I don't remember energy use being the problem with plastic bags?

It was plastic bags being absolutely everywhere in the environment. Streets, parks, trees. Wrapped around anything sticking out of the ground. On your face on a windy day.

Pollution is the problem with plastic. Probably health, too, now that microplastics are being recognized as an issue.

Proper recycling improves national security and the well-being of their citizens.

Good example is South Korea. They were devastated after continual war in the 1950s. So they implemented mandatory recycling. Food waste goings into bin A, metals into bin B, plastics into bin C, ... This allows for reducing the cost of recycling by presorting items. It helped them rebuild and become stronger. To this day they still properly separate their garbage to ease recycling.

Recycling food waste and scraps means creating a nutrient rich fertilize resource. Tossing them into a land fill removes nutrients from the food chain. USA food has less nutrients than years past because of the push for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.

The argument that is pro-polyethylene plastic bags over cotton completely ignores the source: Renewable plants that are grown and harvested, vs. finite fossil fuels extracted from the Earth and refined.

> Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 1,725 megajoules, around 3,050 times as much energy.

That conveniently ignores the drilling, extracting, transporting, refining, and transporting again to make "polyethylene resin".

"Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture."

Yeah, let's stop doing the fairly well established recycling programs that have knock on benefits like reducing pollution, and instead start scaling an entirely unproven and expensive mitigation program.

These are some prominent Effect Altruism guys so I know "cause prioritization" is their whole thing. But I think this is just basic contrarianism, because you cant fundraise off the fact that the cultural shift to recycling in the first world has been pretty successful and positive.

"In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio."

I think there's a thing about food shopping here. Americans just don't go shopping as frequently, so you're better off with paper bags in the back of your car.

I am a Brit. I have a Lidl cotton bag that I've probably used sixty times already. It augments and will ultimately replace two reusable foldable/pocketable bags from Marks & Spencer that I have used for all of my shopping for at least thirteen years, perhaps more like sixteen.

I shop on foot, about once every four or five days. I wil have used the two M&S bags on more than a thousand journeys. One of them is finally wearing thin. The other goes in my pocket more or less whenever I leave the house. They were themselves made from recycled material.

I use two the majority of the time so I am confident I've avoided using at least 1800 plastic bags.

(Weird timing, but I did end up needing one last night, annoyingly, because I had to shop in an emergency, but it is the first time in five years or so and it already has a reuse purpose)

Reusable shopping bags are easy. A British shopper might even get to 173 uses in a single year.

These arguments tend to ignore that a reusable thing is often just a lot better at whatever it does. You can put a few liters of milk in a reusable bag without triple bagging it. You don't have to worry that it will split open and spill out on the ground. You can use the bag to pack for road trips, to store kid's snacks and toys, as a gym bag, etc. Groceries aren't the only thing anyone caries and people go further than between their boot and fridge.

In Switzerland grocery stores have been promoting reusable (recycled plastic) bags for years, and people use them for everything: I saw someone in Interlaken carrying firewood with one.

So:

- To people promoting reuse: maybe go beyond the environmental impact and appeal to quality of life. Having bag or two in your boot all the time is a good idea.

- To people promoting single use: others have pointed out that you need to address the other environmental problems beyond energy, but also acknowledge that you're asking people to find a replacement for their everyday tote bags as well.

In an apartment, I’ve learned not to even have a garbage bin. If I have garbage I make a small bag and throw it out, or keep it in the freezer until I go out. Frozen trash doesn’t smell and doesn’t attract anything :)

Of course, this requires you to have less trash , which is very easy if you simply take a few seconds to go outside and throw your food out after lunch/dinner. Everything else is just dry scraps usually. There’s always the fridge :)

All in all, there is no concept of “garbage”, “garbage bin” , or any kind of “garbage accumulation” in my apartments.

Oh, you can also just freaking flush small things down the toilet. Seriously, it’s like a little mini garbage. Only advise this for people with great water pressure (lucky you!).

If I had a backyard, I’d be burning and burying garbage too, man.

Last but not least, never ever buy expensive garbage bags. It’s literally going in the garbage, man.

I think using a cotton bag 173 times to beat plastic bags and a mug 1,000 times to beat disposable cups sounds completely reasonable.

Just burn your trash

https://www.energimyndigheten.se/en/news/2025/from-waste-to-...

My understanding is that biological decomposition of waste creates methane which is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2.

The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!

I am still not sold on those reusable plastic bottles and how these are better for environment and health then regular soda bottles.

I use maybe one PET water bottle each month when i go for outdoor activities. PET bottle i would buy anyway even if i had reusable one, because i've got stuck somewhere without running water or because i craved bottled icetea or orange juice. After carefully rinsing it. I keep using it for month or so and then dispose it. I only use it for clean tap water. No sugar or anything that might promote unnecessary microbial growth. Non-abrasive rinsing. Store with lid off when not in use.

These are usualy made locally in soda bottling companies, so the shipping is cheaper and more ecological than shipping reusable bottles from one central reusable bottle factory (likely abroad). This makes me feel zero guilt when i finaly decide it's used enough to be disposed.

Quite often these are reasonably sturdy to be used for months if you keep them in backpack and don't throw them around too much. And the reusable bottles get damaged over time as well if you don't treat them right.

Reusable bottle people say something about how refilling that water bottle with water makes it leak BPA or whatever chemicals. That's just insane. I've seen huge grocery market chains storing pallets of those in direct sunlight for months, yet somehow magically that's not leaking enough to violate any regulatory limits. But me puting pure tap water into the bottle automaticaly makes it extremely nasty hormonal disruptor according to some people.

On the other hand, i would like to see some sensible regulation on amount of packaging materials vs amount of product these are holding. Shrinkflation and cost cutting caused some products to be ridiculously small compared to amount of packaging they need. (especialy when you realize the relationship between volume of product and surface area covered by packaging is geometricaly increasing the packaging to product ratio when shrinking down). Sometimes it kinda makes sense (pills/medications), sometimes it's kinda stupid (100ml water bottles - and yes, i am aware of airplanes and conference rooms).

I recently learned of Dandora Kenya (Nairobi) and the megadump there and ors waste pickers.

It’s worth reading about and considering what happens to your waste.

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/kenya-aid-waste...

The total plastic waste in subsaharan africa is expected to increase by 100 Million tons by 2060.

I don’t understand how plastic bags for “100 years at current rates” is an argument FOR its longevity/being fine?

Such a reductive title/framing. Yes, plastic recycling doesn't work very well. But that doesn't mean that getting rid of trash is simple/there aren't opportunities to reduce waste. Metal recycling, compost, glass bottle reuse, and proper management of landfills are all super important!

Also: > In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic.

They make it seem like this is a bad thing but surely the average cotton bag gets used more than 173 times. I've probably used some of my oldest reusable bags like ~1k times.

The article mentions the energy benefits from recycling aluminium but fails to mention the also large (but not as large) savings from recycling glass. Please recycle your aluminium and glass even if it's probably wiser to throw out plastic in most localities.

This all makes tons of sense. Recycling metal works, other recycling may not. Cloth bags make sense if you have a few of them and use them hundreds of times. Reduce still makes sense so why not focus on reduce.

Other papers/articles on this topic:

Tierney:

"The Reign of..." https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...

Kinnaman:

"Is it Time to..." https://www.vox.com/2016/2/13/10972986/recycling

Kinnaman, Thomas C. "Determining the Socially Optimal Recycling Rate." Resources, Conservation and Recycling, vol. 85, 2014, pp. 5–10, doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2013.11.002.

Hopefully energy used will become less important. CO2 emissions seem like the biggest threat to our long term health. Microplastics also matter, a bit.

How much plastic is escaping into the environment from the recycling process vs. landfill? What are the CO2 output of landfill vs. recycling? I imagine burning would be the worst option for these.

Not surprised that the market forces tended towards the most energy efficient waste disposal systems; glad we don't have mountains of trash or poor landfills.

Every now and then I'd come across articles from this source and thought that they were decent. Perhaps not the best, but reasonably well researched and argued. But coming across this statement kind of sealed the deal for me in the wrong way:

> Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture.

Pure unadulterated bollocks, I'm sorry to say. I shall flag this source whenever emerges in my feed.

> Sufficiently well-worn cotton tote bags can beat plastic for environmental cost, but only for the most consistent among us.

We simply don't need to rely on the "most consistent among us", because these things -- and so, so many others -- can be legislated, enforced, stopped, controlled etc. Businesses make and sell plastic bags because no one stops them and they're convenient (as well as a serious environmental problem). Should governments do the job they are supposed to do (or simply step aside and let the society organise in that particular respect), plastic bags would cease to be a problem.

I am somewhat disappointed, I guess.

> A returnable milk bottle takes much more energy to produce and much more fuel to transport than a plastic carton, and has to make around ten or more trips to use less energy than a bottle made from polyethylene plastic.

This seems like the weakest of presented arguments. Just 10 trips and it's more environmentally friendly? Yeah, seems like reusable milk bottles wins over plastic. That's what, ~10 weeks for payback?

Just let me buy things without forcing me to buy so much trash too. Every grocery store item is over-packaged.

In the Netherlands the cradle to cradle hype of some years ago has created a paper reality where waste is turned magically into building material and can thus be effectively dumped anywhere in the environment.

Meanwhile, New York exports its trash to the mid west and microplastics are found on the top of Mount Everest.

Not every place has space for landfills... which is why we often ship trash over to low-income countries.

If a country burns coal. It should burn trash first, before the coal.

"I am once again asking you to consider plasma gasification."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

InEnTec says its plasma technology effectively destroys PFAS - https://www.wastetodaymagazine.com/news/inentec-says-its-pla... - August 23rd, 2024

Production of high quality syngas from argon plasma gasification of plastic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41623879 (September 2024) (0 comments)

Plasma gasification versus incineration of plastic waste: Energy, economic and environmental analysis - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fuproc.2022.107470

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984

> a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic

So what? That's like a year of grocery shopping maybe. I easily use a tote bag for way longer than that and I'm not trying that hard to live an environment friendly life.

Penn & Teller have a Bullshit! episode about this (Season 2, Episode 5). Well, it's technically about recycling, but it makes the claim that landfills are not a bad thing, and much better than the current recycling situation, in most cases.

That episode has always stuck with me, and I've always wondered how valid their argument is.

Before anyone gets all excited by they cherry picked evidence and extremely confident tone, remember this isn't being written by a veteran waste disposal professional, environmentalist, logistics expert, or professor.

It's by a "magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world". Aka, contrarian armchair experts who did some googling and are now throwing spitballs made to be shallowly convincing enough to make money off it with no skin in the game. Catnip for HN, but 100% unreliable.

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