Yeah these plastic bag laws were a convenient way to make people feel like something was done and the problem was solved. We’ve moved on. It’s “uplifting news”. Mission Accomplished.
Where are the efforts to reduce the other 99% of single use plastic waste in the grocery store? It’s full of plastic bottles of water most people could do without, bags of candy where each individual piece is also wrapped in plastic, you can find this shit in every aisle.
And the irony is that I actually reused the plastic bags that got banned, whereas the paper bags aren’t useful and get thrown out. Now if I want small plastic bags I have to buy them. The plastic grocery bags were good for daily cat litter disposal and other small trash can lining.
Can’t paper bags be recycled more easily, or even composted?
I get your perspective, and I’m frustrated that I have to buy garbage bags now.
But my household(s) always ended up with more plastic bags than we could reuse. And before the ban, plastic bag litter was far, far more commonplace.
imo, a good middle ground might’ve been to charge for plastic bags and use that money to fund the cleanup and recycling of plastic bags. But that’s more reactive than proactive, and it’d place disproportionate burden on the lower classes who can’t take on the higher costs as easily as wealthier people.
you ended up with more plastic bags than you could use because you didn’t bring your own bags to the store. it doesn’t matter what type of bag it is, it’s that you didn’t bring it yourself.
yes, the ability to do this leads to more people doing it. but I still think they should have just charged for the plastic bags and let people make the choice to buy more. some people will just always buy them, some people won’t. some people like me would have brought their own bags and then bought plastic ones as necessary (reusing them at home). tbh this wouldn’t be an issue at all for me if they sold similar bags at the store, but everything is much more heavyweight and expensive. I just want a cheap shitty bag to bag up my dog shit and use as a garbage bag, I don’t need something 10 times thicker
in my other comment I do mention that the plastic bag litter is pretty shitty, agreed on that
I didn’t bring my old plastic bags to the store because they tended to wear out quickly and not hold up to repeated usage with weight. So they were better suited to being garbage bags in small bins around the home than they were to regular reuse for groceries, in my experience.
As for dog poo, I thought there were special bags for those that are compostable or something? I don’t have a dog, so I’m not sure, but I don’t think I ever regularly saw people using grocery store bags for that.
there are municipally compostable dog poop bags, but they’re the ‘single serving’ size, at least that is all that I’ve seen
I need to use a leak proof bag to place my dog poop into the green bin at home for the city to collect it, and I don’t pick up my dog’s poop from the yard individually, I do batches every few days, which are too large to fit into the single use bags (also would require many of them!). regular grocery store bags were perfect for this
I’m a bachelor, I outright don’t like using full size kitchen trash bags because any cat litter or meat scraps I throw away start smelling Republican long before the bag is full. I haven’t bought trash bags in years, I only use grocery bags as trash bags.
very occasionally, I ask for one paper bag. After it carries groceries home, it will get cut into rectangles and used for rubbing out the finish on my woodworking projects, because it’s cheaper and honestly better than 600 grit sandpaper. One bag will last awhile, I go through one a month when I’m really churning things out.
Now, in my lifetime, grocery stores have changed. My childhood Juicy Juice was poured from a big metal can my mother opened with a church key. My Gerber baby food came out of glass jars, some of which I still have and still use as containers for screws and such 35 years later. Russet potatoes weren’t individually shrink wrapped. Cat food came in metal cans and paper bags. Now, all of those things and more are packaged in plastic. None of that is being addressed.
I thought they specifically were a particularly common thing to blow into waterways or something, in ways that plastic bottles etc. weren’t? [citation needed]
those grocery bags always had another purpose and got used several times, or at minimum just once as a garbage bag
now I have to buy dedicated bags, which are much more material per bag. and there’s still basically nothing being done about all of the plastic waste in single use products that account for much much more material usage, like water bottles as you said.
I will admit that seeing trees full of plastic bags on a windy spring day after the snow has melted is pretty disheartening. but I don’t think it’s any more disheartening than the plastic trash strewn across the parks and near the garbage cans, and arguably the bags are even easier to clean up.
like yay we got rid of thin plastic bags that had multiple uses, and every fucking vegetable in the grocery store is wrapped in plastic or in a plastic container
Did you read the full comment? They said they reuse them for cat litter disposal and wastebasket liners. Y’know, the sort of things for which someone would normally purchase single-use plastics anyways.
I’m happy to reuse a bag after it’s held canned goods and fresh produce. Cat poop and used tissues? Not so much. My old stock only lasted so long.
Yeah these plastic bag laws were a convenient way to make people feel like something was done and the problem was solved. We’ve moved on. It’s “uplifting news”. Mission Accomplished.
Where are the efforts to reduce the other 99% of single use plastic waste in the grocery store? It’s full of plastic bottles of water most people could do without, bags of candy where each individual piece is also wrapped in plastic, you can find this shit in every aisle.
And the irony is that I actually reused the plastic bags that got banned, whereas the paper bags aren’t useful and get thrown out. Now if I want small plastic bags I have to buy them. The plastic grocery bags were good for daily cat litter disposal and other small trash can lining.
Can’t paper bags be recycled more easily, or even composted?
I get your perspective, and I’m frustrated that I have to buy garbage bags now.
But my household(s) always ended up with more plastic bags than we could reuse. And before the ban, plastic bag litter was far, far more commonplace.
imo, a good middle ground might’ve been to charge for plastic bags and use that money to fund the cleanup and recycling of plastic bags. But that’s more reactive than proactive, and it’d place disproportionate burden on the lower classes who can’t take on the higher costs as easily as wealthier people.
you ended up with more plastic bags than you could use because you didn’t bring your own bags to the store. it doesn’t matter what type of bag it is, it’s that you didn’t bring it yourself.
yes, the ability to do this leads to more people doing it. but I still think they should have just charged for the plastic bags and let people make the choice to buy more. some people will just always buy them, some people won’t. some people like me would have brought their own bags and then bought plastic ones as necessary (reusing them at home). tbh this wouldn’t be an issue at all for me if they sold similar bags at the store, but everything is much more heavyweight and expensive. I just want a cheap shitty bag to bag up my dog shit and use as a garbage bag, I don’t need something 10 times thicker
in my other comment I do mention that the plastic bag litter is pretty shitty, agreed on that
I didn’t bring my old plastic bags to the store because they tended to wear out quickly and not hold up to repeated usage with weight. So they were better suited to being garbage bags in small bins around the home than they were to regular reuse for groceries, in my experience.
As for dog poo, I thought there were special bags for those that are compostable or something? I don’t have a dog, so I’m not sure, but I don’t think I ever regularly saw people using grocery store bags for that.
there are municipally compostable dog poop bags, but they’re the ‘single serving’ size, at least that is all that I’ve seen
I need to use a leak proof bag to place my dog poop into the green bin at home for the city to collect it, and I don’t pick up my dog’s poop from the yard individually, I do batches every few days, which are too large to fit into the single use bags (also would require many of them!). regular grocery store bags were perfect for this
I’m a bachelor, I outright don’t like using full size kitchen trash bags because any cat litter or meat scraps I throw away start smelling Republican long before the bag is full. I haven’t bought trash bags in years, I only use grocery bags as trash bags.
very occasionally, I ask for one paper bag. After it carries groceries home, it will get cut into rectangles and used for rubbing out the finish on my woodworking projects, because it’s cheaper and honestly better than 600 grit sandpaper. One bag will last awhile, I go through one a month when I’m really churning things out.
Now, in my lifetime, grocery stores have changed. My childhood Juicy Juice was poured from a big metal can my mother opened with a church key. My Gerber baby food came out of glass jars, some of which I still have and still use as containers for screws and such 35 years later. Russet potatoes weren’t individually shrink wrapped. Cat food came in metal cans and paper bags. Now, all of those things and more are packaged in plastic. None of that is being addressed.
I thought they specifically were a particularly common thing to blow into waterways or something, in ways that plastic bottles etc. weren’t? [citation needed]
I mostly agree with this
those grocery bags always had another purpose and got used several times, or at minimum just once as a garbage bag
now I have to buy dedicated bags, which are much more material per bag. and there’s still basically nothing being done about all of the plastic waste in single use products that account for much much more material usage, like water bottles as you said.
I will admit that seeing trees full of plastic bags on a windy spring day after the snow has melted is pretty disheartening. but I don’t think it’s any more disheartening than the plastic trash strewn across the parks and near the garbage cans, and arguably the bags are even easier to clean up.
like yay we got rid of thin plastic bags that had multiple uses, and every fucking vegetable in the grocery store is wrapped in plastic or in a plastic container
If you reuse old plastic bags, how does this ban on stores giving them away even affect you?
Did you read the full comment? They said they reuse them for cat litter disposal and wastebasket liners. Y’know, the sort of things for which someone would normally purchase single-use plastics anyways.
I’m happy to reuse a bag after it’s held canned goods and fresh produce. Cat poop and used tissues? Not so much. My old stock only lasted so long.
my bad I somehow didn’t see that