Disposable items (properly disposed of, ie landfilled) can be, and often are, more environmentally friendly than reusable items. Especially if you look at actual real life use, as opposed to projected or design use.

Look at a UK LCA of shopping bags:

A cotton tote needs to be reused ~173 times without being washed to break even with the efficiency of a single use HDPE bag. (Edit: other alternatives, like LDPE, paper or woven plastic, are also listed as low as multiplier of 2x vs HDPE. I didn't intend to mislead.)

If you're not doing a whole load of dishes, it can be more efficient to use plastic or paper plates for a meal, and trash them. The cost of just washing something can be relatively and unreasonably high, environmentally speaking.

The green movement has been over reliant on emotional programming (reuse = always good, plastic = always bad, etc) and needs to invest more in actual education. Landfills have gotten an especially unearned negative connotation.

Hopefully the new generation of college graduates are getting proper training in conducting proper Life Cycle Analysis'.

Not saying reuse is always bad or that we shouldn't be analysing these things, just that they need analysis, and not a collective gut reaction.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

Make them twice as thick. Melt a weight into the seam of each one to prevent flying and floating. You'd still be a magnitude ahead of the alternatives. There are alternatives besides banning.

They have their problems, but people don't realize what a damn miracle of engineering HDPE bags are. And other disposable paper and plastic items, to a lesser extent.

Plastic bags in the ocean are an externality, whose cost is hard to measure but is paid in the lives of wild things. The whole point of externalities is that people aren't bearing any cost for them: tax and/or ban is absolutely a reasonable approach to handling them, since it makes people take literal account of the literal downstream effects.

One more thing, on edit: the analysis you're calling for is good to do, but is also prone to the "seeing like a state" problem. The analysis will only include what can be easily measured... Which can leave out a lot of the story.

Re: the tax and ban... Tires and lead batteries in most states in the US is good example of this. You can tax or ban or regulate to put a cap on the problem. But if you want to collect the existing waste already out there, an incentive refund accomplishes much more, in less time.

Well, now a palette of them weighs 2-10 times as much and the energy required to ship them needs to be recalculated.

Ocado will pay 5p per bag, even other supermarkets' bags.

Here in the states, most grocery stores sell woven poly polypropylene, LDPE resusable bags, not cotton totes. The study you cite says it only takes 4 reuses of an LDPE bag to beat a single use plastic bag, and 11 for the woven PPE kind, an order of magnitude better than cotton. That's only a month or two of grocery trips, and they last for years. I know I've reused the same ones for the past decade.

Yes, I picked cotton because it's considered the luxury choice (given the context) and usually the one sold as the most environmentally friendly. Ie non bleached, organic, sustainably sourced etc that you don't usually see with plastic alternatives. (I did mean to make a point, but not mislead.)

Which is kinda my point... Plastics can fill a proper need and still be the most "green" choice. Same with paper or any "disposable".

But back to HDPE... Most people even reuse these at least once at home. And ignoring that, the nearest competitor is still twice the impact.

I'm not saying alternatives are bad, just that people need to be open to the fact that sometimes the unexpected alternative can be best.

And conversely, the "green" luxury alternative might actually be worst.

Cotton bags are completely irrelevant but are often cherrypicked by those with an agenda to push.

Besides my point is more that plastics have an appropriate place in the environmental scheme of things. Whether you treat them as disposable or reusable.

If you look at numbers, it's also enormously better here than in Asia. Like all of Europe and America are responsible for less than 5% of worldwide river/ocean litter.

Part of the problem is us (western society) shipping bulk "recyclables" overseas, which then get picked through for valuables, and the rest is often left out to be picked up by the next wind or rain.

One of the best things we could do for world wide river ocean litter pollution, is to just landfill low value recyclables domestically, instead of shipping then overseas. (Edit: or at least recycle them domestically, or with a trusted, regulated country)

Also applies somewhat to air quality with burning plastic for electricity.

173 is less than 4 years if you shop groceries once a week or so, I already used mine longer than that (aside from a couple that I lost). Never washed them either. They can last another 10 years I think, unless they are lost.

Those bags are bad idea for random shopping, but they work well enough for regular trips. Just keep them in the car.

I expect people waste more cotton on socks and t-shirts, but that's neither here not there.

We have a break room with a sink, reusable dinnerware, and disposable dinnerware. I cringed when I saw people washing a reusable plate in the sink. We're in Southern California. There's no way in which it is better for the environment to use gallons of water in order to keep a paper plate and a plastic fork out of the landfill.

Too often people take Reduce/Reuse/Recycle to heart without taking a broader view of all the resources that they are consuming.

They are way sturdier then the ones sold now. To replicate them I’d have to make them myself or look on etsy.

The upper middle class and wealthy who already harm the environment more by flying frequently or driving a brand new 25MPG Audi instead of a 40MPG 10 year old Nissan Versa aren’t going to save the planet by going to a zero-waste fancy restaurant, and they might be eating at that restaurant to alleviate their own guilt because they know they’re using more than their fair share in the first place.

For every one of them there’s 15 people working two jobs and eating at a fast food joint with disposable cutlery because there is no other option that fits their schedule or budget. But they might be less wasteful anyway because they don’t have the money to buy a few thousand pounds of jet fuel.

I know this is not your substantive point but ...

The extent to which CAFE standards have improved mileage even over the past 10 years should not be ignored, and you should check your assumptions about fuel economy. e.g. 2020 Audi A4 gets basically the same combined mileage as the 2010 Nissan Versa.

https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=29866&id=4...

Very US-centric though, people in most european countries eat at home.

OTOH I have some US friends who I am not even sure know how to cook

I'm in the US, and 95% of the time, I cook my own food and eat it at home. So does nearly everyone I know.

Definitely cultural, AFAIK most Europeans brings their own bags for groceries and it's just automatic. Otherwise you have to buy a new bag at check-out.

Make people pay for their waste, usually it helps reducing them.

I know the company/cashiers assume it's expected of them, but to me it's like the gallon sized drinks at fast food chains. It aggravates me that anyone thinks it's necessary.

The Amazon packing and boxing situation is a whole other level of annoying.