> a single use plastic object that has 1/1000 the carbon emissions of the reusable alternative may be the best environmental choice.
Is there any data that single use stuff (of any kind) creates less carbon emissions? I would expect it to be the other way around, except for some edge cases.
There's plenty of data. For example, producing single-use plastic grocery bags uses such a trivial amount of energy and resources that it almost doesn't matter—thousands and thousands of times less than an equivalent cotton bag. The bigger problem is disposal. If single-use plastics can be safely sequestered in landfills, that's a mostly solved problem, but that isn't always the case.
But isn’t the way the disposable plastic bags are so cheap actually one of the sneaky ways they are bad? It’s definitely not good for the environment but is a hard to break out or local minima.
I seem to remember that paper bags are close to single-use plastic bags, but still use more energy to produce and also require wood pulp. Paper bags can easily be recycled, but "single-use" plastic bags can easily be re-used as household trash bags, or otherwise. So it's a toss-up.
This is exactly what I've been doing since moving to Austin.
I get paper bags at the grocery and throw them out immediately after a single use, and now I have to also buy plastic garbage bags for under the sink, which I never used to do.
I mean, I disagree with both of those statements entirely. Do you have any sources? I do, but not googling at the moment.
EDIT: quick Google search has many sources listing paper degrading in 2-6 weeks in landfills. Plastic in the ocean… I think you need to b by broaden your horizons if you think that doesn’t happen
You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.
And I'm not saying decomposition doesn't happen at all in landfills; it very clearly does, but the sort of decomposition that takes place is incomplete and slow, because landfills aren't ideal places for decomposition to occur. But that doesn't matter. Once it's buried, who cares if it takes 300 years to decompose?
> You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.
I think that enough people don't give a shit about where their waste goes, that any coastal community will lose a fraction of its waste to the drink. That isn't where most of the plastic in the ocean comes from, but the difference between "should" and "inevitably won't" is vast.
Paper degrades if it is near the surface, mixed with loose dirt, and still getting oxygen. If it's packed down under feet of compacted soil and other trash it degrades much more slowly.
It depends entirely on the content of the waste and the levels of moisture and air infiltration.
Some landfills are known to generate huge amounts of methane, and ooze black sludge at the surface. This famously occured after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.
In contrast, landfills in arid places can preserve trash like a museum:
Yes, mostly because of the energy used in their creation. For example you have to reuse a cotton grocery bag 7100 times before you break even with plastic bags for carbon footprint.
You have not read the document that you link. Else, you would have noticed that it states that a not-organic cotton bag has to be reused 52 times for the same relative impact on climate change. The 7100 is impact on ozone depletion:
p. 18: 'Conversely, for composite and cotton
the very high number of reuse times is given by the ozone depletion impact alone. Without considering
ozone depletion, the number of reuse times ranges from 50 to 1400 for conventional cotton, from 150 to
3800 for organic cotton, and from 0 to 740 for the composite material bag. The highest number is due to
the use of water resource, but also to freshwater and terrestrial eutrophication'.
And as I have commented elsewhere: I have cotton bags that I have easily used 500 times. If I had used an old T-shirt for the bag or later use the old bag for cleaning purposes, the 7,100 becomes very relative.
Aren't the plastic bags mainly a problem because they tend to end up in places where they don't belong at all, like oceans etc.? They can't really decompose or anything like that, they just shred to tiny little pieces that mess with animals (and ultimately also our) digestion, no?
Yup. There are places where plastic bags accumulate. Once it was my doorstep. Every morning there were piles of plastic bags that were delivered to my house.
Just take a trip along any river or stream near a town and you’ll find them swimming by like lifeless jellyfish
The Reason Foundation (which is slightly right leaning of center, but makes its case using actual studies and facts) has a great explainer on how plastic bag bans for example hurt the environment more than help and cost consumers (including low income individuals) an extra $1b/yr: https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/california_plast...
But there’s basically no reasonable way to say that single use plastic is good for the environment. They are clearly a local minima that has seemed tricky for the market to break out of. Unless they make a case that that single use bags are actually the global minima or the global minima is just not worth it, the reason foundation is being rather myoptic when presenting why people attempts to get out of the local minima are bad.
Reason is a libertarian think tank. Describing them as “slightly right leaning of center” is really sugarcoating things - their whole raison d’etre is coming up with arguments to oppose virtually any and all government regulations. That doesn’t make them wrong necessarily, but let’s call a spade a spade.
Is there any data that single use stuff (of any kind) creates less carbon emissions? I would expect it to be the other way around, except for some edge cases.