Plastic bags are such a red herring. They are not a problem in any place that has reasonably decent waste collection and inceneration. You can reuse all the plastic bags you want for the rest of your life, and it won't come close to saving the same amount of energy (or carbon or pollution or whatever metric) of skipping a single transatlanic flight. Or of owning a car. Or living in a stupidly big house.

Environmentalism is full of these pointless "little things" which people think add up to "a big thing", but don't. Tin foil. Cling film. Plastic bags. Paper towels. These are all convenient in daily life and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. This seriously detracts from the message of real environmentalism.

It's much easier to wag a finger at someone and tell them "you mustn't use plastic bags, they're bad for the environment!" than it is to tell them "don't go on vacation to Hawaii, flying is criminally wasteful".

The two great ocean plastic patches are hundreds of km large, and made of mostly plastic bags (polyethylene) and plastic containers (polypropylene) from household items. Not any kind of industrial source. It adds up pretty quickly when there are 8 billion of us.

I suspect you got it backwards here - the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight. But in the end these different types of environmental issues are not exclusive. You can reduce your plastic consumption and plane travel!

People waste time and energy discussing plastic bags. There are laws limiting the use of plastic bags. There "durable" alternatives which are more expensive (and which are inevitably even harder to decompose). Food gets turned into "green" plastic bags. Cotton bags require orders of magnitude more water and energy to produce. Politicians waste their energy debating this stuff, when they could be working on useful legislation to reduce emissions in a meaningful way. This is virtue signalling and is mostly useless.

Much of the plastic in the great garbage patches are fishing related. And the countries where there are laws regarding plastic bags are not the ones dumping them in the ocean. That's mostly the "developing world" (pardon that phrase, can't think of a less awful one). They're clearly not going to adopt "vegan spider silk" bags or any other "greener" alternative; they don't have the money.

> the plastic you use in a year does much, much deeper damage than emissions from a flight

Nah. ~100% of the single-use plastics I use are incinerated and most of the embodied energy is recovered. I would say 100%, but I can't rule out a garbage truck crashing and losing a bit of cargo or sometihng.

Didn’t Seaspiracy show that it was largely fishing plastics

I'm not certain that the keyboard in a box required a plastic bag. If it isn't needed, then why not skip it?

How many more keyboards are damaged in transit with reduced packaging? Where on the packaging spectrum is the optimal value? Where reducing packaging further increases damages to the point that it's more wasteful than a bit of extra packaging? Why not aim for that optimum? Instead of token changes.

I believe the "damage" they are trying to prevent are fingerprints. I don't think that's worth a plastic bag.

Our society seems to associate such a packaging with the feeling of quality/freshness/whatever. The epitome of this may be on airplanes, where they repackage blankets into plastic bags for every flight (allegedly without even being washed.)

> allegedly without even being washed

That seems really unlikely. It wouldn't take long to backfire and the negative PR would destroy what little profit was gained by not washing them. It's unlikely the airline is actually repacking anything, in any case. They almost certainly subcontract the cleaning to a laundry service, and that's who re-bags the cleaned blankets.