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by kragen 744 days ago
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
1 comments
vel0city 744 days ago
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?"

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kragen 742 days ago
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
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vel0city 742 days ago
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.

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