> There's some serious flaws with not counting water as a renewable resource.

I've often found myself pointing this out to people when talking about water being used, though it does depend a lot on where the water comes from, and / or being diverted away from.

It's relevant inasmuch as the transport and purification of water can have a substantial energy cost (and things like _groundwater_ are being depleted faster than used - some of California is sinking, and the Ogalalla (while huge and still mostly there) would take 6,000 years to replenish if depleted

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

I'm curious how you think I found the 20,000 figure buried in a table ~20 pages in without reading it :)

I'm sure there is room for improvement in the methodology. There almost always is. You can contact the first author here [1] and I am sure, as a scientist, she would appreciate your correspondence.

[1]: https://www.dtu.dk/english/service/phonebook/person?id=80447

Thanks, I appreciate that you didn't just flippantly post this. However, I would say that citing the most extreme figure there without context is a technique of persuasion that pollutes discussion with hyperbole. I saw that number and it seemed immediately fishy. I still think so, but I won't get into all the reasons here because I don't have time. I really hate plastic bags. I've picked up hundreds of them off beaches worldwide. So we need to ban them and find an alternative--hey, like paper. Your comment inadvertently raised my hackles because it sounds a lot like you'd rather have BAU and plastic everywhere. (I hope not).

I hate litter, but I don't see much difference between something biodegrading over tens of years or never. Given all of the advantages plastic has over everything else, I would much rather we used that. We could penalise people who improperly dispose of waste - this seems to work quite well in Singapore.

Paper is a particularly bad replacement as it falls apart when wet - a couple of days ago a paper bag did this to me as I walked back in light rain. Additionally, paper necessarily has a higher environmental cost due to the weight and packing fraction of the raw materials.

I shared that number because it shocked me and the report looked authoritative. Thanks for helping to add context to it :)