Motte, meet bailey. There is more plastic polluting the environment in Australia thanks to plastic bag bans, and they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2 per bag (or reusable bags that break even on CO2 after a few hundred to a thousand uses). This should be considered a huge L for the "environmentalists" who pushed it, on all fronts.
Do you have a source for this? Specifically, plastic litter (not in landfill)? Preferably attributable to plastic bag bans and not just following a pre-existing trend?
> they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2
First up, who is giving you paper bags? I haven't come across one store that has replaced plastic bags with paper. Second, this argument was never about atmospheric CO2.
I know we're supposed to, but I've not changed one bit because of these new bags. A typical shop is now 1$ more expensive with the bags, that's where I stop thinking about it.
When I'm out, and my wife calls me to ask me to pick up something at the shop, I don't have my plastic bag with me, so I buy another one. And it ends up in the bin. Now instead of a thin bit of plastic, I've got a bag that's easily 5 times thicker, and took way more to produce.
It's performative.
They are really thick, almost as nice as hardware store bags, but they all get thrown away.
They should have require a standardized bag/crate with deposit that you would use instead, make it durable enough and people would bring it back or just throw it on the sidewalk and enterprising youths could collect them for the deposit.
Really depends on how you cook. If you're not frying, this isn't really a problem.
> This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills.
But a big part of this was to reduce plastic litter. Plastic in landfill isn't really a problem (oil being dug from the ground being put back into the ground). But putting a (small) price on plastics makes people a little less careless with them.