Obvious alternative for plastic is Kraft paper, although I'm sure the retailers would be concerned about the "carbon footprint" -- just like when Sam's Club was making a case that polystyrene cups had a lower impact than alternatives due to truck fuel consumption.
The other big costs are damage to wildlife and infrastructure. A family friend is a sewer foreman. He has a crew of 3 guys that roam around our little city clearing drains, sewage pumps and other sewer infrastructure. Anywhere from 40-60% of the clogs are caused by shopping bags. That's a lot of $$, borne by the taxpayer.
> If you look at the entire lifecycle of a product, plastic bags (to take an example) have a better footprint across the board than paper ones. //
Importantly we don't factor in destruction of the planet: use of non-renewable oil and pollution (and is impact on food supplies, etc.). This is where the cost seems higher with disposable plastic, a cost we are yet to pay.
>You've seen the sides of the roads. You've seen the streams and rivers.
My local rivers are relatively plastic-free. Same with roads. They're not completely free of plastic, of course. Given that there are thousands of plastic bags being dispensed in my neighborhood every day and that the roads/rivers aren't being regularly cleaned, the fact that the neighborhood isn't completely filled with plastic bags makes me think that the overall disposal rate is pretty good.
Plastic litter might be the most visible externality of single use plastics, but I'm not quite sure whether tripling our co2 emissions from plastic bags is a worthwhile trade for eliminating plastic bags from our neighborhoods.
Some of those costs are the pollution and energy used to produce and transport plastic alternatives. That is not capitalism, it is economics. The secondary affects can offset the benefit of the original intent.
> Single use plastics are a tiny fraction of our carbon footprint
... And a Lion's share of the microplastic calamity contaminating our oceans, our ground water and our food supply.
Not everything is about CO2 emissions. With a single business decision, Humans have managed to contaminate the whole water cycle with micro-plastics all the way up to alpine glaciers. [0]
Single-use plastic is outstandingly great for seller's short-term direct costs, bad for almost everything else.
Typical american mindset: Everything is money. Use something, throwaway when don't needed, bury it, contaminate the soil, the seas, it's cheaper.
Of course they are external cost to recycle, what he doesn't say is that THEY ARE EXTERNAL COST TO NOT RECYCLING. Nature knows that since long long ago, she recycles everything.
The Pacific is filled with polymers just because people love to use plastics and don't recycle them, fishes dye (external cost) every day because they confuse it with jellyfish. Jellyfish plague the seas(external cost).
Plastics additives are getting to our food chain(external cost). Our water contaminated by flame retardants and biphenols A when you bury it are affecting us (external cost).
If you want to make new paper you need to contaminate the rivers (Think about International Paper corp.). Making aluminium from oxide, instead of melting takes an exorbitant quantity of energy(external cost).
This article is pure demagogy, if he want to be serious he needs to put numbers over the table.
It’s sad how the costs of dealing with used plastics - whether recycling, landfill, or something else - are usually presented as a problem. Like, “look, it’s getting too expensive to have country X take it” or “it’s not economically feasible to recycle”. I wish the costs of dealing with plastic trash went up 10 times and there was absolutely no way for anyone to avoid them. That’s the only meaningful way to get people’s attention and stop consuming 400 million tons of plastic per year.
The amount of plastic bags is ridiculous. The packaging for many products is ridiculous. I feel good about being able to put groceries into my backpack rather than plastic bags. Unfortunately I don’t have an option to take other products of their crazy layered plastic packages and put those into my backpack as well, all that packaging going straight to garbage as soon as I get home. This makes me sad.
I'd add, plastic pollution is bad and all, but the alternatives are kind of worse, from the point of view of energy and water they require to produce.
Glass for example takes a huge amount of energy by comparison, if you can reuse it 100s of times then you may break even, but let's face it, where disposable plastics are used, such as microwavable food, glass won't be reusable. Recycled at best, but that still takes lots of energy.
Same for reusable bags, hemp or even heavy duty plastic. Natural fibres need to be reused many times to break even on environmental impact. UK banned disposable plastic bags in favour of reusable bags... and amount of plastic dispensed out for bags increased.
I'm all up for eliminating plastics but not at the price of using substantially more energy (CO2) and water.
The reality is that we need to not use plastic, but that is going to be such a hard transition.
I support making companies responsible for plastic waste and at least to produce it in a way that increases likelihood of recycling. As the article explains, there are thousands of plastics and they can’t be melted together for reuse, so the cost to sort and recycle is prohibitive. That’s a problem we can solve with regulation.
I’d really be interested to know what materials are out there that we can invest in to supplant plastics.
That seems highly unlikely, and with efficient recycling, completely unnecessary. There are a number of uses where plastic is the best solution - economically and environmentally.
We already know of the cost of plastic pollution, just do a freaking Google search. From there it's easy to weigh down the payoff vs. cost.
(If you're too lazy to do, yes, reducing plastic pollution will save a good deal of wildlife, and improve human health too, as probably there will be less toxic bisphenol and polystyrene in that tuna can you pick from the supermarket aisle from plastic pollutants which easily land back in our food chain).
And why should they not do this based on the mere presumption that there could be a cheaper way? Everyone else is free to come up with a better idea.
Your post is incredibly intellectually disingenuous just for the sake of being critical.
I see this as a bigger issue than the use of plastic as a whole. If you properly dispose of it (modern trash burning facility and recycling) , it wouldn't be such a huge environmental issue. Open landfills are a disaster.
The government should focus on proper disposal laws. Banning plastic bags at the grocery store is a bandaid on a blood gushing wound.
So why can't we spend all this money we're wasting debating what plastic stuff to ban figuring out how to recycle these things instead? (or down-cycle, plastic contaminated paper pulp from cups seems like a natural fit for filter media)
Obvious alternative for plastic is Kraft paper, although I'm sure the retailers would be concerned about the "carbon footprint" -- just like when Sam's Club was making a case that polystyrene cups had a lower impact than alternatives due to truck fuel consumption.
The other big costs are damage to wildlife and infrastructure. A family friend is a sewer foreman. He has a crew of 3 guys that roam around our little city clearing drains, sewage pumps and other sewer infrastructure. Anywhere from 40-60% of the clogs are caused by shopping bags. That's a lot of $$, borne by the taxpayer.
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