I thought all the percentage statistics in the Reason piece were unlikely, but here's the deal:

My environment is cleaner and safer for all the little animals because I get those plastic bags.

I've built my patterns of food consumption and waste disposal around those plastic bags over the last ten years. They mean too much to me to let them fly down the street and into the bay. They bring my food home. Then they seal some of it (fruit, cheese) in the fridge. Then they take it work work with me (sandwiches). Then they hold the garbage that I take to the bin in two-day parcels.

I'll probably buy them bulk from now on. They won't be expensive, but this will be so silly.

I get it, OK? No clucking. I remember seeing one of those metallic-looking potato-chip bags floating around in the Indian ocean, along with a couple thousand pounds of other miscellaneous trash, and I thought "Even in the worst weather this region has ever seen, that bag will not degrade for thousands of years..."

But Amy's right. Sheesh.

Grocery bags cost money here, and lo and behold, everyone uses the reusable ones. They have paper bags for sale if you need them, but people only buy them when they're in a pinch.

1-2% is a lot of trash.

And the re-usable bags can cross contaminate:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/09/news/la-heb-grocery-bag-diarrhea-20120509

> 1-2% is a lot of trash.

So very much that I don't believe it.

Plastic bags may do a disproportionate amount of damage relative to all the plastics in the waste stream... But I'll never believe they're 2% or even 1%.

Buy this book. Or get it from your library. Or if you're tragically poor, bedridden and sincerely interested, I'll buy it for you.

It's not a new book, but that doesn't matter: It's not a new problem, and Rathje's perspective will rock your world. One of the best things I ever read on a topic that threatens to kill through boredom.

More on those percentages... Last week there was this house across the street. Now it's gone, and there's a vacant lot, and soon there'll be a new apartment building there. And the construction of that building will require several tons of materials with hundreds (maybe thousands) of pounds of packaging. And on and on...

If you melted every plastic bag of my life together, I doubt they'd weigh as much, or even take the same landfill space of, one door from that house.

2%? Can't be.

An environment free of human impact would be free of humans.

How many people who use reusable bags keep separate ones for meat, produce, etc? I bet not many.

I LOVE my plastic HEB bags. Trash, diapers (although no more as of 2 weeks ago!!!!!), litter box mess, lunches, you name it. I get a lot of work out of that tiny bit of thin plastic.

The worst illustration of waste that I've ever seen was a forklift dropping an entire pallet of brand new bricks into a dumpster. Don't builders know you can donate that to habitat for humanity and take a tax write-off! Or freecycle it to someone building a grill, or ANYTHING but dumping it!

I use my plastic bags for tossing used kitty litter and as trash-can liners. If NY banned free bags, I would just have to buy them.

misleading claims from environmental groups

I'm shocked, SHOCKED!, I tells you that environmental groups might stretch things a bit.

The worst illustration of waste that I've ever seen was a forklift dropping an entire pallet of brand new bricks into a dumpster.

I doubt they did that for giggles and grins, so I'm guessing there was something wrong with those bricks and they were not fit for use in construction.

A quick googling shows that 1,000 bricks cost between $300 and $500, depending on the material used. How may contractors do you know would piss away that much money?

Now, they probably would have been ok for someone building a grill. But it's ultimately cheaper for the contractor to dump them, so they don't get sued for putting out defective bricks and someone else getting hurt/killed when the defective bricks defect on their heads.

I use those little plastic bags for EVERYTHING. I do tons of clean up around the house and "herd" things into bags (to keep them out of baby hands). I use them for diapers religiously. I carry a few in the diaper bag for when we're out so we don't stink up the public restroom. I'll probably continue to do so when we start potty training for "accidents". I use them to tote my lunches in, pack in luggage to separate the dirty from the clean, pack my toiletries, etc. Seriously, I reuse the *hell* out of those little plastic bags.

I did find the stat about construction debris interesting. I bet that number's higher in my area, which seems to be run more by the builders than by the City Council. There was a time a few years ago when EVERY street I used to get to work (a distance of 25 miles, btw) was under construction save one.

The whole article looks like something written by a group which lobbies for plastic bags. In India, there was a stat that 1 month after imposing charges for plastic bags, there was a sharp reduction in the usage of plastic bags. And though some people may reuse the hell out of them, the fact is most people don't give a damn about reusing them. And food waste is certainly not harmful in any manner(assuming that it is "food" waste and not the packaging of the food). So even if food waste constitutes 32 percent, the damage it does will be hardly 1% while 1% of plastic can do a whole lot more damage than 1%

I admit, were grocery bags not available, I'd have to start buying bags for lunches and for garbage, something I haven't done in 30 years or so.

But even though I use my cloth bag as much as possible, I still never seem to run out of grocery bags. I also suspect that if they were banned in my area, I'd still be able to get plenty from my neighbors - at least for a few months.

I read the conflation of plastic bags and yard waste and had to laugh. Really? They're going to measure this by volume of waste and not by characteristics?

Yard waste isn't accumulating in a gigantic mound in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Plastic is. Good on the people who are trying to reduce the mess.

Even if paper bags require as much electricity and petroleum to create as plastic, at least they dissolve in the ocean and the landfills.

So they've got that going for them. Which is nice.

My only objection to plastic is that I frequently find myself in the self checkout, holding some item I just scanned in the right hand, trying desperately to separate the plastic bag from the ream it is static-clinged to with my left hand while the machine is politely yelling at me to, "please place the item in the bagging area."

Oh, and there has been one stranded in my neighbor's tree for quite a while.

Then again, I'm not risking the bottle of Patron to the weak glued-on handles of a paper bag.

An environment free of human impact would be free of humans

I'm trying, you have no idea how hard it is to engineer a pathgeon with a 100% mortality rate at is still slow acting enough to spread worldwide

"Then again, I'm not risking the bottle of Patron to the weak glued-on handles of a paper bag."

That's why I use a baby sling. The limes can fend for themselves but that bottle of silver is precious.

Can I get advice without having to pay $125 for it?

How 'bout a discount for email?

Thanks. I loovvvvve you and your talents.

Donna

*****I've built my patterns of food consumption and waste disposal around those plastic bags over the last ten years. They mean too much to me to let them fly down the street and into the bay. They bring my food home. Then they seal some of it (fruit, cheese) in the fridge. Then they take it work work with me (sandwiches). Then they hold the garbage that I take to the bin in two-day parcels.*****

THIS. AND, I use them as can liners for my bathroom wastebasket. Damnit. Why should I BUY plastic bags when I can reuse the grocery ones for free? I see epic logic fail here.

"Plastic lasts forever in the environment."

BULLSHIT!!

Somehow, I have bought "survival" food in plastic bags that I have to replace every five years.

I have had plastic fuel cans that only last 2-3 years in a semi-sheltered environment.

I have tarps that are a combo of plastic and nylon that are ten years old and I can see through.

I do take the time to cut up the rings from my 6 pack containers. But that is because when you're on your sixth beer it is fun to do.

> So they've got that going for them.
> Which is nice.

What Gog said.

Paper is great, but I wish chemists were giving us other solutions: "Plastic" bags with the current characteristics, so they last five years hot/cold wet/dry sunlight/darkness, and then at 11:59:52pm on New Year's Eve, they dissolve into cotton candy or something else innocuous.

But batteries should be first, right? We're all pumping several times as much energy into our cellphone batteries as we can extract from them in our usage of a single charge. And they're poisonous and chemically unrecoverable and environmentally expensive to create.

These seem like reasonable daydreams, until you list ALL the things we're asking chemists to do. The battery has to be safe and cheap and charge quickly and charge deeply and discharge immediately and discharge slowly and be portable and work in many temperatures and be easy to ship and easy to dispose of and and and....

Also, jet packs.

"In comparison, organic waste such as food and yard clippings makes up 32 percent..."

I had to laugh at that, too. Really? Organic waste is a problem? I wish it was a much higher percentage.

"think tank" - That term raises a big red flag for me. It gives this image of a hallowed thing whose opinion and judgement is never to be questioned no matter what it is(Just like the priests of the movie 300). So if reason is actually a "think tank", then that is a big red flag for me.(even "NOW" is considered a "think tank" by a lot of people which it obviously is not).Plus you are saying that it is funded by donations. Do they have any disclosure of who funded how much for reason?

"Jay Beeber is a filmmaker and activist living in Los Angeles." - I've never heard of him and I really don't care. His writing makes it sound too much like he has been bribed by some plastic lobby group(even if he wasn't).