams per kwh and coal at 900 to 1,050 grams per kwh. This makes burning trash CO2 competitive with Natural Gas. Using it for district heating probably improves the picture here because resistive electrical heating on a standard grid emits more CO2 than natural gas heat or pumped district heating.
It plausible that in cold climates burning trash has significant advantages.
90% of countries use some kind of fossil fuel to generate electricity or heat, so burning trash instead won't increase the CO2 emissions. The rule is simple: if you already burn fossil fuels, you should burn trash instead.
"I am once again asking you to consider plasma gasification."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
InEnTec says its plasma technology effectively destroys PFAS - https://www.wastetodaymagazine.com/news/inentec-says-its-pla... - August 23rd, 2024
Production of high quality syngas from argon plasma gasification of plastic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41623879 (September 2024) (0 comments)
Plasma gasification versus incineration of plastic waste: Energy, economic and environmental analysis - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fuproc.2022.107470
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984
What's the point of this when incineration is an option? Even its wikipedia page has only negatives compared to incineration.
> Air emissions can be cleaner than landfills and similar to that of incinerators.
> Large initial investment costs relative to that of alternatives, including [...] incineration.
> Operational costs are high relative to that of incineration.
I think you misread the Wikipedia page. Plasma gasification air emissions are cleaner with costs being somewhat higher than incineration. Plasma gasification breaks matter down at the molecular level versus combustion of incineration. With plasma gasification, you are paying more to end with a more inert end material and reduced hazardous process byproducts.
I interpret "can be cleaner than X and similar to that of Y" to mean "inferior to that of Y, but kinda close". Otherwise, it would be "cleaner than X and Y".
Seems to rival incarceration or probably is better.
> a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic
So what? That's like a year of grocery shopping maybe. I easily use a tote bag for way longer than that and I'm not trying that hard to live an environment friendly life.
Penn & Teller have a Bullshit! episode about this (Season 2, Episode 5). Well, it's technically about recycling, but it makes the claim that landfills are not a bad thing, and much better than the current recycling situation, in most cases.
That episode has always stuck with me, and I've always wondered how valid their argument is.
I remember watching that as a young teen with a libertarian bent. As an old man who no longer identifies as libertarian that episode for some reason has stuck with me as the arguments were pretty compelling. I agree and would like to know if the calculations have changed today or if their argument is still valid.
Before anyone gets all excited by they cherry picked evidence and extremely confident tone, remember this isn't being written by a veteran waste disposal professional, environmentalist, logistics expert, or professor.
It's by a "magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world". Aka, contrarian armchair experts who did some googling and are now throwing spitballs made to be shallowly convincing enough to make money off it with no skin in the game. Catnip for HN, but 100% unreliable.
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