I seem to remember that paper bags are close to single-use plastic bags, but still use more energy to produce and also require wood pulp. Paper bags can easily be recycled, but "single-use" plastic bags can easily be re-used as household trash bags, or otherwise. So it's a toss-up.

I've seen some grass cardboard pop up in the few deliveries we get. The wood pulp is probably negotiable and increasingly more so.

I think a benefit of paper bags would be encouraging planting trees to make more bags

> re-used as household trash bags

this is what i do, and if they were banned i'd be using some sort of bag and then purchasing trash bags separately using maybe twice the resources?

This is exactly what I've been doing since moving to Austin.

I get paper bags at the grocery and throw them out immediately after a single use, and now I have to also buy plastic garbage bags for under the sink, which I never used to do.

> re-used as household trash bags

But that’s a one-time reuse for something that’s not going to biodegrade when it ends up in the ocean or landfill

It should never end up in the ocean, and nothing really biodegrades in landfill, especially not paper.

I mean, I disagree with both of those statements entirely. Do you have any sources? I do, but not googling at the moment.

EDIT: quick Google search has many sources listing paper degrading in 2-6 weeks in landfills. Plastic in the ocean… I think you need to b by broaden your horizons if you think that doesn’t happen

You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.

And I'm not saying decomposition doesn't happen at all in landfills; it very clearly does, but the sort of decomposition that takes place is incomplete and slow, because landfills aren't ideal places for decomposition to occur. But that doesn't matter. Once it's buried, who cares if it takes 300 years to decompose?

> You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.

I think that enough people don't give a shit about where their waste goes, that any coastal community will lose a fraction of its waste to the drink. That isn't where most of the plastic in the ocean comes from, but the difference between "should" and "inevitably won't" is vast.

Paper degrades if it is near the surface, mixed with loose dirt, and still getting oxygen. If it's packed down under feet of compacted soil and other trash it degrades much more slowly.

I thought the heat deep within landfills is intense from all sorts of things degrading.

It depends entirely on the content of the waste and the levels of moisture and air infiltration.

Some landfills are known to generate huge amounts of methane, and ooze black sludge at the surface. This famously occured after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.

In contrast, landfills in arid places can preserve trash like a museum:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-17-mn-14066-...

If nothing did, landfills couldn't harvest methane as fuel.