The recycling point is about the fact that much of the US is greenwashing their actions by thinking they're doing some noble deed by recycling, when they're really just spending a lot of money shipping their trash to other countries that end up throwing a lot of it in the ocean when we could have a sane policy of using landfills.
I only see the author's hypothesis about why not having paper bags is a bad thing. The only firm statement is that it seems "inconvenient", while all the other points are firmly based on a supposedly unavoidable need for bags.
Bags are just containers. Why wouldn't we be reusing boxes for grocery delivery? There are reusable bags, why did the author assume that using a cotton bag a hundred plus times is not reasonable?
Just stating that landfills aren't "bad" is not much of an address, either.
The source they get their info from is interesting, though. (Linked below.) According to this, depending on which study you're looking at, it may actually be impossible to reuse any bags enough times that they become worth it compared to ditching them in general.
The lowest possible seems to be paper bags with 3 reuses, followed by plastic bags at around 10, then if you have a durable enough cotton bag to get through 130 uses it becomes the better option environmentally speaking. I've never known anyone that could reuse any of those bags enough to get through that many uses before they tear to the point of uselessness though.
I wonder if it would be advantageous to encourage stores and individuals to start using crates or woven bags again, which may be able to withstand the number of trips necessary to make their environmental impact neutral compared to plastic bags.
Their source: https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/08/heres-how-many-times-y...
This law could easily end up with a net negative environmental impact.
It seems that the author main point is that they are "inconvenient":
> This law is a huge inconvenience for most people in the state. How can I tell? Because from my experience, the overwhelming majority of people choose not to walk around with a bag full of reusable bags.
To which anyone would reply that, if you are going grocery shopping, just bring your bags?
I mean, I'm old enough to remember when stores didn't give bags away, and people were doing just fine. Why the fuss over bringing a good practice back?
I don't know how often you go shopping, but 132 shopping trips is a lot. If you go shopping once a week with the same bags every time, your four-year-old bags would have crossed the threshold less than a year ago.
It's good that your bags are recycled, and I have no idea if the author's metric was assuming recycled materials. However, since the recycling process is not particularly clean, I suspect the numbers still aren't great.
> if you are going grocery shopping, just bring your bags?
The problem is, what happens when I get to a store and I don't have a bag with me? I'm going to need to buy a new one. If this happens on more than 1 out of 132 shopping trips, I'll end up with a greater carbon impact than if I'd used a single-use bag.
Now, maybe you'd argue that I should never forget my bag. Maybe so, but I can tell you that I'm going to forget, and I'd posit that a lot of other people are going to forget too. The question is not what people should do, but what this law will in fact cause them to do.
IMO, a simple 10¢ surcharge per plastic bag would be far more effective.
---
(It is admittedly worse for me because I live in Manhattan and don't have a car. I often go to stores I pass while on a walk, when I don't have a bag with me because I was not explicitly planning to go shopping. Even so, I suspect car owners will also forget their bags from time to time. Also, environmental policies should encourage no- and low-car lifestyles.)
And then it would make it an actual problem for the poor, more so than OP hypothesis that the law "affects poor people the most as they are the most likely to reuse single use bags as garbage liners".
Because a surcharge on single use bags is essentially turning them into a luxury, i.e. if you are poor, you may not go grocery shopping without planning it first.
I don't see how that's fair.
Secondly... I consider myself on the liberal side of the political spectrum, I think income inequality is a huge problem and we need stronger social safety net. However, I really reject the idea that if some comfort wouldn't be available to poor people, it shouldn't be available to anyone. We want to achieve equality by raising the standard of living at the low end, not lowering the high end. The latter just makes everyone worse off.
They are not as bad as is generally thought. Landfills are essentially big compost piles, and the heat generated from decaying organic material breaks down almost everything, including most plastics. The few things that are left, such as metals, are actually valuable enough to extract in a lot of cases. The primary thing to worry about is lead contamination but this is less of an issue now that lead has been removed from most consumer products. Compare that to recycling, which is extremely energy intensive and has its own impacts on climate change, while landfills can actually generate a net positive amount of energy.
Are you saying that yet another source of heat production, when we already have global warming going on, is a good thing?
Reducing waste is good as well, this law is a silly way to do it.
Personally I think people should avoid grocery delivery unless they really need it. In any case, many people don't have access to Costcos.
> Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
Landfills are a practical solution for waste production levels we have now. Striving to have less of them is the right thing to do but it's not happening tomorrow.
> If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them?
Sure, one solution is to take responsibility for long-term management of our wasteful consumption and put them in landfills stateside instead of shipping them around the world. Then we can reduce our waste over time and, hopefully, find ways to clean up these landfills.
For environmental/waste reasons? It's not obvious that the world is better served by you driving to the supermarket yourself instead of someone else doing it for you.
Sure, maybe you were passing by anyway, and can combine multiple trips. But the economies of scale mostly work the other way: the delivery driver can deliver to multiple households, the supermarket can deliver straight from a warehouse instead of spending time stacking shelves optimized for display.
Or do you just think people these days shouldn't be so damn lazy as to need someone else to do their grocery shopping? Perhaps they should also grow their own food and sew their own clothes.
Also, most of the points made are moot, e.g.
> If there’s anything a person that orders from Whole Foods regularly needs is a dozen reusable plastic bags every few weeks and $10 added to their bill.
Anything delivered by Costco doesn't come in plastic bags, but reused boxes. Order from Costco, then, as they seem to have fixed it already.
> This is all based on a false notion of landfills being bad or the idea that we’re running out of landfill space.
Landfills are bad, and we should strive to have less of them, not more.
> Most of the trash that ends up in the ocean is coming from a handful of countries which are overwhelmed from recyclables sent from the US.
The disconnection here is palpable. If these recyclables come from the US, shouldn't the US strive to send less of them? Are these other countries to blame for not recycling our trash properly?