[MD]

I have a very long association with the plastic bag industry, and man-oh-man has it been conflicted.

In it's early days, "thin film manufacturing" had to compete directly with paper bag manufacturing.

One of the arguments in favor of plastic over paper was environmental, believe it or not, and it had its valid points.

Pulp manufacturers of the day were poisoning rivers, and consuming vast amount of energy, which they still do today.

Plastic manufacturers claimed their product as superior because they were using "leftover" feedstocks from Big Oil. They were correct in that assertion but it didn't win them the bag market. Ultimately it was convenience to the consumer that won the day. Go capitalism!

Plastic bags have strong handles. Paper tried to compete there, but failed the price war. Strong-handled paper is 10x more expensive than plastic. Dense and directed polymer chains will beat pulp ever time, by nature.

Today we have quite a few more trees than we would have had otherwise, which is me digging for a win out of this mess, and we have a thousand mile wide plastic dump floating in the Pacific Ocean.

Now I am not sure who won...

Dammit!

We have shit our nest in a bad way...

[dohboi]

Sounds like a false dichotomy to me.

Most people I know carry around bags with them to use. Plastic stays around essentially forever, so it's certainly not something we want producing any more of than necessary.

It does have it's own nature docudrama!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLgh9h2ePYw

[Ibon]

When your backed into the boxed canyon of overshoot your left with only bad choices. This dilema will only increase in all aspects of our modern life. Human agency in terms of choices and actions and options is being slowly reduced and it will still take some time until we fully understand that these types of dilemas will not be solved by us.

Domination eventually leads to submission and the 21st century will be about consequences teaching this to us. We are at the peak of narcisism at the moment and we are about to start a new diet of delicious humble pie and it doesn't matter whether its packed in paper or plastic it wont change the content.

[Ibon]

The western mind which is now the dominant mind has often confused humility with humiliation. We look at humility as a weakness.

We are similarly confused over the difference between submission and inaction. Or between passivity and acceptance. During this century as consequences take the steering wheel from us and lead we will be forced to submission and capitulating to external forces.

In these early days of not quite yet understanding the nature of the box canyon of overshoot we react negatively to the suggestion of submission. We have been several generations into domination and control and this has created a narcisism that we are blind to.

The most profound exestential dilema awaits us and the more quickly we start to learn the nature of this dilema the easier it will be to cultivate the required humility of surrending our domination back over to our mother earth. We thought all along we were controlling her. Little did we know the lessons she had in store for us.

[GHung]

I admit to loving plastic bags,,, and paper towels; two of my anti-environmental vices. I reuse old plastic shopping bags for picking vegetables and then strip them out to tie tomato vines and curcubits. Paper towels are very useful when canning and get reused as fuel/starters for the stove.

What can I say?

[MD]

Plastic stays around essentially forever

False assertion. Most polymer chains degrade quickly into monomer chains then dust when exposed to sunlight and air.

Once buried in landfill everything has a long shelf life.

But anyhow I wasn't looking to open up the paper vs plastic debate. Both are long term losers.

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

[JuanP]

I have always used plastic bags and still do. I reuse them as garbage bags, so I don't feel any guilt about it. I only buy large plastic trash bags for my environmental cleanups on the islands I visit with my inflatable raft. I am a sight to see, on the water, when I am headed back from my cleanups, the filled plastic garbage bags are usually bulkier than my raft!

[WildRose]

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. But it still makes more sense to wash out these hard-to-clean containers than just trashing them and having them sit in landfills. Should mention that I don't use a dishwasher, all of our dishes are done by hand. Has anyone ever done a comparison re: how much water is used with a dishwasher as compared to washing the old-fashioned way?

[Paulo1]

Plastic bags for garbage, homemade bread, etc. Paper bags to give bread away before freezing. Plastic mayo jars are great in the shop for mixing and storing finishes, screws etc. Peanut butter jars go right in the woodstove.

Paulo

[GHung]

WildRose - Our new dishwasher uses less water than doing the dishes by hand. Either way, in our case, is guilt free, since our water is solar pumped from a spring and the power and hot water are all solar. Plenty of both most days. I guess a lot depends on where you get your water and energy, how often you run the dishwasher, how long the dishwasher lasts, and your method of doing dishes by hand. I like that the dishwasher sterilizes everything, and we run it when we have surplus solar.

[GHung]

We save mayo jar lids since they fit canning jars. Good for storing dry goods. We also buy rice, beans and flour in bulk and store them in saved jars. Our vacuum packer has an attachment that will pull a vacuum in jars for longer-term storage.

You can also stuff a lot of plastic grocery bags in a mayo jar to save for later. I figure both may be worth something someday.

[Timo]

I'm guilty of using both paper and plastic bags, tho i prefer paper bags. They then double as my kitchen trash bags, saving me from buying more plastic bags for that unique purpose. However, plastic bags are very handy when cleaning up wet messes with paper towels. Throw a wet paperr towel in a paper bag, and the moisture transfers, weakening the strength of the paper. I've given some serious thought to making my own nylon trash bags that can be washed and reused on a weekly (or more frequent) basis. Nylon bags would solve the collection problem very well, but when i carry the trash out to the alley to place in the trash can, i'd then have to dump everything out of the bag and into the can, making a potential huge mess for the garbage collectors.

Overall, i'm not a fan at all of the plastic garbage bags. They may have some practical uses and benefits, but post construction costs outweigh those benefits. Drive by any Walmart in the nation and their parking lot is littered with hundreds of grocery bags. Same goes for nearly every other big-box retail outlet in the country. They cause serious clogs in municipal stormwater drainage systems, flow into our rivers and streams and out to sea. Natural process may break them down eventually, but that process takes much longer than the time it takes to make 10 billion more of them on a daily basis. On the scale of good and bad, they're not good. Paper has some disadvantages, too, but they break down and decompose much faster, leaving much less waste to clean up. And they can be made from recycled paper. Nothing is perfect.

I read a couple of weeks ago that some city in California actually banned the use and distribution of plastic grocery bags. Good for them!

[GHung]

CNN - October 1, 2014: 12:27 PM ET -

California has fired the first salvo in what could be a national war on plastic bags.

Governor Edmund Brown on Tuesday signed into law a bill that bans plastic shopping bags, making California the first U.S. state to officially prohibit stores from handing them out for free. ...

...The new law goes into effect for large grocery chains and pharmacies beginning July 1, 2015. It will extend to convenience stores and liquor stores July 1, 2016.

Under the law, stores will be required to offer customers recycled paper bags or bags made of compostable material at a cost of at least 10 cents. Consumers buying groceries using California's food-assistance program won't have to pay for bags....

http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/30/news/ca ... c-bag-ban/

[ritter]

I read a couple of weeks ago that some city in California actually banned the use and distribution of plastic grocery bags. Good for them!

Actually, lots of places in the Bay Area have already banned plastic shopping bags. And as GHung points out above, the entire state will have done so at the first of the year.

[SILENTTODD]

California's plastic bag ban just passed by the state legislature and signed by governor Brown goes into effect July 2015 for grocery stores, July 2016 for convenience stores.

As MD points out there are two sides to the argument about which is worse for the environment, paper or plastic. The compromise has been made that everyone should have reusable canvas bags, hemp being the best. But as my roommate has pointed out they get filthy real quick and require frequent washing.

I will probably use a hemp bag and line it with small disposable trash bags to keep the food clean. Does not completely solve the plastic bag problem but cuts down on it quite a bit. No one yet to my knowledge is proposing banning plastic trash bags, but that could be next.

There is already though talk by industry about using the California Initiative process to overturn the plastic bag ban. Would require signatures equal to 5% of the the number voters in the last Governor election. Could be on the ballot as early as spring of 2016.

[Paulo1]

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......

I guess it's a start.....

It might be more effective to discourage the conspicuous consumption so prevalent in our culture and stop with the feel good issues. It reminds me of the young lady I saw on tv who flew from California to NYC for the latest environmental protests.

Paulo

[WildRose]

WildRose - Our new dishwasher uses less water than doing the dishes by hand. Either way, in our case, is guilt free, since our water is solar pumped from a spring and the power and hot water are all solar. Plenty of both most days. I guess a lot depends on where you get your water and energy, how often you run the dishwasher, how long the dishwasher lasts, and your method of doing dishes by hand. I like that the dishwasher sterilizes everything, and we run it when we have surplus solar.

Good points, GHung.

It sounds like you have a really good set-up there!

[steam_cannon]

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

[efarmer]

My father was the third generation of grocers in the family
and I grew up working a grocery at the time plastic bags hit.
The big reason at the time was that paper bags came with
bug eggs in them from the vendor / factory. We would see
young insects come out of the bags.The paper industry addressed
it but the plastic bag was the hit with the housewife, who did not
wish to be environmentally friendly picking paper and the having
to buy roach spray to deal with the aftermath.
This is what I remember, anyhow...
EF

[dolanbaker]

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!