[alexchamberlain]

The UK banned single use plastic bags at major supermarkets. We all moaned about it for a few minutes, forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it. Even the small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in are now gone in a few super markets - initially, they replaced them with transparent paper-based windowed bags, but then I think people realised you really don't need to see inside the bag, and brown paper bags are back.

[mcv]

Yeah, I still don't understand why brown paper bags aren't more standard for everything.

I do see some manufacturers reducing plastic, fortunately. For example, my box of tea bags used to come wrapped in plastic, and now it suddenly doesn't, and I'm wondering why it ever needed plastic. But there's still so much stuff that comes wrapped in plastic, and often multiple layers of it.

Just ban it. There are excellent alternatives.

[GuestFAUniverse]

Brown paper, from recycled fibers are often contaminated with mineral oil residue (e.g. from ink on paper) and other unhealthy chemicals, sadly.

There was a report in Germany, years ago, of a range of organic products that failed during testing. They discovered the packaging (recycled paper) was the issue, not the crops and the supply chain before packaging.

So, a _really_ biodegradable cellulose bag is desirable. Even if only to use it I side a brown bag (to stabilise it).

[jajko]

Road to hell is paved with good intentions... I wonder how many here even notice the most important comment here from you and just keep repeating how plastic bags are worse.

Yes they are terrible, but we shouldn't just blindly replace them with anything and call it a day but do the (continuous) investigation for best solution, poisons are these days everywhere.

[loopdoend]

Wouldn't the best solution be ensuring they all end up in an appropriate landfill rather than a river?

It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India. Meanwhile it could have been buried with their other trash and appropriately managed.

[JTbane]

IMO most plastics should be incinerated. This reduces the amount of waste that needs to be landfilled immensely and generates electricity as a bonus.

[jraph]

> happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India

It's not like they like this outcome or are even aware of it. We can't blame the individuals who want to do things properly here.

The correct solution to "broken recycling chain" is not "let's not recycle", it's "let's fix the recycling chain".

The issue with non-reusable / non-recyclable stuff is that we have a limited amount of it and is also environmentally expensive.

Even recycling is not ideal. There's waste, and it costs energy. It's in the end not so sustainable.

The best solution to me is reusable bags and containers (washable, and possibly refundable / returnable) whenever possible.

[ethbr1]

The issue with recycling, as-practiced, is that there's no lifecycle accounting (in many countries, including most of the US).

If we boosted plastic price at point of sale by a recoverable amount, claimable when returning the container for recycling, we'd get higher participation.

Separately, we should also apply the same to the post-return lifecycle: company pays a premium for the material flow, then it rebated that premium upon proof of recycling.

[permo-w]

if energy is a problem then surely we'd just build global recycling plants at geothermal hotspots? it's not like shipping is a problem. the sense I get is that the main bottleneck with recycling isn't energy, but labour. handling and sorting rubbish properly is tedious and unpleasant and the west doesn't want to spend the money that its workers would expect for it

tangentially--and I'm aware this sounds incredibly stupid, and I'm sure it is--but on the topic of geothermal hotspots, what is the downside of finding some lava/magma source deep, deep underground and just dumping rubbish in there? surely most of the fumes would just be absorbed before they reach the surface? is it just too expensive of an idea/has it been done/is it likely to have undesirable long term side-effects/do we simply not have safe access to such things

[potato3732842]

>It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India

See prior comment about road to hell being paved with good intentions.

[DownGoat]

You have the same problem with plastic. Recycled plastic may not be food safe, and have contamination from whatever it was used for before recycling.

[lupusreal]

About a year or so ago, somebody in the chain of suppliers of plastic PET bottles for seltzer water, used by several different brands, switched to a recycled plastic with a distinct dark tint to it. Immediately obvious because the product, water, is obviously clear.

My family returned six cases of 15 bottles each to Costco, then found that the other brands at local stores were the same way. A couple of months later the bottles went back to normal. I still wonder if they switched back due to customer rejection of the new plastic, or if they found the new plastic was in some way leeching contaminants.

[nandomrumber]

New plastic doesn’t have that problem and is incredibly cheap.

Take price as a proxy for resource / energy input and see that new plastic is also incredibly lite on inputs.

New plastic may have some off-gassing / contact contamination concerns though.

Last time I checked, energetically we’re better off using plastic over paper or recycled plastic, and burying the waste… if we could do that reliably, which we don’t seem to be able to.

[mapt]

There are several separate problems here.

One is "People don't like bags stuck in the branches of trees and clogging waterways in their parks". Lightweight plastic shopping bags are so thin that a light breeze can pick them up and loft them up into the air easily. They cost approximately nothing - <2 cents retail, significantly less in bulk. It is incredibly expensive by comparison to pay someone to remove them from tree branches and riparian zones - tens of dollars in wages, equipment, and liability insurance. This is a pragmatic reason why municipalities passed bag taxes or bans. Forcing people to use paper or heavier-weight plastic bags that don't blow in the wind, even if they're not in practice "reusable", solves this one. Taxing them 5 cents or 10 cents or 25 cents per bag nudges a high percentage away.

[mcv]

You don't have to make the bags our of recycled paper. You can make them out of new, unbleached paper. Still much better than plastic.

[potato3732842]

>road to hell is paved with good intentions

At some point there are so many bricks in the road, it's direction is so clear, that the intentions are not longer good. At best they are ignorant, but too often they are self serving malice sailing under the flag of ignorance.

[foobar1962]

I'm old enough to remember when supermarkets only had brown paper bags. They were weak and the handles tear off easily, and anything cold will make the bag wet and it will fall apart usually from the bottom. Supermarkets must have spent a lot of money replacing customer's broken items when bags failed even before leaving the store.

So when doing the calculus for brown paper bags don't forget to include the cost goods wasted when they fail.

[potato3732842]

Thankfully we did the full stupid circle quickly enough that the gray hairs in the paper bag industry remembered this and the current generation of bags lacks the handles so people are forced to carry them from the bottom.

[tremon]

Those are not the brown paper bags the GP was referring to. Those fall under the earlier category of "forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it". The ones that are left are to replace "small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in".

[nandomrumber]

Australian supermarkets have excelled at replicating this paper bag fiasco.

The white plastic bags they replaced are magnitudes of order more durable and able to carry, I should test this, at a guess ten times the weight. Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.

Fortunately the white plastic bags are still available online (eBay / Amazon / etc) so I just buy 50 for my own use as required and use them till they nearly fall apart then repurpose them as bin liners.

They’re incredibly cheap, don’t really get dirty in an unhygienic way, can be washed if something does spill in them, and they fold up in to almost no space.

[throwawayffffas]

> Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.

Yeah that's not good, the way they do that is with more plastic in the bags. A single bag weighs as much as 5-10 old timey single use bags.

[nandomrumber]

I’m talking about the old timey bags, they’re still available, just not at the checkout of supermarkets.

[0xffff2]

I'm old enough to remember when supermarket brown paper bags didn't have handles... Agree with the other commenter that the handles are pointless but the bags work fine if you just ignore them.

Incidentally, given that I'm _not_ old enough to remember a time before supermarkets had plastic bags, either the invention of attaching handles to paper bags took a very long time to migrate to my corner of California, or this comment makes no sense

[mcv]

I'm old enough to remember when supermarkets had boxes. All the goods they sell comes to them in big cardboard boxes, and and supermarkets would have a fenced off area where they dumped all those boxes, so whenever a customer needed a box to put their groceries in to take them home, they'd get a box from that fenced off area.

I haven't seen those in decades unfortunately. It was a great way to reuse those boxes.

[rincebrain]

I don't recall ever seeing one of those in the person-facing parts of the store, but I've not had issues either asking someone who works there in the store or going around the back of the store where they do loading and unloading and asking there.

[lupusreal]

The handles on brown paper bags are noob traps. You're supposed to hold the bag against your body with one arm, your hand on the bottom of the bag. They work fine like this. I've walked home totaling hundreds if not thousands of miles (two or three times a week for many years) with paper grocery bags like this and never had issues.

[alexchamberlain]

I think banning plastic completely in packaging is a much harder ask, as whether it is needed is rather nuanced (if I understand it correctly). For example, it's perfectly possible to deliver cucumbers to an end customer without them being shrinkwrapped. However, to deliver enough cucumbers to enough customers for a supermarket scale, I understand from several documentaries that plastic is still required in that case. (For those outside the UK, plastic covered cucumber is the social barometer for plastic packaging.) Banning plastic bags was easy and simple, and our laws don't tend to deal with nuance very well...

[mcv]

Interesting thing is, the non-organic cucumbers at my supermarket don't come in plastic, but the organic ones do. I never know which ones to get.

[jraph]

Yeah, this is terrible.

Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me.

Of course wrapping everything non-organic is a no go as well, it would be terrible for the environment. And I'm afraid stopping the production of non-organic stuff ain't happening anytime soon.

I believe the real solution if possible until they fix this is to go to a market or an organic store where nothing is in plastic, at least for fruits and vegetables.

[philipallstar]

> Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me.

They're different types of environmental. One is "I don't like pesticides and I have money" and the other is "I don't like eternal plastic waste".

[jraph]

Different things, same group of people (money matters aside - people don't buy because it's more expensive, but despite it), no?

The "I have money" part is obviously unfortunate. Buying healthy and environmentally-friendly shouldn't be conditioned by money. The next best individual thing is voting with one's own wallet in the meantime.

The "I don't like pesticides"¹ and the "I don't like eternal plastic waste" are very compatible. Both pesticides and eternal plastic waste hurt the environment in their own ways.

I suppose the target is the restricted set of people who are interested in organic products for their own individual health and who don't push the reasoning far enough to see that their health depends on the environment being healthy in the long term. Or, people who prefer buying organic food and who will make a compromise.

Do you have a different reading?

¹ we will note that organic doesn't mean "no pesticides", and is broader than just pesticides, but I accept the shortcut.

[mcv]

Yeah, the issue is of course that the supermarket sells both kinds of cucumbers, and they need to be able to distinguish between organic and non-organic cucumbers, which is why they wrap one type in plastic. And of course it's better for the environment if that's the type they sell the least of.

So every step makes sense, but the end result looks ridiculous. Maybe they can use paper wrappers instead? Or maybe just settle on one type of cucumber.

[vanviegen]

The way I understand it, without the wrapping a much larger percentage of cucumbers need to be thrown away before ever being sold, due to spoilage. That's not a win for the environment.

[AlecSchueler]

> That's not a win for the environment.

How is this calculated? I know that growing a cucumber has an environmental cost but so does producing plastic, delivering it and then using machines to shrink-wrap every cucumber.

[vanviegen]

This study, for instance, [1] looks at CO2 emissions. Which may be a somewhat limited view, but the effect is rather large: adding 5 wrappers around a cucumber (4 of which being useless) would result in about the same CO2 usage as adding no wrapper. And that's not even considering spoilage after the cucumber has been bought by a consumer.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...

[AlecSchueler]

CO2 usage, I get you, but what about the plastic waste?

[SoftTalker]

Brown paper bags were the standard grocery store bag up until sometime in the 1980s. The transition to plastic was pushed by environmentalists with a "save the trees" message focused on how many trees were used to make the paper bags.

[hliyan]

Can you back that last claim up?

The push was from plastic manufacturers.

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/birth-ban-histor...

[SoftTalker]

Not really. It's just my memory of the times. "Save the trees" was a very big thing for a while, in arguments for avoiding paper and cardboard packaging.

[nickserv]

A lot of so-called environnemental awareness campaigns are the work of trade organizations or multinationals. Often they shift the blame onto the consumer, so for example it's "you need to recycle" instead of "we need to produce less".

[the__alchemist]

I agree getting rid of plastic bags is a net win for the reasons discussed.

But I can't take the brown paper bag thing seriously! They are a UX nightmare in my workflows. Carry one bag per trip in multiple trips (Instead of ~4 I can do with reusable or plastic). Or try the handled ones which tear off end up with groceries all over. Reusable bags are nice though.

[rincebrain]

They break in a lot of use cases.

What you see in a lot of places that have people heavily relying on things like delivery services, is people using the reusable bags like they would use single-use bags - so now you have spent even more resources on a bag that's still being used as single-use. Oops.

[AlecSchueler]

> Yeah, I still don't understand why brown paper bags aren't more standard for everything

Because plastic is cheaper. As I understand it it's often got a negative cost to it, the companies are paid to take it and use it.

[mcv]

Negative cost? Why? It still needs to be produced and transported, right? I don't understand the business case behind this.

[AlecSchueler]

The way it was explained to me isv that there are so many plastic feedstocks produced by fuel production that it's often most efficient to pay someone just to take it away.

[potato3732842]

That's basically the economic equivalent of having to pay to get rid of a fallen tree despite that tree then going on to be chipped and sold in bulk to whatever the nearest local place buying chips is.

The feed stock is basically worth nothing, it's the labor and energy investment that you add to it at every step that adds the value.

[jon_adler]

Unfortunately, all the actual tea bags are usually plastic. The wrapping is probably a small percentage of the plastic in this product.

[mcv]

I'm pretty sure my tea bags are paper, and have always been paper. It's the more recent "pyramid" shaped tea bags that I think are made of plastic. The most recent change to my tea bags was to remove the staple so they could go in organic waste.

[AlecSchueler]

You'd be surprised how paper-like the plastic bags appear to be.

[ahartmetz]

Could try burning a tiny piece and check how it behaves and smells.

[mcv]

I doubt the advice would be to throw them in the organic waste if it was plastic.

[AlecSchueler]

Some plastics can go in the organic waste bins, such as the organic waste bin bags.

[pfdietz]

Why can't staples go in organic waste? They go into my compost pile and will rust. Iron is like 5% of average crustal rocks and is abundant in soils.

[WithinReason]

Teapigs pyramids are made of cornstarch

[gmac]

This is also an issue for microplastics ingestion. In the UK, teabags are increasingly made of PLA.

[pyrale]

I solved this one with a metal tea infuser and bulk tea in a tin box

[behringer]

Time to switch to loose leaf tea

[elric]

I doubt that's made any kind of environmental/ecological impact at all. The cheap, flimsy plastic carrier bags contain orders of magnitude less material than the reusable kind, and had a second life as a bin liner. Now I need to buy bin liners, which are usually made out of sturdier plastic on top of having to get a reusable bag.

Most of the plastic involved in getting food from farm to home isn't the carrier bag or even the food wrappers. It's the massive amount of plastic that pallets of goods are wrapped in for shipping, which happens several times throughout the supply chain.

We should focus on the latter, instead of the former. Pretty much all we're doing is virtue signalling and maybe hoping that it'll make a tiny difference.

Heck, even a marginal improvement in fuel efficiency of trucks delivering to grocery stores would probably do more than these plastic bag shennanigans.

[oniony]

Where I live there are entire fields of crops grown under plastic sheeting, and I do not mean reusable plastic greenhouses, I mean sheeting pegged to the ground. And then the produce is boxed up in plastic, stuck on a palette, wrapped in plastic and delivered to the supermarkets.

Then, when I'm in town I see building projects where the entire building is wrapped in plastic sheeting: eight story buildings wrapped like a parcel in plastic. Even the ground-level hoarding that used to plywood boards is now typically covered in plastic sheeting printed with branding.

And the roadworks: what used to be reusable metal signs and barriers have recently switched to plastic signs and plastic barriers. I get these get battered and broken quickly but at least the steel ones would typically get melted down and reused at their end-of-life. I imagine the plastic ones just end up in landfill or incinerated.

It does kinda make my home recycling efforts seems futile when commercial enterprises are moving in the opposite direction towards more plastic.

[eptcyka]

There are significantly less palettes being delivered and handled by significantly less people, thus it is far easier to ensure that the plastic used in the delivery process is disposed of properly. Whereas with the abundance of cheap plastic bags that are available on tap to the masses, disposal turns into a mess. I generally agree with you that we should focus on the whole chain and there's lots of easy wins to be had, but decreasing the amount of plastic that gets stuck in trees or otherwise lost in the *environment* is still a good thing.

[elric]

I fear that this sort of focus on individual actions has made a lot of people rather upset (e.g. the plastic straws debacle) for very little gains. And I worry that it might backfire.

[yesfitz]

I'd like to address your last point because there's another thread about the larger amounts of plastic being easier to police:

Not all pollution is fungible.

Greenhouse gas emissions and the microplastic epidemic are two related, but separate issues.

There is no amount of fuel efficiency that would stop a plastic bag from blowing into a stream or tree and shedding microplastics as it breaks down.

[darkwater]

We bring tupperwares when buying groceries for the meat, ham, cheese, fish etc and even if the cynic might say it's just a "feel good" action, well, I still put a lot of plastics in our recycle bin but we halved it since we started doing that (and some other trick). Yes, it definitely feels good.

[shellfishgene]

I don't think containers that come from the customer are allowed behind the counter here for food safety reasons.

[darkwater]

Here they put a sheet (that they would use anyway) on the scale to separate it physically from the container, and what enters the container doesn't leave it (or goes to the trash).

[upcoming-sesame]

doesn't it add significant weight to the price ?

[darkwater]

They simply adjust the tare weight in the scale and that's it. They do it anyway with their own 1-use plastic boxes or sheets.

[SoftTalker]

I've never seen a meat counter employee re-zero the scale after putting a container or wrap on it. I do occasionally see them reading -0.1oz or something initially, presumably to avoid the need for the employees to zero it out each time they weigh something.

[darkwater]

My feeling is that they have a few presets available for the containers they use, but it totally can be changed to a custom one.

[gspr]

> The UK banned single use plastic bags at major supermarkets. We all moaned about it for a few minutes, forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it.

I hope you're right. Here in Norway, the sensible people did what you describe. A large minority has, on the other hand, turned the lack of plastic bags (and straws, which I'm sure they barely even used once in a blue moon before) into a battlefield of the culture wars. And far right politicans of course cater to them. They manage to capture discourse talking about "environmentalism gone wild" and "EU overreach". It's terribly annoying and they manage to waste everyone's time and derail important debates with this nonsense.

[varjag]

Funnily you can still buy packs of plastic straws, just that they are sold as "resuable" with a cleaning brush (which noone likely ever uses). They are simply not the default option now and that's enough to make some people rage.

[samrus]

These days, you never hear about reduce, reuse, recycle, and how its supposed to be in that priority order. When i was a kid thats what we were taught. Now its just recycle, recycle, recycle

My conspiracy theory is corporate propaganda changed it because reduce and reuse decreases demand, while recycle potentially only lowers production cost

[fiatpandas]

I highly recommend the documentary Plastic Wars (Frontline). It’s about how the plastics industry made a major marketing push for recycling starting in the 80s, in order to avoid plastic bans and ensure production continued to increase. It shifted the burden of plastic waste from producers to consumers, and we are essentially still in that conceptual space (at least in the US).

[adastra22]

For sure. Plastic packaging keeps the product fresh and hermetically sealed from the clean factory / production depot to your store and eventual home. Get rid of plastic and there will be a LOT more spoilage.

Maybe that's an acceptable tradeoff, but most people don't even realize there is a tradeoff being made...

[timeon]

The goal of green-washing is to keep 'unlimited' growth.

[sircastor]

Since all our local markets have introduced handheld scanners, I don't even bring my bags in. I put everything in the cart barcode up, get to the checkout, scan everything, pay, and go.

When I get to the car I unload into the bags. I'm sure it's not a thing for everyone, but I feel like I'm cutting out a fair bit of shuffling.

[2III7]

Why not have the bags in the cart and put the scanned products straight into the bags?

[bcraven]

I get the impression that the 'handheld scanner' may be tethered to the till (like in B&Q) rather than one you can carry round with you (like Sainsbury's/Asda/Tesco)

[throwawayffffas]

Plastic bags are making a comeback.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plastic-bags...

[upcoming-sesame]

For fruits and vegetables - Why is a bag needed at all ?

I just put my fruits and vegetables directly on the conveyor belt.

[mschild]

For most you don't. But if you buy loose cherry tomatoes, having 30 of them rolling around everywhere isn't exactly practical.

Thats easily solved though by simple buying some reusable fruit/veggie net. Essentially the same as what you would use for socks or underwear in the laundry.