i worked in a grocery store for… many years. ( and through the pandemic. ) at least at our store, we collected what plastics we could and sent them to the recycler.
however, and like the op said, we assumed the recycler, often as not, sent it to the dump. there’s only so much demand for recycled plastics. new plastic is always cheaper
i know pre-pandemic lots of plastic recycling ( including city recycling ) would often wind up overseas ( going back in the otherwise empty containers… and often getting dumped in landfills there ) then china stopped taking it. there were news reports of recycling stacking up here with nowhere to go.
That’s intriguing. We go through a lot of feed bags and so far the only reuse I’ve found is weed barriers for gardens/flower beds/orchard. I may need to find a pattern and remember how to work a sewing machine.
Logistically paper bags have a lot of problems. Paper bags occupy much more physical space, so bags in the checkout lanes have to be replenished more frequently. The space occupied by bags in the backroom storage means that they where they can store one year’s worth of plastic bags can hold less than one month’s worth of paper bags. That means trucks have to deliver paper bags 5-10 times as frequently, using more fuel. They’re much heavier than plastic, requiring extra fuel to transport them to distribution centers and stores. Finally, paper is much more expensive per bag than plastic.
Uline lists typical grocery bags at $91 per bundle of 500 bags, and the bundle weighs 57 pounds. Roughly equivalent plastic bags go for $41 per bundle of 1000 bags which weighs 12 pounds.
So, to get plastic out of the stores, the playing field should be tilted by regulators. A tax rate of 500%-600% on plastic bags would put them on a par with the costs of paper bags. This might be invisibly eaten by specialty stores where the price per bag isn’t much of an issue. Alternately, retailers could be required to charge a per-bag fee reflecting the costs to society, so something like $0.50 each for plastic bags and $0.10 each for paper. Bringing your own bags becomes a bigger deal when their price reflects their costs to us all.
Yeah, the cotton or paper bags vs plastic bags question is a really difficult one. If you look at both water usage or CO2 emissions, plastic bags actually come out way ahead.
Cotton bags need to be reused 20,000 times in order to offset its overall impact of production. That is, one cotton bag takes as many resources to make as 20,000 plastic bags. And it’s even worse for organic cotton, which requires both more water and more CO2.
So that’s 55 years of shopping every single day with the same cotton bag, vs using a plastic bag every day.
Paper bags are a net negative – they’re never good because it’s impossible to re-use them enough times to offset the environmental cost of production.
Of course, plastic bags cause litter, but it’s actually, as a percentage of total litter, less than you might expect. And you have to decide which is worse for the environment, more litter or more CO2.
Of course, once you have a cotton bag, you ought to reuse it til you die. But you should try never to get more cotton or other reusable bags.
My pet peeve is when people use copious amounts of drinking water to rinse/clean plastic before putting it in the recycling. If a plastic container is too dirty for recycling, just put it in the trash.
Indeed. I worked in a grocery store. The amount of pallet wrap that went into film recycling was more than an order of magnitude more than the plastic bags collected from customers.
Yep, where I live you have to buy a heavy-duty reusable film plastic bag for 25 cents if you forget your reusables. Everyone who orders groceries through delivery services gets these ridiculously overbuilt plastic bags with every order. I have never seen anyone reuse them since we all have better cloth bags already. I started using my growing stash as kitchen trash bags and they aren’t even good for that, but at least they get one more use.
No more plastic bags in Maine. They demand you bring your own reusable, or pay 25 cents for paper. I love it. Maine seems to be really taking this shit seriously, though I’m sure folks whined and cried about it when those laws passed.
Wife and I are also working to chip away at all the plastic in our life. Most recently ditched liquid laundry detergent in plastic and moved to boxed powder like the old days. Feels good, though we still have a long way to go and more to do.
Same deal here in Australia. ‘Soft plastics’ recycling scheme collapsed a while ago. Turned out what was being collected at supermarkets etc was just being stockpiled elsewhere.
Oh, they so much did. And implementation got delayed due to COVID and people not yet knowing how it spread.
But to the main topic, all those debating one bag versus the other (cotton totes or paper or plastic film) are assuming a lot.
I’ve lived in Europe, and not only do shoppers bag their own groceries (rare in the US), they bring their own vessels. Sometimes they even just put the groceries back in the cart, roll it out to their car or bicycle, and transfer the groceries to the car trunk or bike bags/basket.
It’s not rocket surgery. We have plenty of options. We just need to help people understand them.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. We need to put more attention on the first two.
Reusable bags can last a long time. I have a Trader Joe bag that I use every day, I got it over 10 years ago and I haven’t been particularly careful of it but it is still doing the job.
I didn’t know this was common in Europe but that’s what I do. I have fold-out baskets on my bike.
keep your receipt handy because apparently people will load a cart and walk out with it, so security will often stop you. flashing the receipt is usually all that’s needed, assuming they even care, but sometimes they check it.
I often feel very disillusioned and cynical about recycling.
In my family, we’ve been dutifully recycling for decades, I mean it’s about 30 years now. I’ve got cloth carrier bags over 20 years old. They’ve passed the 131 uses at any rate, so maybe the environment got some benefit.
OTOH we always re-use one-use containers, even flimsy plastic bags and it’s actually become a minor problem that we get so few new plastic bags these days.
I’ve got a steel insulated water bottle for travelling. On the occasions I collect a plastic bottle – flying long distance, for instance, (nice assonance,) you often can’t refill your steel bottle after security but the flight attendants give you a fresh plastic bottle – I reuse it for as long as possible as a chill bottle for tap water in the fridge.
But anyway. For years we’ve carefully recycled the black plastic trays used for packing sausages, mushrooms and so on. And then I found out, if they are black plastic, they can’t be recycled because the laser machine which reads the plastic type code on them doesn’t work on black.
Thanks so much, GOV.UK! How hard would it be to make some laws to make recycling not a total fuccing waste of everyone’s time? You could have made the plastic trays not black.
I presume someone very rich got 0.0001 pence for every black plastic tray manufactured.
The trays have gone brown in recent years. But why do we have to have trays at all? When I was a boy, the butcher just wrapped your sausages in a sheet of paper.
In Maryland we bagged our groceries all the time. Here in Maine, we try to bag our groceries, but there are actual baggers in Maine stores and they are so happy to help I feel bad if I do it for them, like I’m stealing their job. They even have yearly competitions apparently.
Maine is like a time capsule in some ways, while being just slightly forward thinking in others (but not TOO forward thinking… old conservatives run most towns and will yank your ass back if you try to get to far ahead).
Natural fibers are resource intensive to produce though. Cotton particularly requires a lot of land, a lot of water, a lot of fertilizer, a lot of pesticides. That is not to say that plastics are better in every way. The big picture is that there is not enough focus on reducing what we consume in the first place. As @gatto points out, a lot of waste is created away from our line of sight.
For sure. Corporations specialize in demotivating anyone for pushing for change, whether that is through preventing the creation of a class consciousness or outright interference in the democratic process. I still think there is a place for sum of individual actions to have a positive impact, but institutions also need to create the right conditions for that.
Pulping requires forests to be cut, plantations to be made, effluents to waterbodies. They are probably less impactful than cotton to produce but are much more difficult to reuse (and aren’t quite as strong IMO). Where I live the grocery stores have switched to paper, but you’re charged a quarter for each one.
The Achilles Heel of plastic bag bans is that they rely on harried humans to have a good memory. But when that memory fails they’re still there for you… with another reusable bag.
Maybe this is a good thing - without a safety net, people might be more likely to remember their reusable bags?
I think the problem is that solutions are often marketed as being purely benign and sustainable when they aren’t - and in order to make informed choices, people need to understand the full process that goes into making a cloth bag or a plastic bag. There’s also too much push for blanket solutions - the best solution in one place isn’t necessarily true of another. And unfortunately the debate about whether we should ban plastic bags is a bit of a sideshow from the major action governments need to be taking over our reliance on fossil fuels, not to mention a number of other pressing environmental issues. It’s a bit like treating a symptom or side effect and not the root disease.
