When visiting Seattle for the first time my mom was simultaneously outraged at the lack of plastic bags and the recycling bins everywhere, and also in awe at how clean the city was. Never did the two thoughts cross each other in her head

They were also so damn cheap that clerks would bag EVERYTHING without asking, so they not only covered the streets like you describe, but often after offering no actual utility to begin with.

Yeap. In my pantry right now, I probably have 12 reusable bags. Some of them have been used hundreds of times (and have the battle scars and stains to prove it) while others were used once because I had to run into a grocery store unprepared. The math probably averages out to a slight advantage for reusable, and that doesn't take unique use cases into account: for example, I found every container I owned useful during a recent move.

I'm sure skeptics like the article's writers would tweak some numbers to say disposables have an advantage, so who cares? The fact is there are less gunky, sludge-riddled bags in the gutter of my downtown and that absolutely justifies the bans, despite what this article or the NY Post might argue.

Your state has eliminated metal tab cans? Huh. What do you drink 12oz of pop out of?

CA did the wrong thing for like 12 years. We just finally went back to paper bags for everything. If it ends up on a road, it won't kill animals, it will eventually break apart and turn into particulates. It's what we did before plastic bags rained from the sky into all grocery stores. And the best part: if you have permanent bags you can still use them.

>The state government response was to ban the ban of plastic bags.

Anything to own the libs.

That doesn't solve the problem of people littering. Obviously if trash gets into the trash can it ends up at the landfill.

    > Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world.

> But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them

We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin and have that bin be cleanly collected and yet you're expecting people to bury them??

No, the solution is to massively reduce how often we use single-use plastic bags. It seems like every time I buy anything from any store its just assumed I want it in a plastic bag. Getting a single bottled drink at a convenience store? The clerk gets a plastic bag ready. Its insane.

Personally I think this problem is being solved the right way from a systems perspective.

Energy production is centralized, so the benefits of it becoming cleaner is spread as soon as it arrives, whereas single-use plastic pollution is diffuse, with compounding damage.

Shirley, the most sensitive dump is in testicles? Microplastics in balls. Like a ball pit.

You can use single use plastic bag 50 times or more before it deteriorates, not the thinnest kind, but the average one. They are incredibly strong. The dedicated mult-use ones are insanely strong, but also few times thicker and more unwieldy.

Like with single use shaving razor. They don't need to be literally single use. It depends on the user. You can use it as long as it serves you.

The best thing limiting access to plastic bags did was familiarizing people with the idea of taking bags to the market.