You're picturing plastic waste in the oceans wrong. Most of it comes from fishing gear that's abandoned or lost, not disposal of waste like plastic bags. In total 80-90% come from Asian and African countries with poor environmental policies.
For the record, I am a scuba diver who has participated in the "Dive Against Debris", we use paper straws at home, I bike to work a couple days a week, and switched to reusable bags years before they were required in my locale, etc. I'm not saying that reducing single-use plastics isn't a worthy goal (and microplastics are just as bad as they seem), but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled. Your plastic straw is not ending up at the bottom of the Marinara trench.
> but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled
That's definitely not true in the UK. A lot of our "recycling" has been being shipped to China until recently. I believe that other countries have been doing that too.
It's hard to define "safely" landfilled as well. Many places still leak out toxic leachate into water tables due to a lack of barriers on the landfill. They also severely disrupt large tracts of land. They also vent off tremendous amounts of methane. There isn't much safe about most landfills out there.
True, there is a lot of variety there. Around here everything is properly lined and the water table monitored for various poisons, but that's not true everywhere. The methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and I see little progress on that, even in eco-conscious California. Composting more or less eliminates the methane but I see maybe half of the households in our neighborhood putting out a green waste cart.
Global warming is really the problem, and I will admit to being a huge hypocrite on that. I drive about half the average American's 13.5K miles / 21.K 7km, but fly a lot, probably 20K miles / 32K km. Sigh.
Indeed, and China didn't always keep un-use-able plastic out of their river systems (therefore leading to the oceans). Now that China stopped accepting recycled plastic, it's going to countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, etc that not only can't handle the volume, but don't have the facilities in place to handle the plastic. Lots of plastic that consumers believe is recycled is indeed ending up in oceans.
While this does not invalidate your point, be aware that the American Council on Science and Health is predominantly funded by industries. For example: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Bayer Cropscience, Procter & Gamble, Syngenta, 3M, McDonald's and Altria. [1]
They probably have a conflict of interest on this specific subject (disposable consumer plastic) with some of the companies that fund them.
That article suggests that all of the work in Europe and the Americas is spitting in the ocean and that we need to lean on Asian countries a lot more to literally clean up their mess.
A lot of effort spent on paper straws and reusable bags could probably have a lot more effect in funding the creation of basic sanitation services in Asian countries.
The most exciting news is that they made several extremely deep dives in quick succession, advancing the way to a future of regular deep sea exploration. Congrats to the team!
Do you think this has the potential to result technologies allowing the exploitation (extraction) of deep sea natural resources (i.e. minerals and metals)?
It seems people are more excited by exploiting the Moon for resources, but deep sea should be more economical once extraction tech is figured out.
I'd rather exploit the moon, to the best of my knowledge nothing lives there, and I doubt we'd make a large enough dent to affect tides or other moon-related events.
Has anyone made a good guess at what the true purpose of these dives is? I'm not unconvinced this isn't another expedition in the line of Ballard or Glomar Explorer.
With some previously non-existent radioactive elements mixed in for good measure. This layer of plastic, radioactivity, and airliner exhaust will be forever buried in the geologic record at every point on the earth. What fun!
Not sure it will because it's a very short time period that plastics have existed geologically speaking and the time periods found in rock/soil/ice are generally pretty imprecise until we can relate them to something like tree rings that show precise year cycles where there's a large event like a fire that shows up in both the rock/soil layer and in trees. Generally without large anchoring events like that the best we get is very large time frames for events and mostly in relation to other events in the local area where you can measure forwards and backwards (up and down in the rock formation) relative to other events.
If fossil fuels are the detritus of extinct plants, then plastic is just as "natural" as coal and oil ... in either case, it's a waste/byproduct of a life form/ecosystem that no longer exists.
I think about it this way - the planet will survive, humans will not. Within a year of us being gone the planet will take over everything we ever owned. Weeds will break through the streets and house foundations, and in a decade or so (blink of an eye in Earth time) it'll be like we were never here.
Well except for all the garbage we left behind. But even that will become food for something.
There are a number of all clay or stone structures that have been around for centuries/millenia. I think they'd survive a few decades without maintenance, but for the most part I agree with you.
in the grand scheme of things, humans and what we have produced is nothing. Given enough time everything will be decomposed. On in the words of a great comedian: "the planet is fine, people are f'ed"
My worry is that we will transform Earth into a landfill and in desperation we will search (and find) another planet to trash. Humans are very very creative when it comes to survival. Only a fraction of people alive will make it to the new planet. Rinse and repeat.
I think the sun is further away in terms of energy required than one would expect. You don't just have to escape the Earth, you also need to cancel or redirect its orbital velocity around the sun to get a trajectory that reaches the sun.
Then throw it into space, whatever the direction. The universe is so vast, even if the entirety of the earth was garbage it would be nothing compared to it ;)
Right now it looks like CO2 is going to cause a lot strife and war as drought and sea level rise cause a lot of displacement. A huge number of people live on or near the coasts of the world. I don't think CO2 will kill us directly but it'll probably a) get us to kill each other over resources or b) set us really far back (I think a lot of people underestimate how much of our modern economy is super interdependent on stable global trade and supply lines).
There ought to be a principle that packaging is evaluated on how much harm a 'careless' disposal would cause: even though a paper bag takes many times more energy to produce than a plastic one, it causes less harm when disposed of by dumping.
Of course not. I don't know where you live that it is. Where I'm from(Poland) you'd commonly go to a shop without any bags and just pack everything into single use plastic bags every time and then just throw them away. It's only started changing recently since shops started charging money for bags, but I don't recall ever going to a shop with our own bags for shopping - I think I'd even go as far as say that it would be weird to do so.
UK here - You used to collect a few hundred bags under the sink/stairs years ago and maybe use them as trash bags around the house.
After the new laws came in requiring you to pay for them the culture change around reusing bags was pretty abrupt. Now going to the shops without a few bags in arm just seems...weird?
UK here - I just pay whatever they want me to pay for the bags. I can almost never remember to bring them to the shops. And if I do, I forget them in a car anyway. It used to be 0.05 GBP per bag, now 0.10GBP.
If it gets any more expensive I'll just go for the full home delivery life style. Going to shops sucks anyway and I won't miss it.
One would hope so but evidently not :( I've been trying to exercise more and use exercise videos on YouTube when I can't make it to the gym. People featured in fitness videos usually advocate for drinking more water but then it's crazy to see the majority of them reach for plastic water bottles while they're in walking distance to kitchen sinks in their own homes or studios. I just assume most U.S. and Canadian cities provide suitable drinking water via utilities.
Municipal water in the US is typically pretty tasty. San Francisco water is so good that I don't understand why anyone wouldn't be happy with tap water there.
I'd say it depends. Some grocery stores use plastic bags so thin that they rip or tear just getting the groceries to the car, rendering them non-reusable.
Where I live, they sell everything in plastic bags. I buy everything I can in bulk, but still go through 2-5 bags each day. I wash them with small amounts of water and reuse as much as I can, it's still close to a thousand bags per year -- good luck keeping up with that.
Absolutely no recycling here, too. It all goes to the landfill, along with lithium batteries and laboratory chemicals. How about some fun examples of the stuff my friends have found on the landfill: a jar of mercury, a 1.5L of nitric acid, an ampule of bromine, some other stuff I fail to remember.
Ah, the joyful realities of living in the third world.
I prefer single-use paper. I put my recycleable materials into the paper bags, then toss that into the (single-stream) recycling dumpster - the paper is recycleable after all (and is often made of recycled paper).
Back when we went to the recycling facility in person, we would pre-sort and still use the paper bags.
I suspect, when used this way, paper beats plastic, environment wise (of course, there are better alternatives, like personal canvas bags, but that's another story).
I used to think this as well, until I heard on public radio from a few recycling experts that paper bags actually are worse than properly recycled or disposed of plastic bags. These are not my sources, but you can easily find references online that back this up.
I use cloth bags, too. But, ignoring the marine dumping problem, cloth bags can be the worst.[1] You would need to reuse each thousands of times to be worth using over LDPE bags.
Even better are foldable bins made of cloth—I think mine are reinforced with cardboard or semi-hard plastic inside. They stay open when loading with groceries, and don't roll around in the trunk of the car.
Well they’re reusable, which is even better than recyclable. They also use less materials to make and are stronger for the same weight, so they also reduce, which is better still.
Just don’t throw them into the ocean. But that much should have been obvious.
I don't know what kind of plastic bag it was, but the grocery bags we get where I live start to develop holes rather quickly so they're not actually reusable. They also aren't allowed in my city's recycle bins because they apparently just get stuck in the sorting machines and cause all kinds of issues.
When I tried saving them for various uses and noticed they develop holes quickly, I thought maybe that's good - maybe these bags were made to decompose quickly or something, but that's not the case. And now that we know microplastics are inside lots of organisms (including ourselves) I can't help but just feel like plastic is just a nasty SOB.
We've ended up getting a bunch of those cloth re-usable grocery bags and using those. I also use containers rather than zip lock bags. But I doubt I make much of a difference because when I take my morning walks on trash/recycle pickup days I frequently see bins filled to the brim with plastic water bottles where it seems like people just buy multiple cases of water bottles and drink from them like they're cups or soda cans and toss them.
I reuse the paper grocery bags. They can usually be used 10 times or more before they disintegrate, then I use them again as trash bags. I wonder why I've never heard anyone mention this.
The grocery store has no problem at all with me bringing back the paper bags and stuffing my purchases in them. They've never said a word about it. I never see anyone else do it.
In my city, it took a long time to get a plastic bag ban passed because of strong opposition from plastic manufacturer lobbyists who pretended that they were taking the side of "local businesses".
Around here, plastic bags are banned and paper bags have a per-bag tax. The store doesn't charge for the bags, they just pass on the tax. They didn't charge before the tax/ban, either.
Paper bags are also reusable, but more importantly they are biodegradable. “Just don’t throw them in the ocean.” has proven not to work. People throw everything that is packaging, all the time, despite decades long campaigns. Every generation has to diligently be educated, and despite this, it isn’t enough. The amount of plastic I have to pick up in my relatively wealthy neighbourhood is surprising.
Don’t you have to use a cloth bag like a thousand times before it’s recouped the environmental impact of making it compared to that many plastic bags? I’m not sure that’s always going to add up to being a win for the environment.
131 was the number thrown around in other comments. And I replied there as well, but go ahead and add it up - if the bag holds twice as much, and you use 2 bags a week, we're talking about less than a year before you are ahead of the game.
The Danish government said they thought it was 20000 times. I guess we don’t really know.
> one study from the Danish government found you'd have to use an organic cloth bag 20,000 times for it to be a better environmental choice than plastic
I think "better" is very subjective here. If we're talking the energy and water to make it, sure. But that probably pales into comparison compared to the produce you'll be putting in those bags anyway.
With all we know about plastic in the environment now, and how ineffective recycling as a strategy is, I think anything that will harmlessly biodegrade in a reasonable amount of time is a better choice than plastic.
This is why it is important to adapt environmental policies to local circumstances: if you are living in a country where your plastic bag ends in a landfill, you will have a very different definition of what is better for the environment than if you are living in a country where the plastic bag is safely burned in a trash incinerator.
It's a trade off between traditional waste and carbon dioxide. You will be dead before you recoup the total energy costs that went into the likely exorbitant and absurd steps of building and shipping your cloth bag halfway around the world assembled from materials gathered thousands of miles apart, compared to the cost of using a plastic bag each and every time. But you're consuming less single use plastic that is possibly going to get dumped into the ocean and trash the food chain.
Why would you ship a cloth bag from halfway around the world?
It is a cloth bag. It is something we teach our kids to make from old shirts they grow out of. I know society has moved deep into the paradigm of buying everything and making nothing, but there are some items that make no sense to buy, and cloth bags are one of them.
Society has effectively abandoned and destroyed a large section of do-it-yourself culture in favor of a rapid and disposable one. I'd wager that most people would not even consider the idea of making a cloth bag, and of those that would consider it a lot would not know how to do such a task, even if all that were involved is just sewing shut the holes of a shirt to make a sack, because their parents and their parent's parents were already fully immersed in atomized, disposable culture.
Yeah. Unfortunately, that means we are having the wrong discussions, not just here, but with the people in our lives. If most people have abandoned DIY and want to purchase, and ship worldwide, every item we use, then paper vs. plastic vs. cloth isn't even a drop in the bucket of the environmental impact our lifestyle choices have on the world.
But plastics aren’t carbon neutral and most aren’t manufactured to be reused. They’re made from buried dino bone. On the other hand, paper comes from trees which pulls carbon from the air so if and when that carbon reenters the air, the cycle is complete. Paper is in fact carbon neutral, minus any of the machinery used to manufacture or move the product. Pulling hydrocarbons from underground by its very nature is carbon additive.
Don’t throw them in the ocean, don’t throw them in anybody’s backyard, is the problem we now are running into China doesn’t want our trash anymore. Recycling plastics is harder than ever before. Also recycled plastics lose their elasticity which is part of their strength so only 10% of used material can be re-manufactured into new product.
Paper comes from tree farms. More need for paper, more tree farms will be built. So even without use the farm themselves produce more benefit then plastic factories.
Lots of fiber that ends up in paper comes from actively managed forests, which are not particularly farm like.
And in any case, there is only so much productive land available. Planting a large areas of trees on productive land is likely to displace some other agricultural activity.
> Fiction: Many believe that paper bags are more environmentally friendly than plastic bags because they are made from a renewable resource, can biodegrade, and are recyclable.
> Fact: Plastic shopping bags outperform paper bags environmentally – on manufacturing, on reuse, and on solid waste volume and generation.
People today seem to look back and think the tree-hugging era of moving away from wood products was misguided, but today we are blessed with generally having moved past the "gobble-gobble" era of logging. It's not perfect but timber is far more renewable & sustainably managed today than fifty years ago.
> A 2011 study by the U.K. government found a person would have to reuse a cotton tote bag 131 times before it was better for climate change than using a plastic grocery bag once.
This seems disingenuous. 131 uses of a cotton tote bag doesn't replace 1 plastic bag, it replaces at least 131 plastic bags, if not 2-3x that amount since the tote bags are bigger and sturdier and hold more.
I think the fundamental problem with plastic bags is that since they are 1 or 2 use, they are always going to be entering the environment at a rate faster than they degrade. So there is going to be an ever-increasing buildup of plastic bags in the environment for as long as they go on being used.
Used once is referring to plastic bags used to hold groceries and then immediately thrown out. (Not used more than once: ie a garbage bag, pick up dog poop, etc)
So it is comparing 1 reusable bag used 131 times to 131 plastic bags.
Further in the article another study considers plastic bags used more than once, which are much better for the environment.
>I think the fundamental problem with plastic bags is that since they are 1 or 2 use, they are always going to be entering the environment at a rate faster than they degrade. So there is going to be an ever-increasing buildup of plastic bags in the environment for as long as they go on being used.
I think it is much more important to look at scientific studies than what a random person hypothesizes with no evidence to back it up.
> Used once is referring to plastic bags used to hold groceries and then immediately thrown out.
What percentage of people do this? We use them as “free” bags for garbage bins that we would otherwise have to buy, or for lunch where you won’t/can’t take an insulated bag (outing or when you won’t go home right after work).
How many garbage bags do you use per week? Just for myself I'd buy I guess ten bags of groceries a week and maybe three bags of trash a week. It doesn't add up.
When living with other people, we always accumulated huge numbers of saved plastic bags over the months. I'd recycle them but by myself I use reusable bags and a backpack that helps me carry them back. I get a handful of plastic bags every now and then when I get something without planning and those I put to use like you suggest.
We used to have a surplus of plastic bags before we started making a concerted effort to use cloth bags. (I don't know what they're actually made of, but they're designed for re-use.) Now, we actually run out of plastic bags that we used to use for various things like dog-poop (when we run out of smaller bags and forget to re-order), small bin liners, and general transportation needs. (Though for the latter, we almost always get to re-use the plastic bag again afterwards.)
So my answer is: For those who aren't recycling, I'd guess that most people throw bags out. For those who are, it's going to be a smaller number, depending on how hard they try to avoid plastic bags at the market.
Turn it around and see if this makes more sense: for the pollution caused by making one cotton bag you could have made 131 plastic bags. This means that if you fail to use your cotton bag 131 or more times, you've created more pollution than you have saved.
I shop once a week, and normally fill 2-3 cotton bags. So I'd have paid off my pollution within a year. Maybe 6 months, as my cotton bags hold twice as much as plastic bags.
Also, not all production of bags is going to have the same level of pollution. We DIY many things in our home, and although we do buy the raw cloth, we sew them together ourselves. I suspect that drops the pollution somewhat.
In which case, I may be in a better place simply by using bags for a few months.
We keep ours in the trunk of our car. Makes it easy to do unplanned grocery shopping. Take them in, unpack, hang them on the doorknob to bring back to the car next time we go out. Haven't lost one yet, and we've had the same 5 for ~8 years.
Why wouldn't you use it more times than that? They last years. That's ~2 years of weekly grocery trips. And each usage is going to replace 2-3 of the smaller, weaker plastic bags, maybe more.
Of course most people who purchase cotton bags intend to use them many times. The study that was quoted simply quantified how much reuse is required to make them worth it, and it turns out that this is a surprising number to many people. Plastic bags are really cheap, and growing cotton is more expensive than it would seem.
But when you ban plastic bags, people still use plastic bags. They actually buy thicker plastic bags instead of reusing the grocery bags.
"What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned," she says. This was particularly the case for small, 4-gallon bags, which saw a 120 percent increase in sales after bans went into effect.
> they are always going to be entering the environment
they'll end up in land fill or recycled? The environment will never see them, at the very least they will never end up in the sea...
If I recall correctly most of the plastic bags come from developing countries that do not dispose of any of their garbage properly anyway.
You can always make x better than y by choosing the criteria that define "better".
Making plastic "better" than paper requires ignoring the plastic particles that are building up in our drinking water, the plastic bags that litter the world, etc. Blah.
EDIT: I want to rant. That comparison linked to appears to include the energy to recycle paper in paper's carbon footprint, while it has no such cost for plastic, not even an estimate of what energy could perhaps be required to recycle plastic as well as paper actually us. Sigh.
The problem with trash is that it will always find its way into the ocean. Would you rather have a natural product (paper) break down in the ocean, or a plastic product[1] that will leave behind micro-plastics that have unknown health impacts?
I love Planet Money, but that article was pretty terrible.
Sure, if you're trying to optimize for greenhouse emissions, plastic isn't so bad. After all, carbon chains coming out of the ground as oil are going back into the ground as long-term stable plastic!
However, the article readily admits that plastic results in more litter than other bags. Which is worse, more CO2 or more litter in the environment? The article seems to take a position but doesn't really provide any justification.
I get the value of pointing out tradeoffs, but I don't think you can simply conclude that plastic is absolutely "better for the environment".
> Which is worse, more CO2 or more litter in the environment?
That one is an easy question to answer. CO2 climate change has the possibility of radically altering human civilization and has the potential to cause millions of deaths. While litter in the environment is bad, it is something humans have dealt with before and will not have nearly the impact.
If we were trading off "all excess CO2" for "all litter" I might agree with you, but we're measuring the impact of the CO2 involved in nonplastic bag production vs the litter from all plastic bags.
What percentage of total worldwide CO2 emissions does nonplastic bag production represent? I'm not a subject matter expert, but I would shocked if the portion was more than minuscule. Whereas plastic grocery bags represent a pretty signifiant percentage of litter.
Since this boils down to "how much CO2" vs "how much litter", I really don't find this question easy to answer.
What are you talking about? No one actually needs single-use plastics; they're a wholly unnecessary, superfluous byproduct of consumer capitalism. Unless there's some medical applications I'm not aware of, the world would be a better place if most single-use plastics disappeared tomorrow.
While you are correct, I do believe that these feel-good campaigns distract from the corporate polluters that cause the vast vast majority of these problems.
If you get people fighting over straws which are some exceedingly small amount of overall ocean plastics and pollution, then no one's gonna pay attention to the real villains.
> If you get people fighting over straws which are some exceedingly small amount of overall ocean plastics and pollution, then no one's gonna pay attention to the real villains.
Plastic straws are a negligible fraction of plastic pollution, but they represent much more than that. Viral attention on plastic straws serves as a convenient lever by which the broader topic of environmental stewardship is pushed to the forefront of peoples' minds, indirectly achieving the goal of cleaning up the world. At least, that's what I hope, not what I expect.
Sure, some people will react with supercilious contempt at the hordes of selectively ignorant masses signalling virtue with their social-media images of strawless drinks. It's not like their personal choices are saving turtles, let alone the oceans. But this misses the point: the anti-straw campaign reminds entire populations that people collectively throw away too much plastic, and that things need to change -- at all levels, from the individual upward.
Single use plastics (eg diapers, syringes, many dressings, nitrile gloves, surgical tubing, surgical sutures, saline bags, and so on) are a primary medical supply.
The same can be said about most quality of life improvements, doesn’t mean they’re unnecessary. I enjoy the time throwaway cutlery saves me so I can spend it on something more productive, instead of having to carry dirty cutlery around until I get home.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/asia-africa-cause-90-pl...
For the record, I am a scuba diver who has participated in the "Dive Against Debris", we use paper straws at home, I bike to work a couple days a week, and switched to reusable bags years before they were required in my locale, etc. I'm not saying that reducing single-use plastics isn't a worthy goal (and microplastics are just as bad as they seem), but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled. Your plastic straw is not ending up at the bottom of the Marinara trench.