This article presents a somewhat contrarian point that plastics isn’t necessarily as bad, and more environmental wins can be gained by focusing on other pollution vectors.
For a more mainstream and negative view to balance it out, check out The Guardian’s “The plastic backlash”[0] published last month. One of the points in it I found interesting is that there was a semi-coordinated move by major corporations to reframe the plastic waste issue so that responsibility for the pollution is shifted from themselves onto the consumer (gets us busy worrying about recycling plastic rather than how we end up with that much of it in the first place).
"emi-coordinated move by major corporations to reframe the plastic waste issue so that responsibility for the pollution is shifted from themselves onto the consumer"
It's a very successful strategy. They did the same with "identity theft" where banks deflected the blame for bad security practices.
Something that came up in this article, is often brought up as a ‘gotcha’ in other articles and in discussions is the whole thing about a cotton bag needing 140 uses to be better than a plastic bag.
This has been so easy for me, but the fact it keeps coming up makes me think it’s not for other people? I have cotton bags that I have had for 3 -4 years that I still use a few times a week.
The first couple of weeks I would forget them. But I stuck with it and it’s just habit that I grab them on the way to the shops or throw them in my work bag in the morning.
Also the idea that plastic isn’t bad for the environment doesn’t make a difference about wether I want that stuff floating around in the ocean or ruining beaches/forests. Make producers pay for the clean up. F them.
It is also possible to create bags that are useful for more than just groceries. Part of it is also the mental shift away from disposable.
There is also the the possibility of shared bags but the germ/dirt issue would exist and then adding the cleaning of shared bags may be energy worse. We used to have shared glass bottles for milk that had to be cleaned and sterilized after each use not to mention transporting all the weight of empty bottles back to the dairy.
I think it also depends on what we are solving for. Is it lower carbon footprint or keeping plastic out of our waterways? More quickly bio-degradable plastics may be best for one but not the other.
Not an economist, but it strikes me that perhaps a better way than "making producers pay for the clean-up" (short of regulating their production in the first place) is to make users pay for the cleanup. If some sort of "tax" or "fee" on these items is passed to consumers, I'd bet we'd see less use.
Hell, I live in Seattle, and the $0.05 I have to pay to get a paper bag in the store (plastic is mostly banned) is enough to make me bring my cotton bag.
Totally agree...but this isn't a lake or local stretch of a river that a pulp mill is polluting, this random/isolated stretches of the ocean where everything ends up.
Does international waters jurisdiction make it harder to make them pay for it (from a legal perspective)?
my point was when this happens (pollution in a river/lake), the legal jurisdiction is a little more black/white. by that i mean it's in one country or one state or one county or whatever so from a government perspective jurisdiction isn't hazy.
when it's 1000s of miles from any government in the ocean how does that work legally?
Is it really 140 uses, or is it that you breakeven at 140 plastic bags?
This is a significant difference because reusable bags are usually a lot larger and a lot stronger. In my experience, one use of a reusable bag substitutes for something like five plastic bags. That makes the breakeven point arrive a lot faster.
The cotton bags I've seen in Norway are usually about 2/3 the size of a standard plastic bag. I usually just reuse the plastic bags - some bags are needed for garbage so this works well.
Interesting. In the US, the standard plastic grocery bag is really small, to an almost idiotic degree sometimes. (A particularly large box of cereal may not fit in one at all!) Typical reusable bags are much larger.
If you do groceries once a month, you would need 10 years to get into that magic number. That using the same bags every time, if you have more bags than you need, so you alternate their use, it would take more than 10 years.
That said, I usually use plastic bags 2 or 3 times. Does that mean I would have to keep a cotton bag for 20 years? (I do like using reusable bags, but I don't carry them all the time.)
Once a month seems like a very long cycle. I buy groceries and other commonly needed items 2-4 times per week. Of course, I live within walking/biking distance of several stores, and I hardly ever buy more than what I can fit in a bag.
Still, only once per month seems very little, especially for perishables.
Once a month seems extremely low. We do one big shop a week, and that's with a lot of planning(we do a massive shop for all dinners and lunches for the entire week) and that's with using long-life milk and freezing bread so that we don't have to go to a shop more often.
This is anecdotal but we quit getting plastic bags at our farm because we got tired of picking them up out of the fields. There wasn't a huge amount of them but they used to always and I mean always be out there no matter how many you picked up. We switched to only bringing paper home and now we find maybe one a month from roadside trash or wind.
"This problem, is huge, getting worse every day, we have no way to contain it and not even any good strategies going forward, but we don't have any hyper specific evidence of extremely bad outcomes related to it and we think other stuff is worse anyway. You shouldn't worry about it."
This is an extremely bizarre sentiment.
I usually love the economist but this article is, excuse my pun, garbage.
For a more mainstream and negative view to balance it out, check out The Guardian’s “The plastic backlash”[0] published last month. One of the points in it I found interesting is that there was a semi-coordinated move by major corporations to reframe the plastic waste issue so that responsibility for the pollution is shifted from themselves onto the consumer (gets us busy worrying about recycling plastic rather than how we end up with that much of it in the first place).
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/13/the-plas...