The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!
If I bought one cotton bag and used it for my whole life, the argument would seem silly.
In reality, a household can easily gain 5-10 new tote bags a year as businesses hand them out as swag or with legitimate collections of items or paperwork. There's no way to use them all enough to justify their manufacturing.
The point the article is making is that the "use fewer plastic bags" thing was well-intended, but it incentivized an alternative with too many tradeoffs. Businesses could order a ton of bags, and feel like they were being "environmentally friendly" by handing them out. But in reality, they just flooded the marketplace with so many bags that didn't need to be made in the first place.
Very few people are using a bag to the expected life cycle limit, and even fewer are doing it without WASHING, which is key in doing full LCA (life cycle analysis).
Washing and cleaning are surprisingly inefficient and costly (in terms of $, energy, resources, and emissions) compared to manufacturing, and many assumptions about recycling and reuse go out the window once the realistic numbers descrbing how people actually behave replace idealistic assumptions that go into a manufacturers internal emissions calculations.
As someone who loves to use cotton everything- it pretty much never makes sense to use from an LCA perspective (and that's OK).
The average cotton bag has an artificially low number by misleading statistics. Alice uses one bag 100 times, Bob uses 99 bags one time each. If you sample a grocery purchase and check how many times that bag is used in its lifetime it is 50.5 on average. But if you sample a bag and check how many times it is used in its lifetime, it is 2.
Based on my own usage patterns i'd get really roughly that number before they fell apart. The trader joes "burlap" style bag I like would get me about 1 trip a week for about 3 years. It is, notably, plastic lined though.
I bet you're right. Why though? I've gotten thousands of uses out of mine. Even if you shop infrequently that just means they'll wear out more slowly, so surely that's viable for everyone else, maybe with a 7yr break-even point for an every-2-week shopper?
Because people forget their bags sometimes, and now they have 2 more they they need to use every week for 3 years to break even, on top of their previous bags. Because people take home leftovers from restaurants and the restaurant sometimes puts them into reusable bags, but you already have 10 reusable bags at home so it's not like getting another is helping. Because you get takeout or delivery once in a while and the food comes in a reusable bag that you are never going to reuse 100 times, because you already have 20 reusable bags from forgetting them while grocery shopping and taking home leftovers.
Yeah they need to stay in the car. It’s a hard habit to break because we have lived our entire lives bringing the groceries in and unloading.
We actually just get paper bags and reuse them for our recycling items. The paper bag goes into the recycling bin with the rest of the paper.
I actually don’t care if recycling takes more energy. We should save plastics for where they can be best used, and that’s not a one-shot trip to the landfill
Not just that, but they go as far as claiming that single-use Solo cups are more environmentally than using a mug. Literally anything made cheap and quick and with little energy is better by their calculus. Doesn't pass the sniff test, IMO.
Not to mention the microplastics. Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs.
I have a handful of mugs that I've had for decades at this point, a couple even from my parents kitchen that they used some 30 years and probably before then.
And then there's thrift store mugs - sure they were almost certainly trucked to _somewhere_ a long time ago.
I was in a city that did a bag ban. Informally I observed a lot of perfectly fine reusable bags being discard. I believe later on this was confirmed that the total amount of waste from bags actually went up since the bag ban was enacted. This doesn't even count the material and energy use to make the reusable bags. I think you be shocked about the actual number of reuses a reusable bag gets.
Maybe but there are different things going on: The author of the article suggests that many people are advocating different things, and is trying to present evidence to convince people. The commenter simply says "problem solved" because reuse is possible and everyone is already doing it. But that's just not the truth.
Engineers are often the worst at human understanding. They may understand systems and solutions, but they don't understand people. And often what is needed is to advertise to people the thing they ought to do - so they can come up to the level of the engineer's understanding of said thing. Then the engineer also says Advertising is Bad.
Do you realize that plastic bags can be reused too? Some of my plastic bags are clocking up to 10 years now with semi-regular use. My first ever shopper is plastic one and it's closing on two decades of regular use. I also reuse thin single use bags, sometimes multiple times if they hold up. E.g. a single use plastic bag I use for my swimming pool slipper had been reused dozens of times by now, just fine. I also have reusable cotton bags too, I only discard bags if they fail completely, regardless of material or construction.
Point is - blindly assigning black and white, all or nothing labels to generic materials is not smart. And the total lifetime environment harm of each product is not so clear cut as both radical greens and CC deniers try to push on us.
I’ve encountered this same inability to think or count when people claim that the lifecycle emissions of solar panels or batteries wipe out any potential emissions savings from use. It’s easy to confuse people with big numbers!
I bought 4 quite large heavy duty canvas bags in like 2005 and have been grocery shopping with them since then. I almost never buy more than will fit in those (actually, most trips I just take two of them).
Plastic, when used properly, significantly reduces food waste. It's a trade-off curve. Like most trade-offs, optimal is likely somewhere in the middle rather than on either extreme.
The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!
I think it's beyond many people. A typical pattern is that you forget your bag at home and end up buying another one. After this happens a few times you now have an excess of reusable bags such that you will never recoup the "173 times" on all of them.
One solution for this is reusable bags with a deposit that you can give back at the supermarket in exchange for cash. We have this at some supermarkets in Germany.
I imagine part of what makes it difficult is that people can and do reuse plastic bags. If I reuse a plastic bag 20 times before it breaks then you now have to reuse your cotton bag 3460 times, which is much harder.
One argument for PET packaging bans is that there are people for whom the discipline of disposal is hard. If it's true, than re-using cotton bags for 173 times is hard - on average level, not for you personally.
Being far-left is now officially terrorism. Now they will start move the bar one step at a time, one organization at a time, to cut off every political movement that does not align.
Equating the two seems pretty "radically centrist". Also I'm not so sure that's accurate given that the far right continues to gain legal political power in the EU (and the US for that matter).
And a bit rich that it mentions its reasoning included the Kirk assassination. Kirk was starting to make noise about the Epstein stuff, so Trump personally called him and told him to knock it off. Shortly after he was assassinated.
No, they decided only on support for the Kurdish PKK, which is only under right-wing states a terrorist org. Everyone knows they are not one for decades.
IMO this comment perfectly exemplifies the process that advances society's slide towards fascism:
> Just like being far-right was.
This is simply not true. Just like so many lies repeated ad nauseam by the right-wing media machine, it has convinced a huge part of the US population that the opposition genuinely wants to hurt and destroy them, so now they have no problem with doing the same to them. A terrifyingly huge portion of them is actively and gleefully applauding every time their sides manages to "own the libs", right down to citizens being shot while exercising their rights.
If you look back at Nazi propaganda against Jewish people, it's the same pattern. They convinced their followers of so many terrible things this minority group is doing just to hurt and spite "the common man", until said followers were ready to do all those things to them.
When a vice president tells people that minority groups are eating pets and him literally admitting that it's a lie doesn't dissuade his voters from believing it to be true, you have all the ingredients necessary to enable the next Holocaust.
Nitpicking here, but nazi repression was not only against jewish people. Also against other claimed inferior races (eg. tsigans), but also handicapped people, homosexuals... and very relevant to this thread, communists and anarchists.
Yeah, good point. I only mentioned Jewish people because that's where I've seen the strong similarities between the propaganda then and now, but I'm sure there's also plenty of examples for the other groups that were targeted.
Hopefully we are at the beginning of a change, but I doubt this will come only from the UN.
The UN is the only international democratic institution that - even with its many imperfections - prevents the world to fall into complete anarchy. It's quite telling that it gets ignored since so many years by the country that elevates itself as the world defender of democracy, the US.
The UN has voted for decades for ending the embargo towards Cuba. Every year the outcome of the vote, which has always resulted in a great majority demanding the immediate end of the embargo, has been ignored by the US, resulting in millions of Cubans facing extreme economic consequences since many decades. The last time every country except Israel and US voted for ending the embargo (I might be wrong, maybe a single African state abstained).
In all of this, the only seed of joy I see, was seeing the Cubans a couple of years ago, after decades and decades of seeing their economy strangled by the most powerful country on Earth, roll out their own Covid vaccine just at the same time of those of big Pharma - a vaccine that resulted excellent, effective, and cheap. Hats off for the Cubans. Hope to see some other seed like this also in the Palestinians.
What people fail to understand about dynamics between countries, is ultimately there is no supreme court or arbiter of truth. The UN doesn't have authority over any powerful country (or non powerful country for that matter).
People seem to have this concept that there is some supra national legal system, or even moral system that can hold a higher truth than what powerful countries want, but there isn't. When it comes to geopolitics, the biggest and most powerful sets the rules and lives by them (or not). The USA has zero motivation to do something the UN wants it to do, if it doesn't itself want to do it. No one is going to hold it to account.
Ultimately - whoever controls the violence can set the rules. For the last 80 years that's been the US. Maybe that is changing, but not quite yet.
The UN isn't an international democratic institution. For the last 20-30 years it's been a powerless theatre. And it didn't have much power before then either. Because ultimately, whoever has the most nukes and the biggest army rules the world.
> People seem to have this concept that there is some supra national legal system, or even moral system that can hold a higher truth than what powerful countries want,
Can you blame them? The same countries facilitating this genocide have been telling everyone they uphold principles of human rights and democracy, and a "rules based international order*, and that they oppose genocide. Only now are enough horrors breaking through in such a surreal way that people are forced to notice the contradictions.
Its important to note that most of those "irrelevant" countries are only irrelevant because they're perpetually under the thumb of world powers. Hence why they petition the UN. And, hence why empires and somewhat-formally colonial nations ignore them.
Ultimately, a lot of the wealth of the West comes from core countries siphoning wealth from the periphery and propping up psueodo governments to place their thumbs on the scale of world politics. Exhibit A: Israel.
Empires are not exclusive to the West, and those also ignore the UN. For many of the countries under their thumbs, the West has at least sometimes been acting in their defense.
> The UN is the only international democratic institution that - even with its many imperfections - prevents the world to fall into complete anarchy. It's quite telling that it gets ignored since so many years by the country that elevates itself as the world defender of democracy, the US.
It's not been ignored the purpose of the UN is for largely irrelevant countries to petition the world powers to maybe consider doing something. The UN has been so successful because it has no real power over players like the USA.
> The UN has voted for decades for ending the embargo towards Cuba.
Ok? I mean the purpose of the UN is for people to suggest stuff to players like the USA not for the USA to actually do what the UN votes for.
It's weird to claim that one country should be forced to trade with another country. International trade is voluntary on both sides. The US isn't responsible for keeping any other country's economy healthy. It's simply not our problem, and Cuban economic problems are a consequence of their own corruption and dogmatic incompetence. Should the US also be forced to trade with, let's say, North Korea?
The UN serves as a valuable diplomatic forum but let's not pretend that is does have or should have any real power or authority.
The US sanctions countries and/or foreign businesses that trade with Cuba, the embargo isn't simply between the US and Cuba. Because the US has effective control of most of the world's financial system, it is able to enforce this.
Yes, of course. No one is required to use the US financial system. Other countries are welcome to build their own. Why should we allow ours to be used to prop up a brutal and illegitimate communist dictatorship?
One hopeful observation is that I actually have seen coverage of the genocide in a local newspaper this time. N=1 of course (and I'm not sure what other local newspapers have been like), but that's more than before.
The most hilarious thing to me in this story is the PR guy who replied "most of the things sold in the US these days require warnings about causing cancer". And everybody seems fine with that. LOL
It's ridiculous, but maybe not the way you think; Prop 65 in California classified a lot of things as requiring notification, including things like "Wood Dust." so now every apartment building has a sign in the hallway that says "this building may contain chemicals" and everyone ignores it. The law has lead to people being less informed rather than more informed.
I despise Prop 65 warnings in principle, but the damnable thing about them is they may actually have some effectiveness, if this study is to be believed ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11651356/ ): "Levels of certain chemicals listed under California’s law have declined in biosamples from people across the nation. ... Although the law did not require changes to product formulations or processes, interviews with representatives of affected companies have indicated that many businesses did alter formulations to avoid having to post warnings or manufacture special products just for California."
The study has a lot of limitations, and NHANES is not really designed for this kind of analysis, but it sounds like the warnings do well as a cudgel to beat manufacturers with even if regular individuals ignore them. Even more interesting is the knock-on effects Prop 65 has on people outside of California. Overall it seems like an argument to keep them around, sort of.
I remember when I first bought a knife either made in USA or just targeted at that market (not sure: I mean, I don't think it was the first thing I bought made by an USA company, but I've never seen that warning before), and found that warning inside the package I was quite puzzled, like WTF, I though I was buying a good knife, not some recycled hazardous waste-material or whatever this is. Then, of course, I googled and found out that they stick it on pretty much anything, so that plastic handle is probably just like any plastic handle of any knife I held before. But still it was very weird.
They're as silly as they sound. Growing up, there was a sign when you enter the school's bus storage and maintenance area. More recently, I've seen them at Starbucks (for coffee), in the vinegar section of the grocery store, and on untreated lumber.
This isn't California being California, but it is well-meaning legislation getting out-of-hand because of enforcement mechanisms. It's like website cookie warnings. It was a nice idea, but it lead to a silly place.
Replying because I remembered coffee too, and had to look it up. ‘Good’(?) news is that it was decided in 2019(!) that coffee does not require a Prop 65 warning.
Whenever I see these warnings in the wild, I (jokingly... mostly) think to myself: "well I don't have to worry about getting cancer from this because I live in Texas now, not California"
Prop 65 is frequently joked about but at the time it was a resounding success. The drawback is that any item being sold in California that doesn't pay for the extensive testing (to confirm it doesn't contain any of the thousand chemicals on the list from 1985), ends up carrying the label that the item might cause cancer. If Wikipedia is too dry for you, there's a podcast that explains the history and facts well https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/warning-this-podcast-...
I caught that too, though I believe the California warnings are generally of the form "if you can't prove nothing in there causes cancer, then it might cause cancer."
This is the best guide to improve anti-social behaviour in remote workers and disrupt teams. Just refuse to answer when people text you "Hello".
Oh, come on...
Am I loosing time waiting for your "hello" back? Well, guess what: maybe I took it into consideration the fact that you're busy, and that I might be waiting for hours, but not answering at all only makes you a jerk.
This is far from politely refusing "quick calls" when busy. And no: you can't be always busy: if you want to keep telling yourself you're working in a team you need to allocate a reasonable amount of time to social interactions.
Do you really expect me to send you a calendar event invitation to have a quick call with you once in a month? To update you about something that might even interest you? Maybe it's not going to be communicated in the most efficient way possible, as would be with an email, but certainly it will be done in a way that would keep us human beings, not mentioning the fact that it would also improve team work.
If you do, please do not expect me to sit next to you if we happen to meet in person, and be happy and friendly.
The best way to interact with people who feel this way is to not play the games. Eventually the isolated individual will be managed out or adapt to a more sensible posture. Best to work around them until then.
