[phildawes]

I think the point is that the quantity of CO2e dumped into the atmosphere when you make a cotton bag has a much worse environmental impact than the plastic bag dumped in landfill.

[1] https://medium.com/@tabitha.whiting/should-you-swap-plastic-... "The study estimated that a cotton tote bag’s total carbon footprint was 598.6lb of CO2e. This compared to 3.48lb of CO2e for a standard plastic bag. That means that you would need to use the tote bag 172 times for every 1 time you used the plastic bag."

[mslot]

I doubt that's a significant factor in global green house gas production while plastic bags are a significant factor in plastic pollution. This seems like a basic optimization problem. Yes, this approach uses a tiny bit more memory, but a lot less CPU. Running out of memory is a problem, but there are likely other areas where we can save a whole lot more (e.g. eat less meat, don't generate demand for food that was shipped around the world).

[nordsieck]

> I think the point is that the quantity of CO2e dumped into the atmosphere when you make a cotton bag has a much worse environmental impact than the plastic bag dumped in landfill.

The reason these laws get enacted is because not enough of the plastic bags end up in landfills.

[TuringTest]

Yeah, but the problem is that a lot of plastics don't get dumped in landfill. They reach the water, and the micro-plastics enter the food chain and produce a toxic hormonal responses in animals.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-huma...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132564/

[jfengel]

I find I can carry at least 4 times as much stuff in a reusable bag as a disposable one. They've done remarkable work in making those disposable bags thinner, which is especially helpful when you're only buying a few light items, but for larger trips it's simply not a 1:1 substitution.

There are so many factors involved (CO2, petroleum drilling, microplastics, other pollution, etc) that it's not easy to provide a definitive ratio. I do think it's good that the discussion has reduced the amount of plastic being used in the bags themselves (though I'd need to see a study if that ends up reducing the total amount of plastic involved, or if they're just using more bags). I think it's good that people are now in a better position to forego bags entirely rather than put a single item in a bag simply because they're there and free.

Mostly, though, I'd caution against citing numbers that assume that one reusable bag is exactly the capacity of one disposable one.

[andygates]

"Dumped in landfill" is an optimistic worst case for plastic waste, though. Dumped outside the waste-processing stream so it ends up in the food chain or bobbing down the river - that's the problem case we're trying to avert.