When news is announced like this the focus is always on biodegradable. They already make biodegradable plastic from corn. But it has two problems: it is more expensive and has a rough finish which isn't as desirable as a smooth shiny surface.
Here in Michigan we have been trying to find a use for sugar beet waste for over forty years. Nothing has ever really caught on. Very little barley is grown however in the state but I guess there could be if this proves to be competitive with regular plastic. In fact Northern Michigan which has too short a growing season for corn would be an ideal candidate.
No one ever talks about paper bags. Growing up that's all we ever used and it was easily biodegradable. But stores went with the cheaper solution.
In Ireland a few years ago a plastic bag levy was introduced. If you want a plastic bag at the checkout, you have to pay 5c for each one.
Now everyone has reusable shopping bags they bring to the stores.
The bags are much more rugged than single use plastic bags or paper, and reuse is better than recycling.
However, I think shopping bags are probably not the intended market for this stuff, and the need is more to replace the plastic wrapping that covers food. There have been efforts here and in the UK to reduce the amount of packaging in the first place but there will continue to be places where we still need it for a while
Similar thing in California happened about 10 years ago - 10 cents per bag. Unfortunately, it backfired - because the 10 cent bags are thicker (they can't be designed for "single use", so they have to be thick enough to be "reusable"), the amount of plastic bag waste in landfills has actually risen dramatically in that time.
California kinda screwed up by not mandating paper bags, or carving out an exception for them to promote their use.
> because the 10 cent bags are thicker (they can't be designed for "single use", so they have to be thick enough to be "reusable"), the amount of plastic bag waste in landfills has actually risen
In New Jersey the problem was grocery delivery companies. Like, yes, if I have a constant stream of any packaging I’m going to dispose of it.
In California, stores giving away free bags seems to have compounded the problem. Banning single-use plastic bags and adding a bag tax seems like the way to go.
>In California, stores giving away free bags seems to have compounded the problem. Banning single-use plastic bags and adding a bag tax seems like the way to go.
That's what California did, and it failed. Nobody is "giving away free bags"...
We have that in Spain too. I still pay for the plastic bag like 50% of the time, because they're useful to take out the trash. Otherwise I wouldn't be paying the 5c but I would need to buy trash bags.
PS: the best reusable shopping bag I have is a traditional Taiwanese shopping bag a friend brought from there. Light, beautiful, rugged, holds a lot of weight, seems indestructible. A pity they don't sell these here, I live in fear of losing it :D
I just reuse the paper bags, and I really wish someone would sell slightly thicker better-built paper bags because they have a lot of good attributes versus reusable bags. They biodegrade, they're made from waste and recycled wood and paper pulp, and they can be produced locally. The only thing that makes them not ideal is the handles tear off.
Frequently the store staff have to double-bag everything with paper because the bags tear so easily. But when double-bagged I can get 5 or 10 uses out of them, which suggests that the bag just needs to be thicker to be highly reusable.
>> The only thing that makes them not ideal is the handles tear off.
Do you live in California? Nevada? I bet it is somewhere hot and dry. Paper bags are not fun in the pacific northwest, or the north, or deep south ... basically anywhere with moisture in the air. Either you put them down in a puddle by accident, or you get snow on them and it melts in your car on the way home. Either way, the bottom will fall out the moment you pick them up.
I don't remember the exact figure off the top of my head, but if memory serves well it was in the ballpark of a decade that you could buy a new plastic bag every day and throw it away after, and it would still create less CO2 in total than one reusable cloth bag. Modern plastic is ridiculously cheap to manufacture whereas reusable bags waste a lot of energy and water. A good example of a movement where people feel good about themselves, but actually they're not making things better.
Last I read that was debunked. It was based on one study or article that made a really bad assumption and then it spread. Someone went and did the figures again and it was way off by a few orders of magnitude and in fact only a few uses of a reusable bag means it’s better. Like you I don’t have the link to hand sorry.
By estimated impact: cotton > paper > plastic, but more constructively:
> Ultimately, the single use of any bag is the worst possible choice. The key to reducing your environmental impact is to use whatever bags you have around the house as many times and in as many ways as possible.
So it's better that I need to pay for thicker bags just to put in my wastebasket to collect trash? How is that better than getting a t-shirt bag from the store to carry my items home, then use the bag to line my trash, then throwing the mess away?
By volume I throw away more diapers in a month than an entire lifetime of plastic bags. Fighting plastic bags is what the rich companies making actual pollution want you to focus on so you aren't fighting real pollution.
People have limited campaigning energy and politicians have limited political capital, so it probably does divert some attention from the bigger problems.
Exactly. I don't understand why this isn't acknowledged more.
Banning plastic bags in the US does absolutely nothing for the plastic bags clogging waterways in Asia.
Sometimes people think plastic recycling in the US is shipped to Asia where it ends up in waterways but that's not a thing either. It might get buried in a landfill there rather than recycled, but compressed pallets of plastic recycling aren't getting dumped into rivers. That's not a thing. The bags aren't flying away in the wind or something either. All the plastic clogging rivers -- that's all local consumer littering.
I was under the impression that Americans landfilled their garbage. I don't doubt that waste export is a thing, but is it really that large a proportion?
The US is the only country in the developed world that hasn't ratified the Basel Convention [0] and the US exports close to a billion tons of plastic waste to other countries per year [1]. The trash you see building up in third world countries is in large part from the United States, not from those countries themselves.
Most reusable bags here in Italy are still made of plastic, but much sturdier than single use shopping bags. Personally I like them. My only issue is the few times when I forget to put them back into my car.
Those reusable bags are made of plastic.
They degrade in different ways.
How many bags did they replace when they reach their end of life? Where do they go at the end of life? How much do they cost?
The previous plastic bags may have been reused (ie for small garbage bags). Are consumers now just purchasing equivalent plastic bags for that purpose?
I think there are so many unanswered questions and the benefits can vary by region.
It's far from clear that "reusable" (thick, thin plastic bags are reusable too) plastic bags are a better deal environmentally. If you have to get 300 uses out of a thick one to break even, does the average "reusable" hit this number?
I loathe modern grocery store "reusable" bags. They can't be recycled, in that I can't toss them into my blue bin, I have to take them back to the store (I don't) and story is nothing happens to them anyway. I hate the texture of them, I hate the way the lay. I find them just awful.
For the grocery store, we have a set of, I guess, 10 or so cloth bags we use. We've used the core set every week for over 12 years. Had a tailor stitch up a hole in one of them once, wash them every few months.
We have a large, cloth Target logo'd bag I stuff in the bottom. It's about 1.5x the size of the normal ones, if I put it on top they inevitably drag it out first and fill it with the milk, juice, bowling balls (both of them), cinder blocks and whatever else is super heavy that we happened to buy that day. "But it fits!" "Yea, and now it weight 50lb!" Couldn't stuff it with cotton balls, stuffed animals, and the Cool Whip.
So, yea, bottom of the bag it goes.
I know there are concerns with cloth, and we wrap notably meats in the light plastic bags to help contain contamination. It's not been a real problem.
We've just started (past few months) using reusable mesh bags for the produce, that's working out ok so far.
Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out. Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out (my favorite are the ikea bags, they are big and great for groceries - vs many grocery store offerings which are garbage).
Nutshell, it they may not be a net plus for the environment when so many poor quality bags which are more energy/resource intensive to make end up being single-use anyway.
> Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out.
Your comment is a textbook argument of perfect being the enemy of good.
Sure, some bags are thrown out. Sure, people use more than one. Sure, people can buy them if they feel they need them.
That's perfectly fine, as that's completely besides the point.
What you're failing to mention is that thanks to this push to adopt reusable bags the use of single-use plastic bags plummeted. You no longer see over a dozen single-use bags being thrown out at each and every single shopping trip. These bags aren't recyclable and disintegrate very easily, making it extremely hard to pull them out of the environment once they get there.
You're also somehow leaving out is the fact that some major supermarkets chains are making available reusable shopping bags made of natural fiber. It's not a given that you're replacing large volumes of single-use plastic with small volumes of reusable plastic, as you're also seeing small volumes of natural fabric being used.
You're also leaving out the fact that this push is taking single-use plastic out of the market but nothing forces customers to adopt the store's own offerings. Anyone is able to buy whatever type of shopping bag suits their fancy.
So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic. You're seeing drastic reductions in plastic use by eliminating perverse incentives to consume single-use plastic containers, and the adoption of substitute goods that have a far preferable environmental footprint.
I think your response is overly optimistic; what you're saying is _possible_, but actual deployment of the policy leaves quite a bit to be desired.
So, when you say
> So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic.
I think immediately of NJ's attempt to wrangle this problem.
> While the state’s ban — which, unlike those of other states, also prohibited single-use paper bags — led to a more than 60 percent decline in total bag volumes, it also had an unintended consequence: a threefold increase in plastic consumption for grocery bags.
> How this happened is no mystery.
> The massive increase in plastic consumption was driven by the popularity of heavy-duty polypropylene bags, which use about fifteen times more plastic than polyethylene plastic bags.
> “Most of these alternative bags are made with non-woven polypropylene, which is not widely recycled in the United States and does not typically contain any post-consumer recycled materials,” the study explains. “This shift in material also resulted in a notable environmental impact, with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production in 2015.”
I'm supportive of the goal, but I really do think that making laws that are simple solutions to complex problems really can backfire and be a net negative, so we need to think several steps ahead.
> I think your response is overly optimistic; what you're saying is _possible_, but actual deployment of the policy leaves quite a bit to be desired.
Again: textbook example of perfect being the enemy of good.
I completely disagree with your take. I've seen whole supermarket chains switch from single-use plastic bags to multi-use cardboard crates in their delivery services, and also to paper bags/containers. That's pretty much the definition of the ideal outcome.
So you're seeing some plastic being thrown out. That's besides the point. The point is how many volume of plastic is being dumped onto the environment after supermarkets switched away from cheap single-use plastic bags.
> So you're seeing some plastic being thrown out. That's besides the point. The point is how many volume of plastic is being dumped onto the environment after supermarkets switched away from cheap single-use plastic bags.
I'm not seeing anything myself, and I cited no anecdotes. I cited a study that found plastic use went up after the ban.
Why care if they get thrown out? If you are the median American, you burnt (aka "disposed of in the atmosphere") far more petroleum driving to the store than a hundred single-use bags. I bet a single bag is of comparable volume to tire wear. Get off your high horse and start focusing on real problems. Automobiles are responsible for more micro-plastics than single-use items, plus 6PPD poisoning us. Single-use plastics are just a useful tool to distract from the real sources of pollution.
I've heard this argument before and totally agree that single use plastics are a tiny fraction of the total problem. But as a Canadian I like that the law forced me to think about my consumption habits, as well as it helped create conversation topics with other people.
That's exactly the outcome they wanted. Are those discussions leading to action on topics to reduce automobile dependence (the actual source of micro-plastic contamination)? If not, then you're part of the problem.
Well a lot of discussions due lead to some actions that I wouldn't have done on my own like reducing animal proteins, or shopping local for everything.
I don't see why caring about plastic bags is mutual exclusive from caring about automobile free cities. I'm 40 and have never owned a car. I'm a big NotJustBikes and StrongTowns proponent. We can for sure debate car dependence and what policies we should advocate for. But this was an article about biodegradable plastics.
Montreal is shutting down a ton of streets every summer to make them walkable, and we've built out an extensive bike infrastructure. All great things! We could make public transportation free.
> Why care if they get thrown out? If you are the median American, you burnt (aka "disposed of in the atmosphere") far more petroleum driving to the store than a hundred single-use bags. I bet a single bag is of comparable volume to tire wear. Get off your high horse and start focusing on real problems. Automobiles are responsible for more micro-plastics than single-use items, plus 6PPD poisoning us. Single-use plastics are just a useful tool to distract from the real sources of pollution.
I don't understand why you insist that we need to solve the "real" problems of pollution before we dare think about other smaller, easier to solve problems. It's not like we're playing a video game where society only has a finite amount of elbow grease to apply to this set of issues. We can reduce plastic bag pollution while also working toward reducing the pollution from automobiles, tire wear, and whatever else you on your own high horse have deigned to be "real problems".
"We" are not working on solving those other actual sources of pollution. We're just making people's lives worse. People think they've "done their part" by not using bags, when they haven't done shit.
There are ways to get around the "oh crap, I forgot the bags" depending on how the store does things. For example, the Aldi stores I shop at in the US have a couple of cages with empty boxes in them. The boxes on the shelves get emptied and then the employees round them up and drop them in accessible cages/crates. This allows a person to choose to either buy a paper bag, buy a reusable bag, or make due with a couple of free boxes that were going to be disposed of anyways.
The Aldi I usually go to has staff that are so ridiculously efficient that there are nearly zero empty boxes on the shelves, and the rolling "box cage" is nearly always tucked away somewhere unseen unless they're actively using it.
This isn't a complaint. It's a nice place to shop, and the stock is always very orderly compared to some other locations.
But GFS? They've got boxes at the checkout. I think the expectation is that the customer is supposed to box their own stuff, but they always do it for me if there isn't a line.
My love of Aldi comes from the fact that my attention isn't being accosted as soon as I walk in the door. It's the stuff I need, without advertisements, screens, music, etc.
The price doesn't hurt either. Before I began shopping there, I was exclusively at The Fresh Market, so when I switched, my grocery bill was cut by 2/3.
Their hardgoods tend to be tremendously high-quality for the price, too: Stuff is frequently ~half what I'd expect to pay elsewhere for something similar. Their buyers must be stellar.
Where I live, Aldi does not provide boxes or bags of any sort. You have to bring your own bags and, barring that, take the cart to your car and unload there directly. A bit time consuming, but not a disaster. It has been this way for at least a decade (as long as I've lived here) and people have long been used to it.
It meant that when all other supermarkets stopped offering free plastic bags, most of the shopping populace was already used to keeping reusable bags in their cars or purses, so it was a pretty easy transition.
My local groceries store used to do this and it was great, using the boxes they were going to throw out anyway for bringing groceries home worked well. We used to also go there to get boxes if just needed boxes for something. The problem is they just stopped doing it. They no longer put those boxes out for customers to use.
The killer is grocery delivery services. They got wrapped up in the legislation, so they must deliver groceries in reusable bags. It's totally impractical to come an collect the bags again (collect, clean, sort), so instead our small office, for instance, goes through about a dozen of them a month.
Over here in the UK, our grocery delivery service (Sainsburys) just comes to your door with flat crates full of unbagged shopping. You meet them at the door and transfer the shopping into your own bags. It's a lot slower than just grabbing bagged shopping out of the crates, and I have no idea how it works for folks in flats/apartments (do the delivery folks have to walk each crate up four flights of stairs individually?) but it is nice that it doesn't cause as much direct waste. Albeit that it might cause indirect waste due to now needing more vans on the road to service the same number of users, hm.
Look at VDA's KLT system for example to see something that works readily for the reusable crate task.
Just hand over your empty crate into the empty hands/van-shelf-space of the delivery driver after taking the crate with your fresh goods out of their hands.
Bonus: the KLT system easily offers enough assistance to automated/mechanized handling that the box delivery task doesn't require humans.
Could probably easily have a portal crane style 4-wheel robot to drive the new box from the van to your door, drop it, and bring back an empty box you put out for it.
Well, something about curbs, but the stair dolly (big wheel made of 3 smaller wheels) style drive can probably cope with most.
Originally the KLT boxes were made to elide re-packing and manual box handling in the many-small-supplier-companies car industry of Germany. They differ from the more widely seen euro boxes by having molded features to allow a robot gripper to "plug" into any of the 6 sides of the cuboid and get a solid grasp of the box suitable for (re-)stacking them as long as their nominal load rating is adhered to. Also at least one, if space a short and a long side though, have a slot to hold a DIN A-series piece of (tick/heavy) paper describing the box contents, such that the box won't be contaminated with sticky tape residue.
When they're eventually broken from old age or abuse, they can be recycled cleanly because they are normed to be a pretty specific plastic and to (for interchange at least) be one of that colors (grey and a dark blue).
I have seen a local service, picnic, using a small urban-only electric truck (if not even a tricycle) who's back is just a 120 cm (plus tolerances plus door thing) wide shelf to be used with 40x60 cm euro boxes. If they were KLTs you could just put the box as-is in your pantry instead of doing the "dump onto kitchen table" tactic, I guess.
I don't think so. This is largely dependant on each grocery delivery service, but of you look at it the worst cases are actually just continuing business as usual,which is hardly a regression. In the meantime, some services managed to completely eliminate the use of plastic bags.
As an example, for the past year or so I had a groceries delivery service use their old plastic bags, but they also implemented a charge-back service where they pay you back when/if you return them in the following delivery. This is clearly an improvement. In the meantime I had competing supermarket chains completely switch away from single-use bags to alternatives such as reusable plastic crates and even reusable cardboard crates. Behemoths such as Amazon Fresh completely switched to a mix of paper bags, for example.
everyone I know has a bag of "bag for life" bags, and yes sometimes you forget to bring them and you end up buying more. but they're definitely a net good. the amount of bags sold to people who forgot theirs is orders of magnitude than the number of bags that would be handed out when they were free.
I was shocked recently when I visited a shop in another european country and they had regular non-reusable bags, it seemed so primitive!
> Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out
there are thinner plastic ones, but even the lightest "reusable" bags we have last for months if not years. unless you're buying pineapples and throwing stars every time you shop they should last you a while.
> these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag
Put a tax on them that funds an environmental initiative, whether that be decarbonisation, trash clean-up or better landfill management.
I've seen several studies that dispute the efficacy of reusable plastic items (bags, cups, etc). The energy costs of producing the "sturdy" alternative are often high enough to offset the gain in reuse.
IIRC, one study showed that reusing the single-use grocery bag one time (as a trash bin liner) was enough to put it back ahead of the typical $1 reusable bags available at the check-out counter at most grocers.
Since reusable bags have so little mass, I am not so concerned about the energy use to produce. More about the amount of bags and micro-plastics that escape into the environment.
That's fair. And I'm definitely in favor of doing whatever's best for the environment. Just pointing out that it's not as simple as "reusable is better" - depending on the set of metrics being measured, it might not be.
I never claimed they're filling up landfills, that was somebody else. I was just providing some more context, which as you note, indicates it's not as simple as "reusable good, one-use bad".
you should shop around. I see the heavy plastic bags in the US$2-5 range. Check out Trader Joe's if you have them. I've been using the same couple of TJ bags for years.
Reuse is better than recycling when the reusable bags are more efficient to produce / number of uses than single use bags. More than one researcher has disputed this for "reusable" plastic bags. (I reuse the "non-reusable" ones...)
Yeah, FWIW, this kind of bag fee is very common in the U.S. as well, with the same effects (though perhaps not in northern Michigan). In fact, single use plastic bags are outright banned in many parts of the U.S. I guess I'm not sure what GP means by "No one ever talks about paper bags."
I guess they mean that paper bags are biodegradable and have been for ever. However, plastic bags have been used instead as they are cheaper. He says cost is what drives this so for a barley or corn plastic bag to work it has to be as cheap as a regular plastic bag or at least cheaper than a paper bag.
Right, because a business will almost always take the cheapest option possible unless there is direct customer pushback. It turns out consumers are really bad about thinking about long term (think decades) consequences that don’t immediately provide negative feedback.
Which is why we have government, to protect society from risks that may happen over a longer period of time or fall out of their direct control. Think: the EPA.
PLA (biodegradable corn) is often sold as being a good biodegradable plastic. It ommits the part where its only biodegradable in a high pressure, high heat industrial composter. If you put PLA in your home composter it'll still be exactly as it was in 5 years time.
If the PLA is plasticizer-free and derived from vegetation, it can be burned without pollution. It's not like there's a bunch of chlorine or fluorine atoms in the molecule.
> If you put PLA in your home composter it'll still be exactly as it was in 5 years time.
More interested in learning to make it myself. Daughter and I have been extracting starch from potatoes, and we can reliably ferment to lactic acid. Distillation's trickier, and everything else after that's just bugshit crazy. Have to ferment M. hexanoica, it needs to be fed very specific nutrients to produce capryilic acid, extraction of that will be even more insane, and there seems to be no good source for tin in modern life. I've found a dozen tin scrapping videos on Youtube where you watch them and think to yourself "did they just screw around with soluble lead salts without even mentioning it?".
Also, I've had spontaneous combustion in our compost before. Maybe your compost game's just weak. Be sure to spread grass clippings until they're no longer deeper than about 3".
Ok. Argue that. What about it is worse than sequestering it? If microplastics are so bad, you'd rather it just sit there slowly breaking down into small chains of lactic acid, and those leaching into ground and surface water and blowing around int he wind?
That's net zero on carbon dioxide. The carbon comes out of the air, goes back in. I don't see what the big deal is. One of us has some confusion somewhere.
I'd like to see a useful spectrum of classifications between "lasts forever as a pollutant" and "dissolves in water". As in How biodegradeable is it?. I think that would help make distinctions between the many "biodegradeable" options.
You want something that is just biodegradeable enough that it doesn't become a forever problem, but not biodegradeable enough that it mixes with food or becomes useless as a food container.
The worst offender is compostable bags: They can hold trash for about 1 day before they become the trash.
That's a little weird for a bag designed to hold biodegradable products... have you tried other brands?
I buy mine from Costco and they easily last 2-3 days (the amount of time it usually takes for the pail inside my house to fill up). I take care not to dump wet items in, though not exhaustively so, e.g. coffee grounds are OK, sauce and liquids go down the drain.
> No one ever talks about paper bags. Growing up that's all we ever used and it was easily biodegradable. But stores went with the cheaper solution.
Plastic Bags were banned here in Germany (Maybe EU?) so now you can get either Paper Bags or Plastic Bags made from recycled plastic water bottles. To be quite honest: The paper bags suck because they are fragile and the recycled bags are expensive.
Cloth bags are problematic. The Danish EPA put the break-even on cotton bags at 7,100 re-uses (or 20,000 for organic)[1].
Most people won’t shop enough in their life to pay back that organic cotton bag - reusing twice a week, it will take you 200 years before you break even.
It depends on the paper. Some takeaways round here seem to come in very robust paper bags, although takeaway is perhaps not as challenging as a full bag of groceries.
It's a pity that our school system has failed so many people by not teaching them some basics of economics, which is that the supply of trees is elastic and can increase with demand/price, and will decrease with decreased demand/price.
Not using trees will only incentivize people to re-allocate land that was used for the cultivation of trees to the cultivation of something else that is higher demand, and thus profitable.
The only way that not using paper will save trees is if we stopped all forms of cultivation/farming.
Problem is it’s pretty low value. Better than dumping it down the drain, but barely. Better than salt for surrounding plants/waterways, but the salt spreaders don’t pay that cost.
There is a company called Genomatica that is working on this problem specifically for 20 years, and has started to gain ground. Turning waste sugar into nylon plastic and other products.
Not to mention the bags are usually made from significant amounts of recycled paper. So you're already getting a second use out of the material.
I feel like in the 80's when there was a big "paper kills trees" moral panic the plastic companies took advantage of that to market plastic, and paper companies started recycling their products and developing fast-growing pulpwood species to plantation farm sustainably. And now we could absolutely go back to paper with fewer ill effects. It's probably better for the planet because even if your paper bags end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch something will decompose them into their organic constituents very rapidly and they won't agglomerate into rocks on beaches somewhere.
And how is it ensured it does not partially degrade beyond use in well use? The balance is kinda big question. I do not want some material protecting food do degrade before best by date. Or in storage if I forget it there for few months.
I work in manufacturing, and we had this exact issue. We implemented biodegradable bags for packaging a product, and then found out customers were unhappily opening said product to find the decomposed remains of the bags.
I once bought bio-degradable garbage bags and they rotted and fell apart in about a day - meaning they were completely unusable unless I took the garbage out at least twice a day.
Most "bioplastics" like PLA want 60C or so; this is achievable in industrial composting (it's actually achievable in normal composting if you find an expert) but the process of getting and keeping the bioreactor to that temperature is slow. We'd need a lot of these things, so I hope society starts to build them.
But the more I experiment with 3D printing, the more obvious it is that the problems include:
- separating this stuff out in the first place so that you know what can be composted
- parts fixed with non-biodegradable glues
- dyes, pigments, plasticisers that aren't biodegradable either
- difficulty reusing manufacturing waste
Industrial 3D printing is going to be a bigger and bigger part of our plastics use over time, because it enables products to be iterated long before you reach the kind of economy of scale that supports injection moulding. This also cuts down on waste; shocking amounts of plastic goes directly to landfill because of high-scale unsold inventory.
So a significant development would be actually improving the chances of reusing waste. But it's only a small part of that problem.
Isn't the whole biodegradability thing a bit of a red herring anyways? Just have a reasonably good waste collection system, then either incinerate (yay, dispatchable carbon neutral energy!) or landfill (yay, carbon capture and burial!) and call it a victory. The key benefit of plant based plastics is that no fossil hydrocarbons have been reintroduced back into the active cycle to make it.
So keeping it a bit on the sun or closed car can instantly ruin/pollute ie packaged meat? Despite meat being eatable at least for another 12 hours.
I love such things, but they need to be same or better on most if not all aspects than current ones, not in fashion: better for nature - check; but in these rather common situations they are much worse and can be actually hazard to humans - check.
You store raw meat at temperatures that would degrade plastic for several hours, then eat it? There's a reason they call certain temperatures "the danger zone".
I'd be more than willing to use a more degradable plastic for something that needs to get a chilled product from the meat department to my home.
But if it's possible to degrade it i solar-powered furnaces without any hazardous/toxic byproducts, it's already worth it. Or if microorganisms could decompose the buried stuff. Also composting is an exothermic reaction, generating heat up to 60C, which is above normal temperature anyway. The question is how waterproof it is, can it get wet or store liquids.
>But if it's possible to degrade it i solar-powered furnaces without any hazardous/toxic byproducts, it's already worth it.
Bottles don't carry themselves to solar-powered furnaces. If we assume that they did (and plastic oceans in the pacific demonstrate otherwise), then we could target the much-easier problem of making plastics that are stable when dumped in a landfill.
I suppose the perfect bottle plastic would biodegrade under natural conditions after 5 years or so, but also biodegrade rapidly under enhanced conditions (e.g high temp, fungi).
That way the lifespan of the contents wouldn't be limited by the bottle - minimising food waste - but we'd retain the ability to get rid of the bottle safely without huge landfills.
>material that is certified compostable. To be certified compostable, the product must be able to break down in a commercial compost in under 180 days and not contain harmful toxins.
That stuff doesn't biodegrade in natural conditions, only in commercial compost.
will this end up on the pile of other biodegradable plastic/plastic alternatives that we don't use as they are marginally more expensive. like the chitin bioplastic developed a few years back or the mycelium based bioplastic or the cellulose based...
and more all barely used.
how about we go back to what we used before single use plastic? waxed paper wrappers, small wicker punnet baskets for fruit burlap sacks for vegetables, infinitely recyclable glass and metal beverage container.
I actually switched to store a lot of food related products in those wax-cloths. They are great! They are reusable, are breathable so that no moisture builds up but not breathable enough that, lets say bread for example, goes dry in it. And of course completely compostable as they are made of cotton and bees wax.
If they get dirty you can just scrub them under warm running water.
Of course they are way more expensive than buying a roll of plastic bags, but I bought them one by one and made plastic bags basically obsolete (other than for freezing bread, as that does not fit in my freezer containers) in my house hold over the course of a year or so. And I expect them, based on experience over the last year, to hold for at least another 2 years without needing to reapply the wax layer or buying new ones.
There are a few problems with beeswax, given the very low supply and high demand the price of real beeswax is an order of magnitude greater than paraffin wax, so there is a very large incentive to at the very least mix in some paraffin. Also much of the beehive foundation sheets are made of adulterated wax.
But even if you managed to find some real beeswax, given that bees are collecting pollen from many fields that have been treated with pesticide the harmful substances tend to accumulate in the beeswax and the concentration increases every year if not filtered correctly, and given how hard it is to filter it from fatty substance you might end up with some in the wax.
Ideally, your government would tax the bad thing. But in most cases, the bad thing has powerful lobbyists and the government is not functioning properly.
i am reminded of how we quite having biodegrade chip bags for sun chip when people found them to be too noisy. like sure lets give up environmental friendly alternative to the plastic chocking the planet just because the bag rattles a little more. maybe a minor annoyance is worth the hassle to not kill the only functional biosphere for our species can survive in.
Isn't there this tension between "useful as a food package / eating utensil" and "harmful as trash"? You want something that is just biodegradeable enough that it doesn't become a forever problem, but not biodegradeable enough that it mixes with food or becomes useless as a food container.
The worst offender is compostable bags: They can hold trash for about 1 day before they become the trash.
I’m bullish on hemp as a replacement for plastics, it can be used for many of the same purposes (textiles, packaging), as paper, is easy to grow, inert, and stable yet biodegradable. Hemp had a shot at becoming mainstream before Henry Anslinger went on his cannabis crusade, and though it was legalized in 2018, plastics have too much momentum for hemp to become a common solution without major regulatory change.
Maybe there needs to be a triggering event. Like, becomes compostable when exposed to a certain sort of uncommon radiation that you can bombard a landfill with.
Can it be used for medical products such as syringes and vials? Is research being done there?
I had a close relative admitted in hospital for 2 weeks and I saw them use and throw so much plastic like I have never seen before; think 100 gallon bucket of plastic. I am not discounting the benefits plastics have brought to medicine such as hygiene, but I am concerned its environmental impact.
I also understand that industrial plastic waste is probably an order of magnitude greater than that in medicine.
But I am curious what sort of test a biodegradable/sustainable plastic would need to stand for it to replace traditional plastics.
In a hospital setting the alternative materials would be some types of glass and steels. Those mostly have the downsides of being expensive, tough to clean correctly, and higher liability if someone breaks them.
I don't think it'd be easily possible to easily replace plastic tubing, particularly the clear aspect.
What's the use case for plastic that degrades? I mean we humans know when we're done with it, but surely it's going to interact with environmental triggers.
I understand the benefit of not having plastic in landfills and not making it from fossil fuels! My question is "when could I depend on something using this plastic?"
All the one time use products that currently end up in a landfill (or the oceans) shortly after being manufactured and then fail to decompose properly. A lot of plastic products don't need to be durable for very long. If it needs to be durable, there are perfectly good materials other than plastic that you could use that are probably better.
In fact, most plastics don't actually do that well over time (some exceptions of course) and aren't that durable. Quite a few types of plastic degrade under UV light for example. Of course not enough to fully degrade but they become brittle, get ugly, etc. If it stayed in one piece and just sat there not changing, plastics would actually be less of an issue. The issue is that they do degrade and gradually turn into micro plastics. Which end up in animal and human tissue causing all sorts of issues.
Food wraps, straws, cup liners, plates, bowls, utensils, anywhere single use plastics are just there to hold something for like 30 min before being discarded.
Wood and other biodegradeable materials are available. Plenty of products already on the market, not just for cutlery but things like product packaging, too. Companies exist all over the planet, like BioPak from Australia, WoodAble from Chile, Sulapac from Finland, Hunufa Compostable from Vietnam, etc.
Cheap and easily manufactured using existing processes and factories (pellets molded into various films and containers).
Very few restaurants want to pay a premium for the deluxe eco groovy stuff, in my experience (as a customer only, but one who frequents such stores). They're almost like a lifestyle / branding thing to go along with organic / vegetarian / sustainable / local themed restaurants, but most don't do that and just want to keep costs down. Most just use regular cheap plastic and some still use Styrofoam.
I think a bioplastic that actually biodegrades in average municipal landfills at a minimal cost markup vs current plastics, that say 40% of restaurants adopt voluntarily (or by regulation), will be more impactful than the boutique reusables we currently see but only at like one restaurant per thousand.
I don't ever see places like Walmart or Costco switching to wooden bowls, for example. But bioplastics that look and feel the same and only cost a few percentage more? Maybe. Especially if encouraged by local regulations, similar to plastic bag bans.
> Very few restaurants want to pay a premium for the deluxe eco groovy stuff, in my experience (as a customer only, but one who frequents such stores). They're almost like a lifestyle / branding thing to go along with organic / vegetarian / sustainable / local themed restaurants, but most don't do that and just want to keep costs down.
Restaurants can be perfectly sincere (and branding isn't incompatible with sincerity), but they have tight margins. It's their customers who really have the choice, and there are very few customers willing to pay extra for the eco stuff. It reminds me of this evergreen Onion article:
I'm not saying restaurants are insincere about it, just that it's a cost of doing business many won't (or can't) absorb. It's usually the more expensive hippie-tastic places with already-high prices (and hopefully higher margins) that can afford them.
Culturally, I don't think customers would accept a choice on the matter either, like I've never seen a place offer "you can have the plastic box for free, or buy the sustainable wooden one for $2". In lieu of that, I used to bring my own reusable tupperware to the restaurants for takeout, but got a looooooot of strange looks and comments about that. What I'd really love to see is more of a "borrow a tupperware, bring back a tupperware" model where they just loan you containers. I'd only ever seen that on college campuses, not in the real world.
Anyway, none of that is really the point. There's nothing wrong with fancy sustainable/reusable dishware, but something that's incrementally better and not much more costly than regular plastic is much more likely to see widespread adoption. I think the gradual phase-out of styrofoam to plastics is one such example, and cheap bioplastics of the less-biodegradable kind are more common now (though not everywhere), paperboard boxes with some wax paper/foil lining are popping up, some places are doing away with bottled plastic water in favor of water in milk-like cartons... gradual incrementalism seems to work better than revolutionary approaches in that industry.
At least Sulapac sells biodegradeable pellet etc. materials which can be used by existing machinery for PS, ABS, PC and PP plastics. Probably there are other ones, too.
In Sweden, the take-away food I tend to buy is always packed in a cardboard box or paper containers. Even the drink straws are cardboard in hamburger places. The drink cup is cardboard with some sort of biodegradeable (?) plastic surface inside. Basically all of that gets recycled into the cardboard bin.
Plastic food packaging is not so easy to find, at least in places I tend to visit. Even the dip sauces are packed in tiny cardboard containers. I guess some places still use styrofoam packs, but I have not visited those places in many years.
It varies a lot by location/jurisdiction, especially in a place like the US where our waste stream is a confusing mishmash of governments of different levels and various partnerships with private waste companies who end up outsourcing a lot of their recycling. Some places will allow bioplastics to be municipally composted at an industrial plant near the city. Rural places don't typically have such facilities and plastics just go in the trash to be landfilled. Other places just burn their trash in the backyard. And depending on the jurisdiction, there may or may not be any laws or regulations about any of this stuff. It's basically up to the states and local governments to decide for themselves, which means there's like hundreds of different variations across the country.
Biodegradable plastics are typically degrading in intense environments, such as a compost pile. Not unlike wood. Wood is strong and lasts a long time if kept dry. If you introduce the environment where fungi, microbes, and insects are more comfortable, the wood starts to deteriorate.
I don’t know quite how it’d work with this kind of plastic, but maybe someone will come up with an indicator or rule of thumb that helps. Like how you don’t eat food out of a dented tin can.
If it were chemically/biologically stable until it has been mechanically eroded into microscopic particles, that would at least avoid adding to our microplastics problem.
There are plenty of plastic products that are only used for a moment and then chucked. Plastic wrap for wrapping pallets, or disposable cups, etc. A lot of the paper alternatives we use still have plastic liners to make them waterproof.
The point is to have a plastic that breaks down into starches and cellulose which are materials that our biomes can hand and can break down or incorporate.
The trick will be producing a plastic that is stable enough for use but can break down once it is no longer needed. This would be useful to replace a lot of plastics that are not used long term and are used in dry environments. It probably would not be good to store liquids.
Single-use scenarios would be my first thought, especially food containers and utensils from food vendors.
I would think places where wood is, or could reasonably be, employed might also work. Table top game tokens, for example. Uses where environment factors (rain, contact with the ground, etc.) typically aren't relevant.
I just hope that if they're used for straws, that they work well enough as straws. All the alternate material straws I've tried typically suck. Especially Paper, but have tried a few bioplastics as well.
According to the article, food packaging and interior trims of cars is mentioned. They also say:
> I think it's realistic that different prototypes in soft and hard packaging, such as trays, bottles and bags, will be developed within one to five years,"
It sounds like the environmental triggers for degradation are naturally occurring microbes.
I hope we keep supporting and funding these projects and solve the scale issue!
Plastic isn't affordable, we are just placing it all on credit at the moment.
[Edit] And letting other people accrue all the debit. If you look at the plastic pollution that the west exports to the Carribbean, or the Far East for "recycling" it's fairly horrifying.
Also see the proposed EU regulation on packaging and packaging waste.[1][2] It aims to "bring clarity to consumers and industry on biobased, compostable and biodegradable plastics".[3] In the US we have companies like BPI and ASTM. :/
Found out about wheat based plastic when I bought some reusable food storage containers. This was not clearly labelled but instead a smalltext on the back of the package.
As a person with an extreme gluten allergy, I freaked out and had to return it before even trying.
If any plastics manufacturers see this, and you use barley, wheat, or any other gluten containing material (like rye), please also include a "Certified Gluten Free" seal when your processing plant has been verified to be safe. Otherwise I can't use your product.
Rather than do 30 seconds of basic googling you instead decided it was awful and returned it? This comment is just bizarre to see on HN.
Wheat-based plastic is made from wheat straw, not wheat grains. The straw has no gluten to start with and it sure as hell doesn’t after the chemical treatment required to plasticize it.
Rather than to inform yourself on the matter you instead decided you are entitled to tell a person with an autoimmune disease how their world works?
There are some first studies which show that yes, some of those biodegradables do contain gluten and yes, they do contaminate their contents in doses that are above the threshold for a person with cealiac disease. The latest issue of the DZG magazine (German Cealiac Disease Society) reported on it.
People with celiac disease have to go to great lengths to avoid things that have even the possibility of cross contamination. I can easily imagine that the processing that wheat straw goes through is not stringent enough to ensure that no wheat grains are not inadvertently included.
I've had celiac for over a quarter century, but my first thought seeing the headline was something like "oh no, another thing to look for?" Then I realized, like you said, it probably depends on how it's made.
Not to exaggerate, but there's a sort of low-key "trauma" associated with celiac. I used to have nightmares where I'd eat bread or something without realizing it (should I throw up? do people think I'm faking it? why didn't I remember to check if it has gluten?). There are these gluten-free burritos in the gluten-free section. The other day, I got one out of my freezer and only after opening the package and seeing the burrito was a bit browner than usual and thinking "is this spoiled?", then I thought "wait, is this not gluten-free?" and verifyied the package...didn't say gluten-free. Next time in the store, I found they have non-gluten-free burritos beside the gluten-free ones, in the freezer marked gluten-free.... They often do this in the gluten-free bread/etc aisle, too, right next to the gluten-free stuff. And recently they stopped adding green "gluten free" labels on the price tags which were handy when strolling down the aisles, so now I'm back in "turn every package around to check for allergens" mode. Anyway, just saying I understand OP's knee-jerk reaction.
Ah, the cookie nightmares, always a nice experience… Good to hear I’m not the only one though.
Interesting times might be ahead actually. As the world moves away from meat and plastics (which is great, don’t get me wrong!), the glue-iness of gluten seems to play a central role.
There are the biodegradable plastics on the one side, which in contrast to their contents don’t need to be marked as containing gluten (at least in Germany and at least for now), and on the other side, 90% of the stuff I see in the „vegan replacements of originally-non-vegan food“ aisles are based on wheat; which isn’t a problem while it‘s only a partial slice of the market, but might get interesting for cealiacs if one day those products replace the originals completely.
Well, gee, excuse me for going off-topic to make sure that someone describing themselves as "a person with an extreme gluten allergy" knows to watch out for plywood.
Going off-topic almost never happens here, and I'm very sorry I went off-topic for such a trivial selfish reason.
Generally avoiding plywood isn't actually useful advice for someone with even a serious problem with gluten: "simply touching gluten will not harm an individual with celiac disease." [1]
The above source does continue: "...there can be a risk of ingesting airborne gluten, which is usually caused by flour. It is also important to remember not to prepare gluten-free foods in spaces where there is a risk of airborne gluten, as particles will settle on the food, making it unsafe for those with celiac disease to eat." [1] Perhaps you meant to imply something more in this line, that say the sawdust from cutting plywood could be a potential problem if food is nearby?
In the same spirit as your apology, let me apologize for assuming that your original advice was sarcastic commentary about people who are gluten-free rather than genuine though ill-informed advice.
Chemical leeching is a big issue with all plastics, afaik. That is, they leech chemicals that are not fit for human consumption in trace amounts into food.
I heard that a researcher investigated many bioplastics and other better plastics and found that none of them improved on this issue. They did in fact face enmity when enquiring about the matter. I don't have a source for this unfortunately.
I'd be very interested to see if this barley plastic improves on the issue.
If the plastic is made from renewable plant material and has no other environmental impact, why does it need to biodegrade? Can't you just bury it without fear of contaminating water or relasing microplastics? And won't that effectively sequester carbon?
They don't say on what order it is biodegradable. Is it a week? That would be useless for its use as a disposable carrier for food, beverages, etc; these are the things that are polluting our world on a large scale. Or is it a decade?
It's nice that this seems to address the problem of microplastics, but how about the other problems associated with plastics? Phthalates/endocrine disruptors/bisphenol?
"""
Bioplastics already exist, but the name is misleading says Blennow. While today's bioplastics are made of bio-derived materials, only a limited part of them is actually degradable, and only under special conditions in industrial composting plants.
I don't find the name suitable because the most common types of bioplastics don't break down that easily if tossed into nature. The process can take many years and some of it continues to pollute as microplastic. Specialized facilities are needed to break down bioplastics. And even then, a very limited part of them can be recycled, with the rest ending up as waste," says the researcher.
"""
"Bioplastics" and "Biodegradable plastics" are two different things. One is made from bio origin, second is supposed to be degraded by bio processes. This quote actually sounds like someone was being intentionally misleading.
The issue is China. Most of Europe and USA have laws that disuade single use plastics.
In China where you can get door to door delivery for a single cup of bubble tea that includes, a plastic cup, lid, straw, and spoon, plastic holder to keep the cup upright , thermal bag to keep the bubble tea cold , and another bag for the delivery guy to hand carry. It’s fucking bonkers the amount of waste they produce.
Western voters keep voting for impractical regulation that just result in production shifting to countries with no regulation, where the goods get produced with severely detrimental social and environmental consequences.
I think people should seriously ask themselves, if they are not for some form of deregulation in their own country, why are they fine with buying things produced without that regulation from other countries?
If USA and Europe banned all imports of goods produced in economies with lower regulation than theirs, then China's bad labour and environmental practices will become mostly inconsequential, as their production volume would be mostly inconsequential. Furthermore, if USA and Europe had reasonable domestic regulations, they would not need to buy so many goods from China to begin with.
Another way to think about it, the greatest beneficiary of environmental regulation in the west has not been the environment. It has been non-western countries where the regulation does not apply.
Germany shuts down their nuclear power plants, and as a result, you get war in Ukraine, and Germany anyway ends up buying nuclear power from France because it's become somewhat unfashionable for Germany to keep bankrolling Putin's aggression.
I’m talking about locals living in Chinese. What you’re talking about is tangential, but the single use culture is astronomical and their middle class outnumbers Europe and USA because of their large population who participate in this single use culture. It’s mind boggling the waste you will see in Chinas river and natures in the cities and outskirts
It's good that there is research in this area but I always doubt whether it can be scaled up to a meaningful level without doing other damage. In the end I think we need to work more on reduction and reuse even if it's mildly less convenient.
Hot take, plant origin plastics should be deliberately engineered to be non biodegradable so we can lock that carbon up in a landfill instead of releasing it back into the atmosphere
This is basically what we have now and there is an enormous and growing pollution problem due to the non-degrading plastic.
If we could get people to dispose of their waste in a landfill always and forever, this might work, but in practice people treat the world like an open sewer.
(don't 100% buy this take but don't think it's completely invalid either lol) Arguably, that problem is worse in countries with poor landfill/trash collection infrastructure, the US isn't in the top ten for example (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...). And in places like the US, the difference between plant sourced and fossil fuel sourced plastic is that plant based would shift the externality calculation towards net positive externalities, since it would shift the plastic industry towards ideally becoming a net carbon sink and leverage consumerism and america's love of single use plastics and packaging to create a market for carbon capture.
It’s impossible to produce cellulose and amylose in this way from barley and claim it was done safely in a protective atmosphere.
They already do this in many sweets by using sugar from wheat because it’s cheaper to produce but it makes many people with gluten allergy extremely ill.
They separate out the sugar but it’s contaminated.
A single molecule of gluten or nuts from cross contamination can make people with these allergies very ill.
Wrapping all food in our society with this stuff will lead to great suffering and danger for many. At least initially until the problem is acknowledged and fixed like in the cases of asbestos, tobacco etc
Talking about wrapping all food in our society using a product derived from an allergen like this is going to cause trauma and worry for those with serious allergies
What should we discuss next, nut plastic ?
If it was nuts and it only contains 50 bits of nuts per million grams ? And this makes sick only a few thousand people with the most sensitive nut allergy it’s ok to talk about doing it ?
No. This idea is so stupid and upsetting to many it should be binned immediately.
It will open the door to cross contamination of every food in our society with gluten.
As we have seen with sugar derived from wheat making many coeliacs sick , it is impossible to safely separate individual molecules from what or barley.
> Talking about wrapping all food in our society using a product derived from an allergen like this is going to cause trauma and worry for those with serious allergies
It is really productive to tell people not to talk about something because talking about it might cause trauma or worry? Does this thread need a trigger warning?
The FDA has, IMO quite reasonably, created an actual definition of “gluten-free”. The OP describes this new material as “amylose-derived”, and amylose is a starch. Any problematic proteins could surely be separated from the starches to much better than the FDA requirement.
Why would producers go beyond the FDA legal requirement? Would they not be brought to bankruptcy by the free market for doing such things?
I believe you don’t think through anything you say if you can say something as foolish as that.
Companies already do not go beyond the standard required by the FDA when they were use sugar derived from wheat in their products.
This “sugar” makes people who are very sensitive to gluten very ill and uncertain as to what foods are genuinely safe.
The FDA do not require companies to put labels on the food stating it’s derived from wheat. They don’t have to label the food as containing wheat or gluten.
Yet the food for example sweets where 80% of its composition may come directly from sugar “derived from” (and so
is) wheat basically and contaminated are just labelled as containing sugar.
I don’t think any gluten intolerant person wants to be chewing on mouthfuls of partial wheat or have all of their foods wrapped in similar materials
The FDA will gaslight them and hand wave it a away saying that they can’t reliably test levels below a certain threshold and they’re being selfish as micro plastics are harming the 99.9% (which is bs)
I'm incredibly pro-tech as a rule, but my first reaction here was a groan. We'll probably be forced to use plastic replacements that are 100x more expensive and come with a new set of problems.
I hate it with a fiery passion when environmentalism is disconnected from numbers.
What about taking the longer view? Most technologies, including plastics, were a lot more expensive than the products they replaced before going mainstream, with society organizing around them and subsidizing many of the costs.
For instance, take petrol-powered cars. It took building cemented roads, petrol stations, petrol distribution networks, supertankers, boats, trucks, car companies, refineries, etc. Cities are built for cars, with large roads while space is at a premium and could be used for something else. All that was 100x more expensive than horses and came with a new set of problems.
Another topic: plastic "feels" cheaper, but it's because some costs are not factored into the price, for instance in environment and health. I am not endorsing the following report, just citing it as an example of this idea: https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?3507866/These-costs-for-plas...
All this counts into the "I'm usually very pro-tech". The point I'm contesting here is pure ideological regulation, without numbers behind it. Ban on plastic bags is actually the perfect example. You can calculate the number of times you need to actually use a reusable bag before it breaks even, and it's stratospheric. I'm not googling for a (potentially biased) source, but I'm sure you've seen such numbers.
And the downside is twofold. First, there's actually a pretty decent correlation between how expensive something is and how harmful for the environment. If you use a hand-made cloth bag made from cotton that was hand-grown in a garden using only renewable energy, it's expensive because you have a higher number of man-hours spent on it - and those man-hours are actually generating orders of magnitude more negative externalities for the simple fact of keeping those workers alive. The 1 cent plastic bag may be made from oil using energy from burning coal, but it's actually much cleaner because it used only a fraction of the man-hours. Whenever you hear claims that "it's a lot more expensive but it's green", the first guess is somebody didn't factor in everything.
The second downside is that bans are taking choice away. If you think there are negative externalities, and you have a good enough argument - by all means, tax those plastic bags until you compensate. If there are still objections to people buying the more expensive plastic bags, those objections are most likely ideological, not practical. Which yes, I still continue to hate with a fiery passion.
> If you use a hand-made cloth bag made from cotton that was hand-grown in a garden using only renewable energy, it's expensive because you have a higher number of man-hours spent on it - and those man-hours are actually generating orders of magnitude more negative externalities for the simple fact of keeping those workers alive.
This style of energy accounting makes no sense to me. Humans are going to use up resources and create pollution, regardless of what their specific source of income happens to be. More artisanal cotton bags means less of something else, in some broad sense, but that says nothing about the environmental accounting of the other side of the margin. The ratio of workers making luxury goods vs. mass producing cheaper substitutes for those goods will have little to no bearing on how many humans happen to exist, birth rates are clearly dominated by other factors.
I don't want to start a flame war, so I'll stop there.
I want to share a podcast you may be interested in, because it's dicussing how to price nature from an economic perspective:
Pricing Nature is a limited-series podcast from the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and the Yale Carbon Charge. It tells a story about the economics, politics, and history of carbon pricing, which many argue should play a critical role in any national climate policy. We feature conversations with carbon pricing experts from government, academia, and civil society. To learn more, visit our website, pricingnature.substack.com.
I was a bit "flamy" with my first comment, sorry. I'm honestly not very into podcasts - short attention span? But if by any chance you have a written source I'll probably take a peek.
Here in Michigan we have been trying to find a use for sugar beet waste for over forty years. Nothing has ever really caught on. Very little barley is grown however in the state but I guess there could be if this proves to be competitive with regular plastic. In fact Northern Michigan which has too short a growing season for corn would be an ideal candidate.
No one ever talks about paper bags. Growing up that's all we ever used and it was easily biodegradable. But stores went with the cheaper solution.