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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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So now instead of having plastic bags that can be re-used to line small trash bins or dispose of cat litter or pick up dog poo in the park, people need to buy single-use plastic garbage bags. Smart.
Can you honestly say that you actually use most of those bags? If you do, you're in an extreme minority. I throw away the ones with holes (a good chunk of them) because they can't be used as garbage bags (and they're notoriously difficult to recycle making most jurisdictions not even accept them; grocery stores who "take" them will often just send them to places like grocery warehouses which will unceremoniously throw them away). But despite the fact that I've been using my own bags for months only occasionally supplementing them with the thin, plastic store-provided ones when I physically don't have enough and the fact that I'm choosy with them, I still have a backlog of literal hundreds of shitty little plastic grocery bags sitting under my sink from when I didn't have my own bags. The cat litter or dog poop thing assumes that the person with the bag owns a cat or a dog (less than 60% in California, and this is still overgenerous because cats and dogs aren't the only pets) and that most of them use their grocery bags for waste disposal, which doesn't seem realistic.
That's not even including the gargantuan amount of bags that go to waste before you even get your hands on them. I can't tell you in my short time working at a grocery store how many bags get thrown away because they're defective or get ripped. I vividly remember multiple times getting a stack of literal hundreds of bags that's supposed to go on a bag rack, and a defect across the entire "ream" meant that I couldn't situate it on the rack correctly. Those all went straight into the trash.
I use all of the ones I get as trash bags. If they ban them here I'll have to buy small plastic bags instead of reusing the ones from groceries. Either way it's going to be the same amount of plastic, only now I'll be paying extra.
Not the op, but we do use them in my house too. We use every one that we get. We can line them with paper (we collect our junk mail paper for this purpose) to prevent leaks if there happen to be any tiny holes.
Use a bag daily during dinner prep to collect all the food trash and packaging and stuff that needs to be moved to the main trash can. Also use them as small trash bags in the bathroom and bedrooms.
Using one bag every single day for dinner prep just to put its contents in the "main" bin seems wildly inefficient compared to just having a larger bag in your kitchen or bringing those same contents to the trash via a reusable bucket. Using bags inefficiently is better than not using them at all, but it still suggests a net benefit from banning store-issued plastic grocery bags. Having such easy access to them incentivizes people to reuse them in frivolous ways if they even reuse them at all, and I think this illustrates that.
It is somewhat ineffecient spacewise. But my area tends to have fruit fly problems during the summer, so we use the smaller plastic bags to more tightly seal food waste to keep fruit flies from getting to it. Also reduces odors from the trash
or maybe they really don’t? not every bit of trash needs to be contained in a tiny plastic bag.
edit: for example, instead of dedicated bag for cat litter I can usually fit it in a partially empty large trash bag from around the house (as I take it out to the toter). And for dog poop I buy corn-starch based biodegradable bags.
At the least the garbage bag could be made of biodegradable or plant-based plastic.
The road to mitigating climate change and pollution will be filled with small inconveniences. In the grand scheme of things, is it really that big of a deal to spend a few cents on bags that are much more likely to end up properly disposed of to reduce the outsized amount of plastic bag litter and energy/oil spent on creating said bags?