[Subjectivist]

A more recent report on microbes eliminating ocean plastic debris can be read here, http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/ ... 140619.htm

[Lore]

No conflict here, just get rid of them.

[Keith_McClary]

A local supermarket accepts plastic bags for recycling.

But as my roommate has pointed out [reusable bags] get filthy real quick and require frequent washing.

I saw a lady at the checkout with bags covered with hair. She said her cats loved them - she had to dump the cats out every time she went shopping.

[SILENTTODD]

California bans plastic shopping bags, but provide freeways to support 13.5 million cars.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/1960 ... alifornia/

I guess if it makes you fell better......

Paulo

Before you beat up on California for auto use compare it to other states for numbers of cars per capita. See the link below:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ ... per_capita

California is the most populous state with 38.3 million. About 12% of the of population of the United States. But we rank 23rd in number of vehicles per person.

[WildRose]

A local supermarket accepts plastic bags for recycling.

But as my roommate has pointed out [reusable bags] get filthy real quick and require frequent washing.

I saw a lady at the checkout with bags covered with hair. She said her cats loved them - she had to dump the cats out every time she went shopping.

For that lady, it would probably be wise to have anything that isn't in a can or box or jar put in a plastic bag...

I admit my reusable bags get dog hair on them, not because the dog is anywhere near them but her hair just floats around in the van...

I'm thinking maybe I'll get some of those plastic boxes for my groceries. A lot of people have them. They'd be easy to clean with disinfectant wipes after each use.

[ROCKMAN]

Ban plastic bags (or anything else plastic) of not. IMHO it won't have any meaningful benefit to the environment or energy consumption compared to the efforts to maintain BAU. As Juan points out it's really just a method for the folks in CA to feel better about themselves as they continue consuming huge amounts of energy compared to the average global citizen.

[jedrider]

Here in Ireland we have a plastic (single use) bag levy that is imposed whenever a plastic bag is used to carry dry goods home, the tax is €.018 per bag. This has changed shopping habits and now we have the "long life" plastic bags instead that cost about €1 and can be (are) used many times before they wear out.

Made a huge reduction to the volume of discarded plastic bags flying around in the wind!

Yes, that is the best solution, to change the mindset of our throw away society. It took me awhile to get use to bringing my own bag, but I ENJOY the experience. That 10 cents per bag is really trivial, but it IS the incentive to bring and reuse your own bag. Eventually, no one wants to stand out as doing things differently, and that is the nature of society AND mass culture.

[Herr Meier]

California is the most populous state with 38.3 million. About 12% of the of population of the United States. But we rank 23rd in number of vehicles per person.

That's because 20 Million are illegals afraid to drive.

[Lore]

This is one of those things that again should never have been invented. Plastic bags not only pollute the environment, but pose a dangerous and ongoing threat to wildlife.

And yes deposit laws do make a big difference. Those states that charge a container deposit see a manifold increase in recycling and less trash of all kinds being tossed out along highways and back alleys.

Pavlovian techniques change human habits. So, why wouldn't a flat carbon tax be just as effective?

[dohboi]

What lore said (as usual). Furthermore, at every stage of breakdown, plastic particles gum up systems of living things.

Our city has at least banned using plastic bags for leaves that are picked up by city sanitation. Of course, to my mind, that whole process is an extreme waste--just leave the damn leaves on the ground or rake them into a composts pile. It does provide me with a good source of compostable material, though.

[dohboi]

One picture of what plastics do to wildlife:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000 ... 1341291239

A dead Albatross chick from Midway Island

[steam_cannon]

One picture of what plastics do to wildlife

In that picture I see a bird ate a bunch of common plastic items that not being banned anytime soon. I think a better approach to cleaning up common plastic items like that might be to offer $1 or $2 per pound for the items that bird ate. That might be overpriced, but anyway a state run can recycling program would go far to clean up the problem you noted in that picture. Plastic bags could even be recycled in such a program. The problem looks like one of public policy, not the material.

Ban plastic bags (or anything else plastic) of not. IMHO it won't have any meaningful benefit to the environment or energy consumption compared to the efforts to maintain BAU. As Juan points out it's really just a method for the folks in CA to feel better about themselves as they continue consuming huge amounts of energy compared to the average global citizen.

Yeah pretty much. My use of plastic bags doesn't compare to the amount of fuel I use or energy used to build the roads I use or the energy used for transporting food on those roads. Banning plastic bags looks to me like a feel good effort and it's good to feel good, but switching from plastic bags is not something that will solve serious problems. It's just good marketing.

So I haven't changed my mind on this one yet. Sure in my daily life I personally prefer cloth bags, if I have them with me. But regarding bagging groceries in plastic bags, I'm fine with that. I prefer the forests not be used for making paper bags.

[Lore]

The alternative is to use reusable cloth bags, I do, not paper or plastic. One good set of those could last a family a lifetime. The added benifit is that it wouldn't be strangling the life out of some poor creature. Try it, kind of makes you feel all warm and fuzzy for doing so.

[Henriksson]

I don't see plastic stuff as such as a super-big problem - all things considered, they make up an extremely small of hydrocarbon consumption - but why the heck they're ending up in the ocean. Adopt a more sensible approach of recycling them or at least disposing of them safely and there wouldn't be a need for hemp bags to make sea birds safe.

[jedrider]

Here in Ireland we have a plastic (single use) bag levy that is imposed whenever a plastic bag is used to carry dry goods home, the tax is €.018 per bag. This has changed shopping habits and now we have the "long life" plastic bags instead that cost about €1 and can be (are) used many times before they wear out.

Made a huge reduction to the volume of discarded plastic bags flying around in the wind!

Very much, a win-win. I was finding it disgusting at how many plastic bags they would give us before they instituted the token levy. Now, there is no reason to feel socially awkward attempting to carry multiple items out of a store without a bag. Although, my daughter reminds me, it depends on what you're carrying!

[Subjectivist]

Quote:"we have a thousand mile wide plastic dump floating in the Pacific Ocean."
Quote"Plastic stays around essentially forever, so it's certainly not something we want producing any more of than necessary."

Yes and no.

Regarding plastic staying around forever, plastic most certainly does not stay around forever and bacteria are eating it in the oceans. Marine microbes digest plastic This is also why tar from oil seaps on the ocean floor also doesn't stay around forever, due to bacteria. This is why tire dust doesn't fill the streets. And why tar roads break down into slightly rocky dirt after enough time. I find bpa type molecules in plastics more of a consern then the plastic themselves and since as a society we're moving away from plastics with bpa hormone disruptors in our plastics, I am less and less worried about plastics released into the environment.

So yes we have a huge patch of ocean that has floating garbage that breaks up into smaller pieces though photo degradation. And that patch would be a lot bigger and denser if not for bacterial action after the pieces have broken up.

Quote: "We need to stop burying shit in landfills (or flowing it into the oceans), period. That's the core message."

No, sure cleaning up the rivers is a great idea. But landfills full of trash are resources, as is farm land taken over by suburbia that is full of trees, topiaries and grass, calcium dry wall you can mix with soil, copper pipes in walls, I think these things all represent a huge rainy day fund for western society and I think could save millions of lives if TSHTF hard. These are resources and they could protect our society from a hard crash. Many people feel concern that a hard crash is a very real possibility after an oil resource collapse and other kinds of collapses can and do happen from time to time. Economic collapses happen, environmental catastrophes happen ranging from war, meteors, a super volcano or even an EM from the sun. A lot of bad things can happen and have happened on earth. Backup resources can protect a society by softening the impact of those things.

I think we need to be saving energy and resources for our future even if there was only a slim chance of a hard oil/energy transition. And really the only way as a capitalist society that we can convince people to save resources is to encourage people to throw resources away and bury them in a landfill. Or to grow trees on farmland with houses made of kindling and copper pipes aka suburbia. In my opinion, I see Suburbia, forests and land fills as all possible rainy day fund resources in the future.

Sure landfills aren't sustainability, but they do offer resilience. Presently our society is definitely not putting enough resources towards reaching sustainability. And based on club of Rome business as usual scenario, we may have passed the point in resources available where we can't transition to a comfortable sustainable society. So we should look to maintaining elements that provide us resilience if we crash instead of making a soft sustainable landing. Land fills offer resilience, because they are full of resources that only a desperate society would use.

Regarding the trees that have been saved by not using paper, this is very true and an excellent trend. This trend started with the oil age as oil and coal were cheaper fuels for home heating then wood. Most of New England was treeless before coal and oil, due to deforestation for fuel.

If we experience an oil/energy crash, the trees that have been growing for 100 years are protecting farmable land and gathering solar resources that could be used for heating saving millions in a SHTF scenario. If we experience a major economic disruption, oil crash, what have you, trees and the land they are on are a very important resource and could save a lot of lives. Just for the protection they offer future generations, I think might be worth the environmental damage plastic bags cause. The trees we have today may someday save many lives in the future if we go though a difficult transition after oil.

Also I think that plastic that is packed away into garbage dumps is a chemical feedstock resource for future generations. Plastic in trash dumps sequesters carbon and I think of it as another future resource. What about paper bags? In many trash dumps paper degrades producing methane, which can be captured and burnt, but if it is not, paper is another methane source and not a good way to sequester carbon or a good way to store future resources.

So that said, I vote for plastic.

...The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836- ... g-now-save

It appears there may now be a solution to the plastic problem, though I an certain some people would go bonkers if anyone tried it. Scientists have identified a bacteria that produces an enzyme that breaks PET plastic chemical bonds. The bacteria then eat the resulting chemicals like any regular biological food source. The gene producing the new enzyme can be identified and inserted into regular ocean bacteria which will then eat all the plastic floating around out there.

Whoops hit submit when aiming for preview!

Now a team at Kyoto University has, by rummaging around in piles of waste, found a plastic munching microbe. After five years of searching through 250 samples, they isolated a bacteria that could live on poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), a common plastic used in bottles and clothing. They named the new species of bacteria Ideonella sakaiensis.

You may think this is the rerun of an old story, as plastic-eating microbes have already been touted as saviours of the planet. But there are several important differences here.

First, previous reports were of tricky-to-cultivate fungi, where in this case the microbe is easily grown. The researchers more or less left the PET in a warm jar with the bacterial culture and some other nutrients, and a few weeks later all the plastic was gone.

Second - and the real innovation - is that the team has identified the enzymes that Ideonella sakaiensis uses to breakdown the PET. All living things contain enzymes that they use to speed up necessary chemical reactions. Some enzymes help digest our food, dismantling it into useful building blocks. Without the necessary enzymes the body can’t access certain sources of food.

For example, people who are lactose intolerant don’t have the enzyme that breaks down the lactose sugar found in dairy produce. And no human can digest cellulose, while some microbes can. Ideonella sakaiensis seems to have evolved an efficient enzyme that the bacteria produces when it is in an environment that is rich in PET.

The Kyoto researchers identified the gene in the bacteria’s DNA that is responsible for the PET-digesting enzyme. They then were able to manufacture more of the enzyme and then demonstrate that PET could be broken down with the enzyme alone.

http://www.sciencealert.com/new-plastic ... revolution

[dolanbaker]

You may think this is the rerun of an old story, as plastic-eating microbes have already been touted as saviours of the planet. But there are several important differences here.

First, previous reports were of tricky-to-cultivate fungi, where in this case the microbe is easily grown. The researchers more or less left the PET in a warm jar with the bacterial culture and some other nutrients, and a few weeks later all the plastic was gone.

Second - and the real innovation - is that the team has identified the enzymes that Ideonella sakaiensis uses to breakdown the PET.

Sounds like a fantastic solution to a real problem, or the start of a catastrophic chain of events if this stuff ends up in the wrong place. Plastics are used everywhere these days, waste water pipes are almost all plastic these days for starters.

[Outcast_Searcher]

I have a problem with the plastic container/water conflict. When I'm washing out some containers (e.g. peanut butter) it takes so much water to clean them that I feel guilty about it; just should be happy I guess that water is not in short supply, here, yet.

And this is a valid point. I got castigated by a friend for using picnic supplies like paper plates, plastic forks, etc, because I hate washing dishes.

"Well", I pointed out, "from what I've read, there's a lot of debate about whether the water, the soap, the energy to heat the water, the disposal of the dirty water, etc. is worse than the paper plates, etc.

Looking at several websites on this topic, the typical overall answer I see is "It depends". (on many variables) So it's not like this is completely obvious.

[Shaved Monkey]

We have rare sea turtle breeding here and are surrounded by national parks, the big one being the great barrier reef national park.
Turtles eat plastic bags thinking they are squid and then die.

I have my own heavy duty bags in the boot/trunk of the car when I go shopping,half are insulated silver lined with zips to bring the cold stuff home ,I also use re-usable gel ice packs in them,its hot here and the shops are far away.

[dohboi]

http://www.startribune.com/proposal-to- ... 372422131/

Minneapolis takes fresh look at plastic bag ban