The UK banned single use plastic bags at major supermarkets. We all moaned about it for a few minutes, forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it. Even the small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in are now gone in a few super markets - initially, they replaced them with transparent paper-based windowed bags, but then I think people realised you really don't need to see inside the bag, and brown paper bags are back.
Yeah, I still don't understand why brown paper bags aren't more standard for everything.
I do see some manufacturers reducing plastic, fortunately. For example, my box of tea bags used to come wrapped in plastic, and now it suddenly doesn't, and I'm wondering why it ever needed plastic. But there's still so much stuff that comes wrapped in plastic, and often multiple layers of it.
Brown paper, from recycled fibers are often contaminated with mineral oil residue (e.g. from ink on paper) and other unhealthy chemicals, sadly.
There was a report in Germany, years ago, of a range of organic products that failed during testing. They discovered the packaging (recycled paper) was the issue, not the crops and the supply chain before packaging.
So, a _really_ biodegradable cellulose bag is desirable. Even if only to use it I side a brown bag (to stabilise it).
Road to hell is paved with good intentions... I wonder how many here even notice the most important comment here from you and just keep repeating how plastic bags are worse.
Yes they are terrible, but we shouldn't just blindly replace them with anything and call it a day but do the (continuous) investigation for best solution, poisons are these days everywhere.
Wouldn't the best solution be ensuring they all end up in an appropriate landfill rather than a river?
It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India. Meanwhile it could have been buried with their other trash and appropriately managed.
The issue with recycling, as-practiced, is that there's no lifecycle accounting (in many countries, including most of the US).
If we boosted plastic price at point of sale by a recoverable amount, claimable when returning the container for recycling, we'd get higher participation.
Separately, we should also apply the same to the post-return lifecycle: company pays a premium for the material flow, then it rebated that premium upon proof of recycling.
>It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India
See prior comment about road to hell being paved with good intentions.
At some point there are so many bricks in the road, it's direction is so clear, that the intentions are not longer good. At best they are ignorant, but too often they are self serving malice sailing under the flag of ignorance.
New plastic doesn’t have that problem and is incredibly cheap.
Take price as a proxy for resource / energy input and see that new plastic is also incredibly lite on inputs.
New plastic may have some off-gassing / contact contamination concerns though.
Last time I checked, energetically we’re better off using plastic over paper or recycled plastic, and burying the waste… if we could do that reliably, which we don’t seem to be able to.
One is "People don't like bags stuck in the branches of trees and clogging waterways in their parks". Lightweight plastic shopping bags are so thin that a light breeze can pick them up and loft them up into the air easily. They cost approximately nothing - <2 cents retail, significantly less in bulk. It is incredibly expensive by comparison to pay someone to remove them from tree branches and riparian zones - tens of dollars in wages, equipment, and liability insurance. This is a pragmatic reason why municipalities passed bag taxes or bans. Forcing people to use paper or heavier-weight plastic bags that don't blow in the wind, even if they're not in practice "reusable", solves this one. Taxing them 5 cents or 10 cents or 25 cents per bag nudges a high percentage away.
About a year or so ago, somebody in the chain of suppliers of plastic PET bottles for seltzer water, used by several different brands, switched to a recycled plastic with a distinct dark tint to it. Immediately obvious because the product, water, is obviously clear.
My family returned six cases of 15 bottles each to Costco, then found that the other brands at local stores were the same way. A couple of months later the bottles went back to normal. I still wonder if they switched back due to customer rejection of the new plastic, or if they found the new plastic was in some way leeching contaminants.
I'm old enough to remember when supermarkets only had brown paper bags. They were weak and the handles tear off easily, and anything cold will make the bag wet and it will fall apart usually from the bottom. Supermarkets must have spent a lot of money replacing customer's broken items when bags failed even before leaving the store.
So when doing the calculus for brown paper bags don't forget to include the cost goods wasted when they fail.
Thankfully we did the full stupid circle quickly enough that the gray hairs in the paper bag industry remembered this and the current generation of bags lacks the handles so people are forced to carry them from the bottom.
Australian supermarkets have excelled at replicating this paper bag fiasco.
The white plastic bags they replaced are magnitudes of order more durable and able to carry, I should test this, at a guess ten times the weight. Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.
Fortunately the white plastic bags are still available online (eBay / Amazon / etc) so I just buy 50 for my own use as required and use them till they nearly fall apart then repurpose them as bin liners.
They’re incredibly cheap, don’t really get dirty in an unhygienic way, can be washed if something does spill in them, and they fold up in to almost no space.
> Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.
Yeah that's not good, the way they do that is with more plastic in the bags. A single bag weighs as much as 5-10 old timey single use bags.
Those are not the brown paper bags the GP was referring to. Those fall under the earlier category of "forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it". The ones that are left are to replace "small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in".
The handles on brown paper bags are noob traps. You're supposed to hold the bag against your body with one arm, your hand on the bottom of the bag. They work fine like this. I've walked home totaling hundreds if not thousands of miles (two or three times a week for many years) with paper grocery bags like this and never had issues.
I think banning plastic completely in packaging is a much harder ask, as whether it is needed is rather nuanced (if I understand it correctly). For example, it's perfectly possible to deliver cucumbers to an end customer without them being shrinkwrapped. However, to deliver enough cucumbers to enough customers for a supermarket scale, I understand from several documentaries that plastic is still required in that case. (For those outside the UK, plastic covered cucumber is the social barometer for plastic packaging.) Banning plastic bags was easy and simple, and our laws don't tend to deal with nuance very well...
Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me.
Of course wrapping everything non-organic is a no go as well, it would be terrible for the environment. And I'm afraid stopping the production of non-organic stuff ain't happening anytime soon.
I believe the real solution if possible until they fix this is to go to a market or an organic store where nothing is in plastic, at least for fruits and vegetables.
> Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me.
They're different types of environmental. One is "I don't like pesticides and I have money" and the other is "I don't like eternal plastic waste".
Different things, same group of people (money matters aside - people don't buy because it's more expensive, but despite it), no?
The "I have money" part is obviously unfortunate. Buying healthy and environmentally-friendly shouldn't be conditioned by money. The next best individual thing is voting with one's own wallet in the meantime.
The "I don't like pesticides"¹ and the "I don't like eternal plastic waste" are very compatible. Both pesticides and eternal plastic waste hurt the environment in their own ways.
I suppose the target is the restricted set of people who are interested in organic products for their own individual health and who don't push the reasoning far enough to see that their health depends on the environment being healthy in the long term. Or, people who prefer buying organic food and who will make a compromise.
Do you have a different reading?
¹ we will note that organic doesn't mean "no pesticides", and is broader than just pesticides, but I accept the shortcut.
Indeed, but removing the money part of your sentence:
> They're different types of environmental. One is "I don't like pesticides" and the other is "I don't like eternal plastic waste".
Makes its clear that both concerns would come from the same group of people, more or less.
Or not? This is my question to you. Just take my previous comment as "What do you mean, different?".
You have a point with your money thing. Supermarkets absolutely make their choices with individualistic assumptions, taking in account classes of people and their revenues, and I suspect this is how we ended up with this wrapped organic vegetables heresy.
Yeah, the issue is of course that the supermarket sells both kinds of cucumbers, and they need to be able to distinguish between organic and non-organic cucumbers, which is why they wrap one type in plastic. And of course it's better for the environment if that's the type they sell the least of.
So every step makes sense, but the end result looks ridiculous. Maybe they can use paper wrappers instead? Or maybe just settle on one type of cucumber.
The way I understand it, without the wrapping a much larger percentage of cucumbers need to be thrown away before ever being sold, due to spoilage. That's not a win for the environment.
How is this calculated? I know that growing a cucumber has an environmental cost but so does producing plastic, delivering it and then using machines to shrink-wrap every cucumber.
This study, for instance, [1] looks at CO2 emissions. Which may be a somewhat limited view, but the effect is rather large: adding 5 wrappers around a cucumber (4 of which being useless) would result in about the same CO2 usage as adding no wrapper. And that's not even considering spoilage after the cucumber has been bought by a consumer.
The way it was explained to me isv that there are so many plastic feedstocks produced by fuel production that it's often most efficient to pay someone just to take it away.
That's basically the economic equivalent of having to pay to get rid of a fallen tree despite that tree then going on to be chipped and sold in bulk to whatever the nearest local place buying chips is.
The feed stock is basically worth nothing, it's the labor and energy investment that you add to it at every step that adds the value.
I'm pretty sure my tea bags are paper, and have always been paper. It's the more recent "pyramid" shaped tea bags that I think are made of plastic. The most recent change to my tea bags was to remove the staple so they could go in organic waste.
I doubt that's made any kind of environmental/ecological impact at all. The cheap, flimsy plastic carrier bags contain orders of magnitude less material than the reusable kind, and had a second life as a bin liner. Now I need to buy bin liners, which are usually made out of sturdier plastic on top of having to get a reusable bag.
Most of the plastic involved in getting food from farm to home isn't the carrier bag or even the food wrappers. It's the massive amount of plastic that pallets of goods are wrapped in for shipping, which happens several times throughout the supply chain.
We should focus on the latter, instead of the former. Pretty much all we're doing is virtue signalling and maybe hoping that it'll make a tiny difference.
Heck, even a marginal improvement in fuel efficiency of trucks delivering to grocery stores would probably do more than these plastic bag shennanigans.
Where I live there are entire fields of crops grown under plastic sheeting, and I do not mean reusable plastic greenhouses, I mean sheeting pegged to the ground. And then the produce is boxed up in plastic, stuck on a palette, wrapped in plastic and delivered to the supermarkets.
Then, when I'm in town I see building projects where the entire building is wrapped in plastic sheeting: eight story buildings wrapped like a parcel in plastic. Even the ground-level hoarding that used to plywood boards is now typically covered in plastic sheeting printed with branding.
And the roadworks: what used to be reusable metal signs and barriers have recently switched to plastic signs and plastic barriers. I get these get battered and broken quickly but at least the steel ones would typically get melted down and reused at their end-of-life. I imagine the plastic ones just end up in landfill or incinerated.
It does kinda make my home recycling efforts seems futile when commercial enterprises are moving in the opposite direction towards more plastic.
There are significantly less palettes being delivered and handled by significantly less people, thus it is far easier to ensure that the plastic used in the delivery process is disposed of properly. Whereas with the abundance of cheap plastic bags that are available on tap to the masses, disposal turns into a mess. I generally agree with you that we should focus on the whole chain and there's lots of easy wins to be had, but decreasing the amount of plastic that gets stuck in trees or otherwise lost in the *environment* is still a good thing.
I fear that this sort of focus on individual actions has made a lot of people rather upset (e.g. the plastic straws debacle) for very little gains. And I worry that it might backfire.
We bring tupperwares when buying groceries for the meat, ham, cheese, fish etc and even if the cynic might say it's just a "feel good" action, well, I still put a lot of plastics in our recycle bin but we halved it since we started doing that (and some other trick). Yes, it definitely feels good.
Since all our local markets have introduced handheld scanners, I don't even bring my bags in. I put everything in the cart barcode up, get to the checkout, scan everything, pay, and go.
When I get to the car I unload into the bags. I'm sure it's not a thing for everyone, but I feel like I'm cutting out a fair bit of shuffling.
I get the impression that the 'handheld scanner' may be tethered to the till (like in B&Q) rather than one you can carry round with you (like Sainsbury's/Asda/Tesco)
These days, you never hear about reduce, reuse, recycle, and how its supposed to be in that priority order. When i was a kid thats what we were taught. Now its just recycle, recycle, recycle
My conspiracy theory is corporate propaganda changed it because reduce and reuse decreases demand, while recycle potentially only lowers production cost
I highly recommend the documentary Plastic Wars (Frontline). It’s about how the plastics industry made a major marketing push for recycling starting in the 80s, in order to avoid plastic bans and ensure production continued to increase. It shifted the burden of plastic waste from producers to consumers, and we are essentially still in that conceptual space (at least in the US).
For sure. Plastic packaging keeps the product fresh and hermetically sealed from the clean factory / production depot to your store and eventual home. Get rid of plastic and there will be a LOT more spoilage.
Maybe that's an acceptable tradeoff, but most people don't even realize there is a tradeoff being made...
For most you don't. But if you buy loose cherry tomatoes, having 30 of them rolling around everywhere isn't exactly practical.
Thats easily solved though by simple buying some reusable fruit/veggie net. Essentially the same as what you would use for socks or underwear in the laundry.
> The UK banned single use plastic bags at major supermarkets. We all moaned about it for a few minutes, forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it.
I hope you're right. Here in Norway, the sensible people did what you describe. A large minority has, on the other hand, turned the lack of plastic bags (and straws, which I'm sure they barely even used once in a blue moon before) into a battlefield of the culture wars. And far right politicans of course cater to them. They manage to capture discourse talking about "environmentalism gone wild" and "EU overreach". It's terribly annoying and they manage to waste everyone's time and derail important debates with this nonsense.
Funnily you can still buy packs of plastic straws, just that they are sold as "resuable" with a cleaning brush (which noone likely ever uses). They are simply not the default option now and that's enough to make some people rage.
I would kill for this for when I’m buying fresh produce at the shops. Right now I just raw dog the produce into my basket as putting 4 apples into a plastic bag to ease the weighing and transport home seems like a selfish thing to do to the environment, but something that starts to break down soon after that sounds great.
Why don’t you bring plastic bags from home? They are very much reusable, you don’t have to throw them out. They are also quite easy to fold into small shapes and keep on you, or your car, or whatever. I have plastic bags which have endured for literal years. I also decided early on that if I forget to bring a bag, I either do without or have to go back to get one. You start remembering really fast after a few times of forcing yourself to go back.
Another thing you can do is just take a cardboard box from some product in the store. This may depend on country, but where I live the shops leave products on their transport boxes on the shelves. Walking around the store I can usually find one empty box, or maybe one almost empty that I can move the products from into another box for the same product next to it. Then I just take the box and use it to transport my groceries. Stores just throw those boxes out anyway, so they don’t care if you take them (I have asked). At this point it’s a bit of a game for me, to guarantee I always find a box. I have a personal rule never do anything that would make the lives of the workers harder in the process.
I have a cupboard full of bags at home I can reuse. It's right next to my door. Really easy to get to.
75% of the time I forget to take a bag to my car.
As well as all the single use bags (paper and plastic) I bought, I also have jute bags that I got years ago and are still holding up. I like them better as they are bigger and stronger.
Even if I managed to get a bag, the other 75% of the time I forget to take it into the shop and leave it in my car.
Even if I manage all of that, 25% of the time I will end up not having enough bags.
What I would like to see is some kind of deposit system with stronger bags (like my jute bags). Then when I actually remember I can bring them back to the store for someone else to use.
The trick is to always have them where you will need them. I always have one or two in my backpack, in my car, in my luggage when I travel... Their size and weight is almost nothing and the only effort is putting them back after use. Which is where it occasionally fails, sure.
Reuse is significantly more effective than recycling. Bothering is something we should indeed do. Though yes, disposing of bags properly is also much superior to just throwing them on the floor.
> 75% of the time I forget to take a bag to my car.
Then take a bunch in the other 25%. You can just leave them in the car.
Grab a bundle right now, or whenever you’re at home and remember, and put them next to your keys, your wallet, or hang them on the handle of your door.
> I like them better as they are bigger and stronger.
Sure, use whatever you like. Just don’t let perfect be in the way of good.
> Even if I managed to get a bag, the other 75% of the time I forget to take it into the shop and leave it in my car.
Then go back to your car! It will be mildly annoying the first two times, and the third time it won’t happen. I mentioned exactly that in my comment.
> Even if I manage all of that, 25% of the time I will end up not having enough bags.
Then start bringing more. This isn’t hard. Leave the extras in your car.
Or just use the cardboard box approach I mentioned.
None of your mentioned obstacles is insurmountable. On the contrary, they are all exceedingly trivial to overcome with the tiniest amount of will to do so.
Again, force yourself to go back or do without whenever you forget, and you’re going to start remembering really fast.
Additionally, don’t just take them when you know you’ll need them, do it before. Next time you need to leave your house to go somewhere, grab some and put them in your car. Done. Go put some right now next to your wallet or keys or literally on the handle of your house’s door.
Or just use the cardboard box approach I mentioned. You can’t forget to bring what’s already inside the store.
You can bring your own, non-plastic bags. I do wonder if maybe some cultures just don't have this and so the deprecation of plastic bags has left everyone quite confused.
It's a very solved problem, has been for centuries probably. You can even get some with little wheels! If you absolutely can't handle the looseness of the fruits amongst your shopping, you could use string nets.
For sure. But reusing the plastic bag you already have is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than buying a new cloth bag, yet many people never even think of using the same plastic bag twice. Even if some food juice spills inside, you can quickly rinse it off, hang it, and it’s good as new.
In my original reply I was trying to convey that you can be the laziest, most forgetful person, and still have an easy solution.
Reusable shopping bags have been a thing for a long time, but I think for many, they never went back to them after stores banned them as a Covid mitigation.
People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. The impact of a 10 min car ride = 10,000+ plastic bags of emissions. And in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment.
Where did I say that? I was only responding to the assertion "in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment" pointing out that I see it everywhere.
>People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment.
I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.
Sure plastic aren't great for the environment when we're just dumping it out there without much care. Obviously reducing waste and reusing is what we should strive for on all fronts. Demonizing one thing results in overcompensation on the flip side and we know for a fact that that's not where we want to end up either. Remember when we tried to reduce paper use as much as possible because of deforestation? Or saturated fats?
At least microplastics don't make you angry and violent that we can tell.
On the other hand, it's going to be around (relative to pre-emission levels) for a lot longer than the lead (paint gets chipped off and disposed of, we stopped using it in end-consumer products, etc)
Can't imagine this survives napkin scrutiny. A ten mile drive isn't using nearly as much hydrocarbon mass as 10k plastic bags. While most of the plastic hopefully winds up in a landfill, most of the gasoline is water and carbon dioxide by the end. It's tires versus bags. While tires shed, the mass lost in 10min is definitely quite a bit lower than 10k bags or the fraction that escapes the waste pipeline.
30mpg, 10 miles, means two pounds of gasoline, 910grams, knock off or add 100g for ethanol per your preference, a google says about 5grams per bag, so nearly 200 bags.
Nowhere close to 10k, but nontrivial. And, this gets reduced and sometimes outright negated if you reuse the bag. Doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate if plastic shopping bags are the beat choice though.
I don't think replacing them with store bought doggy poo and cat litter bags is better. It's not a reduction and theres no reuse. If you find yourself discarding them outright, then find an alternative I guess.
Don’t forget that a lot of carbon went in to making the road, the parking (deforestation or other land destruction for those should be considered too), the car itself, emissions from tyre wear, brake dust, some plastic for the single use medical devices necessitated by treatment of people struck by drivers, etc etc.
Though what is often forgotten is the insane amounts of plastic used in farming. Occlusion fabric for weeds, polytunnel skins, silage wrap, etc
I think the units there are off, a Camry hybrid is about 100g direct CO2 per km. One widely repeated calculation has total direct + indirect emissions for a grocery bag at 200g. So 1km driven vs 1 bag is a similar magnitude of emissions.
Please be careful of such "metrics/statistics." Their very nature means they're politically and financially incentivized lean towards a higher or lower number than "the other guy." And, of course, a big number is scarier in a vacuum. What if a paper bag is 250g of emissions?
The poster child for me for this is low-GWP refrigerants. Sounds good, right? Well, think about how CO2 captured filtered and compressed compares. I'll leave everybody to argue with their-self on this. Does co2 vs r-whatever use more energy? Less? Does it somehow justify the emissions and pollution of manufacture?
As for a kilo of gas per 10 miles- see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline - says 0.71-0.77g/mL, standard conversion table says 3.785L per gallon. (https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/volume-units-converter-d_...), and finally- since we're comparing burning gas for a car vs using it in plastic: the figure of merit is petroleum usage, not greenhouse gas emission. Technically, plastic and gasoline aren't going to be 1:1. But that's not napkin math anymore unless you're a petroleum engineer/chemist.
Just wash some forever checmicals over the pesticides, that'll do the job. Jokes aside, i raw dog with a quick wash and im yet to have caught covid so it cant be that bad.
I always find it interesting when I visit Italy. The supermarkets there do sell some kind of dissenfectent for produce, and everyone is really strict about using gloves (this was even before COVID). My country has none of that...
As someone who works in a market, eating anything without cooking or washing it first is a bad idea. Most of it is fine, but people are disgusting and there's no way of knowing how many people have touched your apple, if someone's kid managed to lick it without you noticing, or someone managed to push everything off the shelf onto the nonslip mat before they got stopped. Bagged produce can be even worse, given the amount of condensation inside the bag after it warms up on the loading dock and then sits in the cooler. The mister above the fresh greens and such doesn't do much and they regularly get touched and knocked out. The potatoes are probably the best, as the dirt on them is obvious.
If you live in an area with entitled people and spineless corporate rules that don't allow stores to confront people over pets, that's instantly worse than everything else combined. Pets like to lie on the floor, someone's dog has peed on the floor, 5 different random people have petted hugged or picked up that dog and 3 others since they left the house. One of those people is probably a cashier who then handles every item you've bought. And then someone inhaled pet hair and sneezed.
Any washing you do to the produce at home has basically zero chance of killing/removing anything. It's hygiene theatre. People typically don't wash their produce in bleach or soap.
What are you basing this on? If I buy something like parsley and don't wash it then it tastes a bit like fly killer, but if I rinse it thoroughly then it doesn't. Is that just placebo?
Japan recycles but also a whole bunch of their waste is incinerated. I think they super-heat it to reduce emissions but guessing that also costs energy which also secondarily causes emissions.
the places around here are using compostable plastic bags. not sure what it's made of but it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag. one downside is they are green tinted and harder to see what is in there but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it... assuming it's not a plastic that degrades into microplastics.
> it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag
Note that "according to the bag" is very different from "according to your municipality"; my understanding is that most places actually can't handle them, and they might need to divert your compost to the landfill if it has too much of those plastic bags. They can be composed under certain conditions, but whether the facility your municipality uses has those is unclear.
See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
I'd assume those bags would be okay considering they break down after a few days of holding compostable materials, and frequently make a mess in the compost bin. The "compostable" cutlery is definitely not compostable under normal household situations though.
My understanding is most manicipal compost facilities can handle them - the vast majority of manicipalities don't have a facility at all. They are expensive. A home pile won't compost them, a pile at manicipal size is likely a health hazzard and so not a good option.
Most of these at least in my region are made from cornstarch. They decompose well/without "microplastics" but only under correct conditions.
Home composts aren't usually meeting these, their temperature isn't going high enough for full decomposition and you can have traces of polymers left behind. I throw them in the trash for compostable waste because thankfully my collectivity collects these to generate biogas and my guess is they do end up in much larger/managed composts where they can fully decompose.
PLA doesn't actually biodegrade outside of specialist industrial facilities, it was much vaunted as an eco friendly thing when 3d printing started using it, but we rapidly found out it can last decades without breaking down much if at all.
> but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it
It doesn't. The plastics in the ocean don't come from your grocery store. They come from fishing gear and from places without municipal trash service.
Honestly? It's basically greenwashing, it doesn't actually do anything at all. No one ever composts this things, and landfilling or incinerating a bag does not harm the environment.
yeah I mentioned municipal compost because they can get the compost temperature way higher than we can at home scale. It should break down in the big compost piles they have
I've been doing that since before anyone cared, it just seems wasteful to use a bag for a handful of things. I use bags if I buy more than a few of something, or if it's something with dirt on like potatoes.
In the US, produce is rarely weighted and labeled in the produce section with the bag. Only at checkout is it weighed for sale, so no opportunity to tare the container.
we use these fresh and crisp bags. They sound like a gimmick but they really do work. We reuse a bag for months until its full of holes and not doing its job well anymore.
I’ve worked for two refining companies. They aren’t about to rebuild their global infrastructure to make this happen…it doesn’t matter what possible, it’s what corporations can buy out politicians and the rich building a society that benefits them.
You could have said that about motor cars. That the horse industry wasnt going to give up that easy. Its all about incentives
Having said that, deep sustainability initiatives like this require some forward thinking, and i dont see the public buying into preserving their own future when the reaction to climate protesters is eye rolling and the west and east keep throwing the hot potato of blame to each other rather than trying ti solve the problem.
Ideally, the government would introduce regulations to incentivize this for entities for whome the value proposition would, in the short term, be negative. But i dont know if they'll get their act together to do that. So you might be right
There never existed a "refinery" that produced whatever the equivalent of "50 million barrels of crude oil a day" in horses is. "Big Horse" never existed; it was massively decentralized, even when sold at large annual livestock events.
I grapple with this all the time. my wife is very eco-conscious and will scrub out a deeply moldy glass jar just to recycle it (whether the recycling system works is a separate issue here). On one hand there is some truth to the fact that if we all just work together to do the right thing the world is a much better place to live in. Sometimes i don't want to do this (scrub gross shit out) because i'm lazy, other times it feels futile. or maybe its just that the latter is a good excuse to be lazy.
I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do. There are plenty of developing nations where consumption and pollution run rampant and unchecked and unregulated which do tons more damage than me throwing 1 glass jar into a semi well managed landfill.
I mean theres just so many facets to this - does recycle work, does collective action work, or are corporations the real devils here doing much more bad than the collective at large?
i feel that the only way to change anything is through government level policy (which also feels futile), but individual actions do little without policy+propoganda to disseminate the right message and change collective behavior.
Developing nations generally leapfrog by adopting the latest generation of developed world tech.
Imagine people saying they didn't want to adopt mobile phones because developing nations didn't have traditional telephones yet.
This applies to both green tech and to green regulations. They'll look to the EU and China for that as the US is going this one alone again. China recycles 30% of its plastic compared with 12% in the US. Presumably they look at it as an engineering problem to solve and not a fake culture war to protect the oil industry.
Slightly older data here but the trend and the major outlier of the US visible here:
> I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do.
On the other hand, growing poor behind Iron Curtain, thinking about not recycling glass jars was crazy.
The thing is wealthy societies just buy things. We were not only washing those jars but re-filling as well with what we have produced.
And I think same goes when one is 'eco-conscious'. Recycle sure, but buy less.
Agreed with first sentence ( and only). That's why the state must legislate and fiscalize rules that benefit the population.
I don't even condemn businesses (too much). For a single business to be more eco friendly it must raise costs anf lose competitiveness. For a state to mandate these stuff, all businesses will be on the same level - and they'll have to compete for practical or cheaoet ways to be eco friendly.
It's the tragedy of the Commons, and the only way to win is to enforce rules for everyone.
Your explanation assumes that 1) people have full knowledge of everything corporations do and 2) corporations aren't hiding what they do.
Corporations actively use addiction and psychological manipulation. They're not just passively filling consumer wants.
Your drug dealer analogy actually proves the opposite: we hold dealers responsible precisely because we recognize supply drives addiction. That's exactly why we have laws against dealing rather than just treating addiction as purely a demand-side problem. By your analogy, drug dealing should be legal because it gives the people what they want.
Customers wanting or not the product is only one of the path to that. Aligning with competitors to avoid profit reducing change to the market is one way to optimize for money while giving the middle finger to customers.
> people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling
Eschewing the responsibility of companies with money flow the size of a small nation, crazy marketing budgets, plenty access to lobbying and political power at an international level is way worse in my book.
> Corporations don't do things that people don't want to pay for
Have you heard about lobbies and the billion of dollars companies spend in advertising targeting everyone from the moment their mom shits them out in the world?
Are people born wanting an iPhone 98 Max S pro and a Ford mustang gt5000 7.0 ultimate? I doubt it, but they sure are influenced by comics/movies/ads 24/7 into wanting them.
Do you think the average Joe stands a chance again zuck and his friends hiring the top behavioral scientists and paying the 1m a year to make sure their ad delivery platform are addictive as possible?
Every person I know that works "back of the house" says the amount of plastic that you don't even see as a consumer is at least 10x of the final consumer packaging
I've been down this road before, and been brutally downvoted, but I'll say it again:
- corporations are responsible for creating products which can be recycled;
- the consumer is responsible for proper disposal of their waste, and also for electing officials who have actual policies on reducing or eliminating pollution;
- local government is responsible for setting up recycling centers, and for enforcing correct behavior in consumers.
The consumer is at the bottom of all this, directly responsible for polluting the environment.
Oft-stated opinions like yours are lazy and ignorant.
It’s not a radical thought to hold corporations accountable after they have limited our choices and controlled markets. So many things most Americans buy are manufactured needs so built into the culture that we think we need it. Proctor and gamble have written books about strategy that synthesize a market.
ok, but I find this simplification to be what is lazy. Obviously the world isn't as clear cut as only those 3 groups as if they're not intertwined.
And what does "directly responsible for polluting the environment" even mean? If I pay someone to take my trash out and throw it in the ocean am I all of a sudden excempt because I'm not the one "directly" polluting?
Pollution comes from a complex system so it has to be solved as such. Blaming individual participants (specially the ones with less money and power) is reducing the responsability of the rest which is the perfect excuse to do nothing
That's a whole other argument about which I have even stronger opinions - namely about the dismal failure of government, and the flaws in our democratic systems that allow corporations to infiltrate governments and manipulate policies.
The 20 year old me would have been so excited about something like this. The 39-year old (ok 40 next month) is more reserved. It is not that I don't think this will be adapted but more like : What needs to happen (government, civic groups whatever economic forces) for companies to adapt this? It's going to be a slow burn for sure if this needs to work at a global scale but the impetus should begin with incentives, sadly.
I couldn’t just leave an upvote because rather than read and agree, I immediately had the identical reaction and then saw your post. I may as well still be reading the order section in the back of my comic books or the gadgets in Popular Science.
I’m grateful the work is being done because it’s essential but no longer have faith in these things being solved in 5, 10, or 20 years.
It doesn't _only_ solve long-term logistical problems. Plastics are used for things like takeout containers, drink cups and straws, amongst others - things that are only needed for a short time.
What contaminants would result from cellulose-based plastics like in the article? I'd guess probably things that'd at worst make the hot and wet thing taste bad, no?
Bro I’m not agreeing with it, single use plastics are ridiculous. The failure in replacements continues to be what problems they solve for the supply chain.
Unless you want to eat at Applebees, a small, locally sourced, organic, etc restaurant owner can’t conjure up a supply of biodegradable containers. But your local joint can order 5000 of them and keep them in a back room in less than ideal conditions for a year at minimal costs.
Not saying it’s right, just trying to draw attention to reality
Again, not all replacements need to replace 100% or even 10% of plastic use to be able to have an a positive impact. There's space for a short-life plastic just like there's (currently) reasons for long-life plastics
I want my produce wrapped in this plastic not the forever plastic. Maybe the bio-degradable plastic has it's use cases for other special purpose packaging with a very short self life.
I don't know much about this area at all, but it seems like it would be neat to have a plastic that stood up well to heat and moisture, but you could leave it soaking in some petrol/diesel/oil liquid, and it would melt into that and leave you with something still useable.
As I write this, it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature. Perhaps there's something a little less far-fetched that people are working towards?
> it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature
That's what plastic IS. That's why it sounds like it, because plastic is in fact solid hydrocarbon.
So not only is it not farfetched, it exists today, which is also why incinerating plastic for energy is the best possible way to dispose it. You remove the plastic from the world, you reduce the amount of oil pumped for fuel, and you get to use the oil you do pump, twice! Once for plastic, and again for fuel.
It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides. (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
which produces HCl which eats the incinerator. [1] Sure you can build a chemically tougher incinerator and add lime but practically stripping toxins from incinerators is a function of building a stripper tuned to whatever toxins are expected to be in the particular waste and frequently adding something that reacts with them. You can't really "burn up" heavy metals and certain other poisons and those either go up the stack or are part of the ash that has to be disposed of.
A technology you hear about more than you hear about real implementations is "chemical recycling of plastics" through pyrolysis which implement more or less controlled combustion and captures petrochemical molecules that can be used either for fuel or to make plastics and other chemicals: these manage to capture or consume most of the products but some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced when you burn plastic are practically drugs that cause cancer
Municipal waste has a large fraction of waste from demolished buildings which includes wood, concrete, bricks, all sorts of stuff. PVC is a significant part of that waste because it is used for siding, floors, etc.
In a consolidated municipal waste stream heavy metals are a concern because they concentrate in the ash which has to be carefully stored. This kind of system
is supposed to encapsulate heavy metals into slag particles that aren't very mobile and can be incorporated into roads, building aggregates and such but people have struggled to make them work, part of it is that the syngas plant and whatever uses the syngas and cleans up the syngas and/or the products of using the syngas is a chemical factory that depends on the inputs having a certain composition and the composition of a municipal waste stream is not at all constant.
PET is a major thrown-out plastic that's not a hydrocarbon, it's also the most recycled. Polystyrene, funny enough, is easy to chemically recycle but not through pyrolysis, it's the sort of thing you might even demo in a high school chemistry class if styrene wasn't so carcinogenic. It's never caught on because expanded polystyrene is hard to handle, transport and bring back to a chemical factory large enough to efficiently consume.
How is PET not a hydrocarbon (for the purposes of burning it)? It's (C10 H8 O4)n the oxygen makes it not technically a hydrocarbon, but it will burn just fine and cleanly.
Your point about building waste is valid, but I think most of that stuff goes in dumpsters and can be directed to a different wasting handling.
We burned shavings/rejects from a polyester-resin+glass boat building.. in a 200L drum.
That was quite smoky and smelly, but still I think better than just shipping it all off for burying in a landfill. And fiberglass decomposed basically into fine sand too.
Environmentally speaking, shipping it off to a landfill would have been orders of magnitude better; burning it released thousands or millions of times more pollution. Most polyester resins are aromatic, so incomplete combustion can produce a wide variety of quite toxic substances.
I guess we did release some. Mostly soot and half-burned hydrocarbons to be decomposed by solar UV. Still, thinking of all this just being buried for like 2e6 years ... that seems even more wrong.
> It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides
In relation to directly burning oil for fuel, yeah. In relation to other disposal methods, there's still the pretty major downside of being dependent on a non-renewable resource, in addition to…
> (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
Greenhouse gas emissions are still an issue, though, no? Or do the incinerators capture that?
If you were going to burn oil for power, and instead you burn used plastic that for power, greenhouse gas emissions from the burning are roughly similar. However, you skip the emissions from oil extraction and transport, assuming the plastic is burned close to its use / collection.
We sure do, Sweden imports trash (actual trash, not recycling) because it's a huge part of their energy source.
A large amount of plastic recycling is burned, but always in secret, because when people find out they freak out, because they mistakenly think that making some new plastic out of it is somehow better.
Petrol is really quite harsh and includes cancerous chemicals like benzene in sizable quantities. It’s not something you can soak something in and then use to expose to food.
Diesel and other oils tend to be (somewhat) less bad - but there are many oils in food which are nearly identical, and hence anything which breaks down in those situations is likely to breakdown while in food contact too.
Some people are skeptical about biodegradable materials, but honestly, ten years ago nobody believed paper straws would catch on either. I think if we can turn leftover plant waste like grapevines into something useful, there's a real chance to start phasing out throwaway plastics in the kinds of products we only use once and forget.
I already use cellulose based bags for my compost waste, and they only stay reliable for about 3 days of usage after something is put in them. This makes them a huge pain to use. I think they also degrade quite a bit (i.e. shorter lifespan in use) after just a few months because each new roll of bags seems better at the beginning.
I found that using bags for compost isn’t really necessary at all. I just dump the container out each night and clean it along with my dishes. It’s nice this way because then nothing is ever actually rotting in my indoor trash.
Having a stainless steel compost container helps with this, as it’s easier to clean and doesn’t retain odors like the plastic bins.
Ever since energy conservation and environmental protection became a focus, supermarkets have started charging for plastic bags. But I think relying on this kind of approach to reduce usage does not really solve the root problem. Instead of using penalties, we should be thinking of practical and eco friendly alternatives that make people genuinely want to change their habits.
It will require someone like LEGO (others) to fully adopt it and prove its effectiveness, and for the governments to mandate its usage while providing incentives for adoption. However, the plastics industry will likely resist this change strongly. There’s also the issue of monoculture, the ideal is reduction (such as re-use durable cotton bags) — I wonder if plastics bags disappeared overnight wouldn’t people adapt? Probably a few extra trips to the supermarket at the start but shortly after a reusable container wouldn’t be forgotten. There’s more to plastics pollution than plastic bags though, water bottles, fast fashion and synthetic fibers, etc.
This is a novel material with a set of properties and a production "story" that looks rather cool - recycled vines.
If those parameters meet the requirements for a material that you need to use then cool. Use it. I don't see any attributes in this article, which is fine but "stronger than ..." is a bit weak.
The biodegradeable thing is probably going to be key if this stuff can hold hot liquids without poisoning the imbiber or can make plackey bags without falling to bits within seconds.
> These films exhibit a transparency of 83.70–84.30% mm−1 and a tensile strength of 15.42–18.20 MPa. They biodegrade within 17 days in soil at 24% moisture content. These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications. Our research approach of repurposing agricultural byproducts to create high-value products helps reduce plastic waste, conserve the environment, and provide economic benefits to farmers.
Alternatives to oil based plastics have been developed for decades, sometimes with oil industries support. But astonishingly enough, we still burn oil for making unhealthy and unsustainable containers. I wonder what is that force that is pushing us backwards every time we try to tame oil industries.
Why is it that we read about so many inventions like this - once - and then never hear of them again?
Most countries have to import plastic along with their oil. Surely the economics of this gets worse every time oil or shipping prices rise. And more so if you account the cost of waste disposal.
There are economic incentives to scaling up these biodegradable alternatives. Are they not big enough to result in a push?
Google says global oil production is 90 to 95 million barrels per day.
That is a lot of grapevines, grapevines grow slowly, and growing grapes is the best way to use grapevines.
We read about technologies like this because science grad students have to do something, grad schools have low standards for useful work, and universities employ a lot of press release writers.
Per TFA, this is a highly manual one off process with a not-well-scaled resource - a specific type of vine cutting that can only be harvested every other year without affecting the overall vibe health.
So Id wager it's the brutal road from proof of concept to scaled production.
What about paper bags? In the UK retailers have to charge for single use plastic bags. Clothes retailers hand out strong paper bags for free, and charge for plastic.
Supermarkets charge for plastic bags. Paper bags for fruit and veg work well. They also provide quality reusable bags that cost a small amount (£1 or so), and people actually reuse them.
As an owner of 30 trees, mainly oak trees, why the heck don't we do this with leaves...? I throw away 3 bins FULL of leaves every week and I can't even keep up. They drop leaves year round.
Vitis riparia (wild grapevine endemic to the whole eastern side of North America, grows like a weed all over extremely disease resistant and cold hardy) and hybrids with it also produce gum arabic from their spring pruning wounds: https://agresearchmag.ars.usda.gov/2015/dec/grape/
Combined with the high sugars in the fruit and this cellulose things, overall an extremely useful plant.
If I’m not mistaken this is ecologically basically a paper bag that looks like a plastic bag. Remember when we all switched from paper bags to plastic bags to save the environment? The environmental issue isn’t plastic bags, it’s that you don’t reuse them.
That is neat, but not breaking down quickly is why we use it so often and why we find it so useful. We already have and use a ton of cellophane, but stores and producers avoid it in favor of plastic because plastic doesn't meaningfully degrade in the store or warehouse even if climate control conditions are shitty.
The headline is practically a demonic summoning ritual for the naturalistic fallacy. The article is talking about cellulose. We've had cellulose forever. Cellulose is dirt cheap. We are a post-cellulose-scarcity civilization. Extracting it from grapevines ought to be mocked as our century's version of bringing coal to Newcastle.
There's a reason we don't use cellulose packaging for everything and it has nothing to do with grapes.
Hint: moisture exists in the world. Biodegrading in 17 days usually means that it breaks down a lot sooner in conditions we care about.
> Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.
What useful research could we have funded instead?
The argument, which doesn't seem insane, is that this film is useful because it is particularly optically clear and strong, which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose. I agree 17 days is too short, but that seems like an interesting opportunity for future research. I would highlight that the number is 17 days when buried in wet soil, not sitting around on a shelf. Cardboard will break down when buried in wet soil, yet we use it extensively in packaging without issue.
Yeah I know this usage from older people when I was a kid, they referred to any clear thin wrapping as cellophane where to me it was just plastic. My father told me that cigarette packs are kind-of environmentally friendly because they are made up of nothing but paper, tobacco obviously, cellulose acetate for the filters, and cellophane for the wrapper. Recently I got interested into whether they still use cellophane instead of plastic, so I did some * * * science * * * by dunking a wrapper in water (and yes, it did soak up some water) and burning some (it burns cleanly like paper with grey ashes, unlike plastic which stinks and leaves behind hard black tar). So apart from the printing colors, it looks bio-degradable, with the other reservation being that especially the filters will spend a really long time underground before becoming integrated.
That's cellulose acetate, though (or, previously, nitrate.) Cellophane is just cellulose. It's like the difference between drinkable ethanol and ethyl-acetate nail polish remover, or between morphine and heroin. Clearly related but significantly different substances.
> which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose
You know why we've lost so much early cinema history to fire and moisture?
Because silent-film-era film is made of cellulose. It burns. Rapidly. Photography pioneers knew that. They used cellulose anyway because it's flexible and transparent. Right technological decision at the time.
We've known about cellulose properties for literally over a century. There's nothing new here.
> grapevine waste is a concern, and why it’s a particularly effective source of cellulose.
We have markets and prices. If cellulose became scarce enough that the cheapest source for it became agricultural waste, we wouldn't need the government to fund research into an extraction process. Industry would be all over it on its own.
State funding for research is there to solve the problem of industry incentives being aligned against foundational, long term research. What we're looking at here isn't anything like that. It's just one more organic extraction process, another entry in a long tradition of such things.
You know, I'm sure if biodiesel/bioethanol can be a thing, then extracting cellulose from grapevine can make it too. It's just a matter of marketing it correctly ;)
We don't have a good mechanism for waterproofing cellulose without various complicated industrial processes. Finding a way to do that would be interesting research.
But anything involving grapeviles is just ecomasturbation.
Actually, no, it's worse, because it robs attention and funding from real problems. Plastic pollution isn't predominately plastic bags or (plastic straws for that matter) that seem important because the sort of person who writes articles on a laptop for online publication encounters them daily and doesn't see the stream of untreated industrial waste mostly from the big rivers in Asia.
IMHO, the best investment in mitigation of plastic pollution would be automatic cleanup mechanisms, especially for microplastics in the ocean.
In fairness, those industrial waste streams are mostly produced by “recycling” facilities for consumer waste.
The whole plastic straw thing is nuts. The old waxed paper straws were fine. The new “paper” straws are coated in PFAS and way worse for your health and the environment than most alternatives.
This article reminds me of that. Cellulose isn’t a new technology, but, like wax paper straws, it’s apparently forgotten arcane knowledge.
It's interesting to me that you think the point of greatest effectiveness is exactly where I'd say realistically all hope is lost, the oceans being so vast of a surface and volume. This is end-of-pipe thinking where I believe we should really start at one of the many points earlier in the process: industrial consumption of materials and industrial waste management are such points, and as you say protection of waterways from pollution. Given how lousy mankind has proven to be when it comes to collecting and effectively re-using plastic waste while avoiding concomitant pollution of water and air and material down-cycling, the real mistake lies in the sheer enormous tonnage-per-year and its growth of plastic. This volume of production should have never happened in the first place. But of course it has so there's a place for ocean cleanup efforts. But to state that "the best investment [...] would be automatic cleanup mechanisms" while denigrating research efforts to produce better plastic-ersatz to me sounds like futuristic techno-boondoggle-babble, not unlike that crazy 'hyperloop' thing. Automatic ocean cleanup robots! Yaay! LA to NY in under 30 minutes! Yaay! Colonies on Mars! Yaa---wait wot?? People can't even cleanup after themselves or avoid throwing their trash into the next river, but no problem, we'll clean that up in no time AUTOMATICALLY?? C'mon give me a break.
Another day has come around here since, I've slept over this argument, and I still find it genuinely anti-scientific and smug. As for the coals to Newcastle, did you know that there are steam engines that want to be fed particular types of coal, not any type, to run well (I think I learned that from YouTuber Cruise the Cut)? So there's a point to made that sometimes bringing coals to Newcastle is exactly what you want. Other than that we need much more research in all kinds of cyclic processes that we can utilize to make our activities more sustainable. Right now much too much material is on a one-way trip to the landfill or the incinerator, and how to continue mining and farming is solely left as an exercise to the future reader, with no hind- or foresight, at all. Traditionally people used all kinds of wrappings and containers, many of them suboptimal from a modern POV which we now have replaced with all kinds of plastic which is littering the planet, land and water alike. A solution will not be simple or easy, but if cellulose from grapevine can be part of it, that's probably a good thing.
I think it highly depends on your city, county, and country. Aren't landfills still super common in the US? The city I live in Germany indeed incinerates most trash including plastic.
I'm skeptical that new materials like this will meaningfully drive down the demand for virgin plastic packaging. The problem is not just the absence of good alternatives; it's the fact that plastic is the fossil fuel industry's backup plan for the global transition to cleaner energy sources.
That is: in preparation for a decrease in global demand for energy from fossil fuels, the industry is ramping up production of plastic to compensate so that it can maintain profitability (instead of, you know, just slowing down the extractive capitalism). Plastic production is set to triple over the next few decades as new facilities are built to support this transition.
This is why I'm constantly asking: why aren't we planting vineyards in the Wasatch Front? Silicon Slopes didn't work out but can we at least farm some effing grapes?
I don't think there are good or bad wine growing regions as much as there are places where people have figured out how to make good wines. The Finger Lakes had a bad reputation once but people figured out Rieslings and some more affordable whites that reputation changed. More recently it was famous for soda-pop sweet wines like Red Cat but I've had some dry reds lately that weren't as bad as what I had 20 years ago.
Despite there being many great breweries in that region, most people shy away (initially) from a state run by a prohibition-style religion. Probably illogical, but definitely real in my experience.
Great, just what we needed as companies are pushing even more aggressively for planned obsolescence. "Biodegradable" just means "self-destructs automatically so we can keep selling you more".
The UK banned single use plastic bags at major supermarkets. We all moaned about it for a few minutes, forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it. Even the small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in are now gone in a few super markets - initially, they replaced them with transparent paper-based windowed bags, but then I think people realised you really don't need to see inside the bag, and brown paper bags are back.
Yeah, I still don't understand why brown paper bags aren't more standard for everything.
I do see some manufacturers reducing plastic, fortunately. For example, my box of tea bags used to come wrapped in plastic, and now it suddenly doesn't, and I'm wondering why it ever needed plastic. But there's still so much stuff that comes wrapped in plastic, and often multiple layers of it.
Just ban it. There are excellent alternatives.
Brown paper, from recycled fibers are often contaminated with mineral oil residue (e.g. from ink on paper) and other unhealthy chemicals, sadly.
There was a report in Germany, years ago, of a range of organic products that failed during testing. They discovered the packaging (recycled paper) was the issue, not the crops and the supply chain before packaging.
So, a _really_ biodegradable cellulose bag is desirable. Even if only to use it I side a brown bag (to stabilise it).
Road to hell is paved with good intentions... I wonder how many here even notice the most important comment here from you and just keep repeating how plastic bags are worse.
Yes they are terrible, but we shouldn't just blindly replace them with anything and call it a day but do the (continuous) investigation for best solution, poisons are these days everywhere.
Wouldn't the best solution be ensuring they all end up in an appropriate landfill rather than a river?
It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India. Meanwhile it could have been buried with their other trash and appropriately managed.
> happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India
It's not like they like this outcome or are even aware of it. We can't blame the individuals who want to do things properly here.
The correct solution to "broken recycling chain" is not "let's not recycle", it's "let's fix the recycling chain".
The issue with non-reusable / non-recyclable stuff is that we have a limited amount of it and is also environmentally expensive.
Even recycling is not ideal. There's waste, and it costs energy. It's in the end not so sustainable.
The best solution to me is reusable bags and containers (washable, and possibly refundable / returnable) whenever possible.
The issue with recycling, as-practiced, is that there's no lifecycle accounting (in many countries, including most of the US).
If we boosted plastic price at point of sale by a recoverable amount, claimable when returning the container for recycling, we'd get higher participation.
Separately, we should also apply the same to the post-return lifecycle: company pays a premium for the material flow, then it rebated that premium upon proof of recycling.
Yes, and same for reusable containers / bags.
>It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India
See prior comment about road to hell being paved with good intentions.
>road to hell is paved with good intentions
At some point there are so many bricks in the road, it's direction is so clear, that the intentions are not longer good. At best they are ignorant, but too often they are self serving malice sailing under the flag of ignorance.
You have the same problem with plastic. Recycled plastic may not be food safe, and have contamination from whatever it was used for before recycling.
New plastic doesn’t have that problem and is incredibly cheap.
Take price as a proxy for resource / energy input and see that new plastic is also incredibly lite on inputs.
New plastic may have some off-gassing / contact contamination concerns though.
Last time I checked, energetically we’re better off using plastic over paper or recycled plastic, and burying the waste… if we could do that reliably, which we don’t seem to be able to.
There are several separate problems here.
One is "People don't like bags stuck in the branches of trees and clogging waterways in their parks". Lightweight plastic shopping bags are so thin that a light breeze can pick them up and loft them up into the air easily. They cost approximately nothing - <2 cents retail, significantly less in bulk. It is incredibly expensive by comparison to pay someone to remove them from tree branches and riparian zones - tens of dollars in wages, equipment, and liability insurance. This is a pragmatic reason why municipalities passed bag taxes or bans. Forcing people to use paper or heavier-weight plastic bags that don't blow in the wind, even if they're not in practice "reusable", solves this one. Taxing them 5 cents or 10 cents or 25 cents per bag nudges a high percentage away.
About a year or so ago, somebody in the chain of suppliers of plastic PET bottles for seltzer water, used by several different brands, switched to a recycled plastic with a distinct dark tint to it. Immediately obvious because the product, water, is obviously clear.
My family returned six cases of 15 bottles each to Costco, then found that the other brands at local stores were the same way. A couple of months later the bottles went back to normal. I still wonder if they switched back due to customer rejection of the new plastic, or if they found the new plastic was in some way leeching contaminants.
You don't have to make the bags our of recycled paper. You can make them out of new, unbleached paper. Still much better than plastic.
I'm old enough to remember when supermarkets only had brown paper bags. They were weak and the handles tear off easily, and anything cold will make the bag wet and it will fall apart usually from the bottom. Supermarkets must have spent a lot of money replacing customer's broken items when bags failed even before leaving the store.
So when doing the calculus for brown paper bags don't forget to include the cost goods wasted when they fail.
Thankfully we did the full stupid circle quickly enough that the gray hairs in the paper bag industry remembered this and the current generation of bags lacks the handles so people are forced to carry them from the bottom.
Australian supermarkets have excelled at replicating this paper bag fiasco.
The white plastic bags they replaced are magnitudes of order more durable and able to carry, I should test this, at a guess ten times the weight. Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.
Fortunately the white plastic bags are still available online (eBay / Amazon / etc) so I just buy 50 for my own use as required and use them till they nearly fall apart then repurpose them as bin liners.
They’re incredibly cheap, don’t really get dirty in an unhygienic way, can be washed if something does spill in them, and they fold up in to almost no space.
> Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.
Yeah that's not good, the way they do that is with more plastic in the bags. A single bag weighs as much as 5-10 old timey single use bags.
I’m talking about the old timey bags, they’re still available, just not at the checkout of supermarkets.
Those are not the brown paper bags the GP was referring to. Those fall under the earlier category of "forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it". The ones that are left are to replace "small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in".
The handles on brown paper bags are noob traps. You're supposed to hold the bag against your body with one arm, your hand on the bottom of the bag. They work fine like this. I've walked home totaling hundreds if not thousands of miles (two or three times a week for many years) with paper grocery bags like this and never had issues.
I think banning plastic completely in packaging is a much harder ask, as whether it is needed is rather nuanced (if I understand it correctly). For example, it's perfectly possible to deliver cucumbers to an end customer without them being shrinkwrapped. However, to deliver enough cucumbers to enough customers for a supermarket scale, I understand from several documentaries that plastic is still required in that case. (For those outside the UK, plastic covered cucumber is the social barometer for plastic packaging.) Banning plastic bags was easy and simple, and our laws don't tend to deal with nuance very well...
Interesting thing is, the non-organic cucumbers at my supermarket don't come in plastic, but the organic ones do. I never know which ones to get.
Yeah, this is terrible.
Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me.
Of course wrapping everything non-organic is a no go as well, it would be terrible for the environment. And I'm afraid stopping the production of non-organic stuff ain't happening anytime soon.
I believe the real solution if possible until they fix this is to go to a market or an organic store where nothing is in plastic, at least for fruits and vegetables.
> Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me.
They're different types of environmental. One is "I don't like pesticides and I have money" and the other is "I don't like eternal plastic waste".
Different things, same group of people (money matters aside - people don't buy because it's more expensive, but despite it), no?
The "I have money" part is obviously unfortunate. Buying healthy and environmentally-friendly shouldn't be conditioned by money. The next best individual thing is voting with one's own wallet in the meantime.
The "I don't like pesticides"¹ and the "I don't like eternal plastic waste" are very compatible. Both pesticides and eternal plastic waste hurt the environment in their own ways.
I suppose the target is the restricted set of people who are interested in organic products for their own individual health and who don't push the reasoning far enough to see that their health depends on the environment being healthy in the long term. Or, people who prefer buying organic food and who will make a compromise.
Do you have a different reading?
¹ we will note that organic doesn't mean "no pesticides", and is broader than just pesticides, but I accept the shortcut.
> (money matters aside - people don't buy because it's more expensive, but despite it), no?
I didn't say people buy it because it's more expensive.
Indeed, but removing the money part of your sentence:
> They're different types of environmental. One is "I don't like pesticides" and the other is "I don't like eternal plastic waste".
Makes its clear that both concerns would come from the same group of people, more or less.
Or not? This is my question to you. Just take my previous comment as "What do you mean, different?".
You have a point with your money thing. Supermarkets absolutely make their choices with individualistic assumptions, taking in account classes of people and their revenues, and I suspect this is how we ended up with this wrapped organic vegetables heresy.
> I suspect this is how we ended up with this wrapped organic vegetables heresy
It could be that things treated without pesticides might require more protection against things attacking them in transit? Who knows.
It would be quite concerning :-)
That would mean that we eat active pesticides when buying non organic food. Not that it would totally surprise me neither.
We do know that organic markets don't need the plastic though. But they might have shorter circuits as well (which is also a good thing).
> That would mean that we eat active pesticides when buying non organic food. Not that it would totally surprise me neither.
Not necessarily. It could be microbes downstream of pests touching your crops that shorten the shelf life, for example.
> But they might have shorter circuits as well (which is also a good thing).
It's a good thing if you have the time and money to buy things that are more expensive to produce.
Yeah, the issue is of course that the supermarket sells both kinds of cucumbers, and they need to be able to distinguish between organic and non-organic cucumbers, which is why they wrap one type in plastic. And of course it's better for the environment if that's the type they sell the least of.
So every step makes sense, but the end result looks ridiculous. Maybe they can use paper wrappers instead? Or maybe just settle on one type of cucumber.
The way I understand it, without the wrapping a much larger percentage of cucumbers need to be thrown away before ever being sold, due to spoilage. That's not a win for the environment.
> That's not a win for the environment.
How is this calculated? I know that growing a cucumber has an environmental cost but so does producing plastic, delivering it and then using machines to shrink-wrap every cucumber.
This study, for instance, [1] looks at CO2 emissions. Which may be a somewhat limited view, but the effect is rather large: adding 5 wrappers around a cucumber (4 of which being useless) would result in about the same CO2 usage as adding no wrapper. And that's not even considering spoilage after the cucumber has been bought by a consumer.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...
CO2 usage, I get you, but what about the plastic waste?
> Yeah, I still don't understand why brown paper bags aren't more standard for everything
Because plastic is cheaper. As I understand it it's often got a negative cost to it, the companies are paid to take it and use it.
Negative cost? Why? It still needs to be produced and transported, right? I don't understand the business case behind this.
The way it was explained to me isv that there are so many plastic feedstocks produced by fuel production that it's often most efficient to pay someone just to take it away.
That's basically the economic equivalent of having to pay to get rid of a fallen tree despite that tree then going on to be chipped and sold in bulk to whatever the nearest local place buying chips is.
The feed stock is basically worth nothing, it's the labor and energy investment that you add to it at every step that adds the value.
Unfortunately, all the actual tea bags are usually plastic. The wrapping is probably a small percentage of the plastic in this product.
I'm pretty sure my tea bags are paper, and have always been paper. It's the more recent "pyramid" shaped tea bags that I think are made of plastic. The most recent change to my tea bags was to remove the staple so they could go in organic waste.
You'd be surprised how paper-like the plastic bags appear to be.
Could try burning a tiny piece and check how it behaves and smells.
I doubt the advice would be to throw them in the organic waste if it was plastic.
Some plastics can go in the organic waste bins, such as the organic waste bin bags.
Teapigs pyramids are made of cornstarch
Why can't staples go in organic waste? They go into my compost pile and will rust. Iron is like 5% of average crustal rocks and is abundant in soils.
This is also an issue for microplastics ingestion. In the UK, teabags are increasingly made of PLA.
I solved this one with a metal tea infuser and bulk tea in a tin box
Time to switch to loose leaf tea
I doubt that's made any kind of environmental/ecological impact at all. The cheap, flimsy plastic carrier bags contain orders of magnitude less material than the reusable kind, and had a second life as a bin liner. Now I need to buy bin liners, which are usually made out of sturdier plastic on top of having to get a reusable bag.
Most of the plastic involved in getting food from farm to home isn't the carrier bag or even the food wrappers. It's the massive amount of plastic that pallets of goods are wrapped in for shipping, which happens several times throughout the supply chain.
We should focus on the latter, instead of the former. Pretty much all we're doing is virtue signalling and maybe hoping that it'll make a tiny difference.
Heck, even a marginal improvement in fuel efficiency of trucks delivering to grocery stores would probably do more than these plastic bag shennanigans.
Where I live there are entire fields of crops grown under plastic sheeting, and I do not mean reusable plastic greenhouses, I mean sheeting pegged to the ground. And then the produce is boxed up in plastic, stuck on a palette, wrapped in plastic and delivered to the supermarkets.
Then, when I'm in town I see building projects where the entire building is wrapped in plastic sheeting: eight story buildings wrapped like a parcel in plastic. Even the ground-level hoarding that used to plywood boards is now typically covered in plastic sheeting printed with branding.
And the roadworks: what used to be reusable metal signs and barriers have recently switched to plastic signs and plastic barriers. I get these get battered and broken quickly but at least the steel ones would typically get melted down and reused at their end-of-life. I imagine the plastic ones just end up in landfill or incinerated.
It does kinda make my home recycling efforts seems futile when commercial enterprises are moving in the opposite direction towards more plastic.
There are significantly less palettes being delivered and handled by significantly less people, thus it is far easier to ensure that the plastic used in the delivery process is disposed of properly. Whereas with the abundance of cheap plastic bags that are available on tap to the masses, disposal turns into a mess. I generally agree with you that we should focus on the whole chain and there's lots of easy wins to be had, but decreasing the amount of plastic that gets stuck in trees or otherwise lost in the *environment* is still a good thing.
I fear that this sort of focus on individual actions has made a lot of people rather upset (e.g. the plastic straws debacle) for very little gains. And I worry that it might backfire.
We bring tupperwares when buying groceries for the meat, ham, cheese, fish etc and even if the cynic might say it's just a "feel good" action, well, I still put a lot of plastics in our recycle bin but we halved it since we started doing that (and some other trick). Yes, it definitely feels good.
doesn't it add significant weight to the price ?
They simply adjust the tare weight in the scale and that's it. They do it anyway with their own 1-use plastic boxes or sheets.
Plastic bags are making a comeback.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plastic-bags...
Since all our local markets have introduced handheld scanners, I don't even bring my bags in. I put everything in the cart barcode up, get to the checkout, scan everything, pay, and go.
When I get to the car I unload into the bags. I'm sure it's not a thing for everyone, but I feel like I'm cutting out a fair bit of shuffling.
Why not have the bags in the cart and put the scanned products straight into the bags?
I get the impression that the 'handheld scanner' may be tethered to the till (like in B&Q) rather than one you can carry round with you (like Sainsbury's/Asda/Tesco)
These days, you never hear about reduce, reuse, recycle, and how its supposed to be in that priority order. When i was a kid thats what we were taught. Now its just recycle, recycle, recycle
My conspiracy theory is corporate propaganda changed it because reduce and reuse decreases demand, while recycle potentially only lowers production cost
I highly recommend the documentary Plastic Wars (Frontline). It’s about how the plastics industry made a major marketing push for recycling starting in the 80s, in order to avoid plastic bans and ensure production continued to increase. It shifted the burden of plastic waste from producers to consumers, and we are essentially still in that conceptual space (at least in the US).
For sure. Plastic packaging keeps the product fresh and hermetically sealed from the clean factory / production depot to your store and eventual home. Get rid of plastic and there will be a LOT more spoilage.
Maybe that's an acceptable tradeoff, but most people don't even realize there is a tradeoff being made...
The goal of green-washing is to keep 'unlimited' growth.
For fruits and vegetables - Why is a bag needed at all ?
I just put my fruits and vegetables directly on the conveyor belt.
For most you don't. But if you buy loose cherry tomatoes, having 30 of them rolling around everywhere isn't exactly practical.
Thats easily solved though by simple buying some reusable fruit/veggie net. Essentially the same as what you would use for socks or underwear in the laundry.
> The UK banned single use plastic bags at major supermarkets. We all moaned about it for a few minutes, forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it.
I hope you're right. Here in Norway, the sensible people did what you describe. A large minority has, on the other hand, turned the lack of plastic bags (and straws, which I'm sure they barely even used once in a blue moon before) into a battlefield of the culture wars. And far right politicans of course cater to them. They manage to capture discourse talking about "environmentalism gone wild" and "EU overreach". It's terribly annoying and they manage to waste everyone's time and derail important debates with this nonsense.
Funnily you can still buy packs of plastic straws, just that they are sold as "resuable" with a cleaning brush (which noone likely ever uses). They are simply not the default option now and that's enough to make some people rage.
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I would kill for this for when I’m buying fresh produce at the shops. Right now I just raw dog the produce into my basket as putting 4 apples into a plastic bag to ease the weighing and transport home seems like a selfish thing to do to the environment, but something that starts to break down soon after that sounds great.
Why don’t you bring plastic bags from home? They are very much reusable, you don’t have to throw them out. They are also quite easy to fold into small shapes and keep on you, or your car, or whatever. I have plastic bags which have endured for literal years. I also decided early on that if I forget to bring a bag, I either do without or have to go back to get one. You start remembering really fast after a few times of forcing yourself to go back.
Another thing you can do is just take a cardboard box from some product in the store. This may depend on country, but where I live the shops leave products on their transport boxes on the shelves. Walking around the store I can usually find one empty box, or maybe one almost empty that I can move the products from into another box for the same product next to it. Then I just take the box and use it to transport my groceries. Stores just throw those boxes out anyway, so they don’t care if you take them (I have asked). At this point it’s a bit of a game for me, to guarantee I always find a box. I have a personal rule never do anything that would make the lives of the workers harder in the process.
I have a cupboard full of bags at home I can reuse. It's right next to my door. Really easy to get to.
75% of the time I forget to take a bag to my car.
As well as all the single use bags (paper and plastic) I bought, I also have jute bags that I got years ago and are still holding up. I like them better as they are bigger and stronger.
Even if I managed to get a bag, the other 75% of the time I forget to take it into the shop and leave it in my car.
Even if I manage all of that, 25% of the time I will end up not having enough bags.
What I would like to see is some kind of deposit system with stronger bags (like my jute bags). Then when I actually remember I can bring them back to the store for someone else to use.
Would it make sense to keep those bags in your car? Or in some of your pockets even ?
The trick is to always have them where you will need them. I always have one or two in my backpack, in my car, in my luggage when I travel... Their size and weight is almost nothing and the only effort is putting them back after use. Which is where it occasionally fails, sure.
The trick is to not bother, just make sure your bag ends recycled not in the street or in the ocean.
If you recycle then it's probably just going to a street or ocean somewhere else. Plastic recycling is more or less made up.
Reuse is significantly more effective than recycling. Bothering is something we should indeed do. Though yes, disposing of bags properly is also much superior to just throwing them on the floor.
> 75% of the time I forget to take a bag to my car.
Then take a bunch in the other 25%. You can just leave them in the car.
Grab a bundle right now, or whenever you’re at home and remember, and put them next to your keys, your wallet, or hang them on the handle of your door.
> I like them better as they are bigger and stronger.
Sure, use whatever you like. Just don’t let perfect be in the way of good.
> Even if I managed to get a bag, the other 75% of the time I forget to take it into the shop and leave it in my car.
Then go back to your car! It will be mildly annoying the first two times, and the third time it won’t happen. I mentioned exactly that in my comment.
> Even if I manage all of that, 25% of the time I will end up not having enough bags.
Then start bringing more. This isn’t hard. Leave the extras in your car.
Or just use the cardboard box approach I mentioned.
None of your mentioned obstacles is insurmountable. On the contrary, they are all exceedingly trivial to overcome with the tiniest amount of will to do so.
Because I forget them at home most of the time on the way to something else.
Again, force yourself to go back or do without whenever you forget, and you’re going to start remembering really fast.
Additionally, don’t just take them when you know you’ll need them, do it before. Next time you need to leave your house to go somewhere, grab some and put them in your car. Done. Go put some right now next to your wallet or keys or literally on the handle of your house’s door.
Or just use the cardboard box approach I mentioned. You can’t forget to bring what’s already inside the store.
This. HDPE lasts. So reuse it.
Cardboard not so much, but where I live one can just take how many boxes one can haul off various shops and they will just thank you.
You can bring your own, non-plastic bags. I do wonder if maybe some cultures just don't have this and so the deprecation of plastic bags has left everyone quite confused.
It's a very solved problem, has been for centuries probably. You can even get some with little wheels! If you absolutely can't handle the looseness of the fruits amongst your shopping, you could use string nets.
> You can bring your own, non-plastic bags.
For sure. But reusing the plastic bag you already have is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than buying a new cloth bag, yet many people never even think of using the same plastic bag twice. Even if some food juice spills inside, you can quickly rinse it off, hang it, and it’s good as new.
In my original reply I was trying to convey that you can be the laziest, most forgetful person, and still have an easy solution.
Reusable shopping bags have been a thing for a long time, but I think for many, they never went back to them after stores banned them as a Covid mitigation.
Oh interesting, I don't think we had that ban where I live. We had many, many restrictions, but not that one.
People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. The impact of a 10 min car ride = 10,000+ plastic bags of emissions. And in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment.
I cycle to the supermarket and every bush I pass on the way is full of plastic.
How is that the fault of plastic wrappings and not the fault of people throwing trash onto the side of the road?
Where did I say that? I was only responding to the assertion "in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment" pointing out that I see it everywhere.
it's not about CO2 emissions, it's about plastic waste that eventually degrades to microplastics
>People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment.
I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.
Sure plastic aren't great for the environment when we're just dumping it out there without much care. Obviously reducing waste and reusing is what we should strive for on all fronts. Demonizing one thing results in overcompensation on the flip side and we know for a fact that that's not where we want to end up either. Remember when we tried to reduce paper use as much as possible because of deforestation? Or saturated fats?
> Remember when we tried to reduce paper use as much as possible because of deforestation?
No, I don’t. I do remember a push to recycle paper which was a net win for everyone.
> Or saturated fats?
Great counterpoint. Remind me of the benefits of having microplastics in your testes. Which part of that had scientists questioning historical data?
At least microplastics don't make you angry and violent that we can tell.
On the other hand, it's going to be around (relative to pre-emission levels) for a lot longer than the lead (paint gets chipped off and disposed of, we stopped using it in end-consumer products, etc)
Can't imagine this survives napkin scrutiny. A ten mile drive isn't using nearly as much hydrocarbon mass as 10k plastic bags. While most of the plastic hopefully winds up in a landfill, most of the gasoline is water and carbon dioxide by the end. It's tires versus bags. While tires shed, the mass lost in 10min is definitely quite a bit lower than 10k bags or the fraction that escapes the waste pipeline.
30mpg, 10 miles, means two pounds of gasoline, 910grams, knock off or add 100g for ethanol per your preference, a google says about 5grams per bag, so nearly 200 bags.
Nowhere close to 10k, but nontrivial. And, this gets reduced and sometimes outright negated if you reuse the bag. Doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate if plastic shopping bags are the beat choice though.
I don't think replacing them with store bought doggy poo and cat litter bags is better. It's not a reduction and theres no reuse. If you find yourself discarding them outright, then find an alternative I guess.
Don’t forget that a lot of carbon went in to making the road, the parking (deforestation or other land destruction for those should be considered too), the car itself, emissions from tyre wear, brake dust, some plastic for the single use medical devices necessitated by treatment of people struck by drivers, etc etc.
Though what is often forgotten is the insane amounts of plastic used in farming. Occlusion fabric for weeds, polytunnel skins, silage wrap, etc
Cars don't only need gasoline to exist and work.
I think your math is wrong. Most of modern cars do up to 150g of CO2 per 100km, there are other emissions too, but they are in way smaller numbers.
I think the units there are off, a Camry hybrid is about 100g direct CO2 per km. One widely repeated calculation has total direct + indirect emissions for a grocery bag at 200g. So 1km driven vs 1 bag is a similar magnitude of emissions.
Please be careful of such "metrics/statistics." Their very nature means they're politically and financially incentivized lean towards a higher or lower number than "the other guy." And, of course, a big number is scarier in a vacuum. What if a paper bag is 250g of emissions?
The poster child for me for this is low-GWP refrigerants. Sounds good, right? Well, think about how CO2 captured filtered and compressed compares. I'll leave everybody to argue with their-self on this. Does co2 vs r-whatever use more energy? Less? Does it somehow justify the emissions and pollution of manufacture?
My conclusion is... I don't know.
Thats comically wrong. Human Resting metabolism is on the order of 20grams of CO2/hr.
See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
As for a kilo of gas per 10 miles- see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline - says 0.71-0.77g/mL, standard conversion table says 3.785L per gallon. (https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/volume-units-converter-d_...), and finally- since we're comparing burning gas for a car vs using it in plastic: the figure of merit is petroleum usage, not greenhouse gas emission. Technically, plastic and gasoline aren't going to be 1:1. But that's not napkin math anymore unless you're a petroleum engineer/chemist.
Also most of that weight is oxygen. The mass of carbon from the gasoline in an apples to apples comparison to plastic would be much lower.
It doesn't really make sense to be comparing plastic waste to CO2 emissions though. These aren't fungible.
I can breathe CO2. I don't want plastic in my brain. These two things are not the same.
10 miles in a 30pmg vehicle uses only 1/3 of a pound of gasoline, or roughly 150g. So, nowhere close to 10k or even 1k...
150g is only equal to about 1-5 of the reusable bags in CA grocery stores, depending on the store.
That's emissions. The problem with plastics is not emissions but their biodegradability (or lack thereof).
it's about rubber tires that shed a lot of micro plastic
I quit using bags for produce--I just put the produce in my basket or cart and then straight into the checkout bag on my way out of the store.
The exception is small loose produce like snap peas.
Ugh. That's a REALLY bad idea for anything that you don't thoroughly cook.
That's such an American fear.
Wash it (as you should anyways) and you'll be fine ...
Just wash some forever checmicals over the pesticides, that'll do the job. Jokes aside, i raw dog with a quick wash and im yet to have caught covid so it cant be that bad.
I always find it interesting when I visit Italy. The supermarkets there do sell some kind of dissenfectent for produce, and everyone is really strict about using gloves (this was even before COVID). My country has none of that...
Sorry--I don't understand the risk. Are you concerned about germs? Pesticides? Other?
As someone who works in a market, eating anything without cooking or washing it first is a bad idea. Most of it is fine, but people are disgusting and there's no way of knowing how many people have touched your apple, if someone's kid managed to lick it without you noticing, or someone managed to push everything off the shelf onto the nonslip mat before they got stopped. Bagged produce can be even worse, given the amount of condensation inside the bag after it warms up on the loading dock and then sits in the cooler. The mister above the fresh greens and such doesn't do much and they regularly get touched and knocked out. The potatoes are probably the best, as the dirt on them is obvious.
If you live in an area with entitled people and spineless corporate rules that don't allow stores to confront people over pets, that's instantly worse than everything else combined. Pets like to lie on the floor, someone's dog has peed on the floor, 5 different random people have petted hugged or picked up that dog and 3 others since they left the house. One of those people is probably a cashier who then handles every item you've bought. And then someone inhaled pet hair and sneezed.
I hate to break it to you, but the loose produce in store isn't clean. That's why you must wash produce before you eat it.
Any washing you do to the produce at home has basically zero chance of killing/removing anything. It's hygiene theatre. People typically don't wash their produce in bleach or soap.
What are you basing this on? If I buy something like parsley and don't wash it then it tastes a bit like fly killer, but if I rinse it thoroughly then it doesn't. Is that just placebo?
Water is a great solvent! And, I'm sure you could use unscented soap if you wanted to. (I just use water)
Anyway, if water won't wash the food clean, then one may as well not shop at the grocery store.
I’m pretty sure I’d rather remove the dirt from my vegetables, but you do you.
You can also read the studies that show mechanical action (brushing, rubbing) under running water effectively reduces the bacteria count https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X2...
It’ll never be sterile, but it doesn’t need to be for a healthy human. Probably shouldn’t be either.
Well, I use dishsoap
Why don't you just buy some re-usable fruit bags?
https://www.target.com/p/lotus-original-reusable-produce-bag...
> I just raw dog the produce into my basket
It's crazy, and how fast "glazed" became commonplace.
SAME. It kills me inside when people wrap things like fruits and potatoes in plastic that have natural peel they'll remove before eating anyways
Japan is wild for this, but also pretty good at recycling plastic in general.
Bananas are often wrapped individually for sale. You buy a box of biscuits and they're often individually wrapped in plastic etc.
Japan recycles but also a whole bunch of their waste is incinerated. I think they super-heat it to reduce emissions but guessing that also costs energy which also secondarily causes emissions.
It is energy positive. Their incineration plants provide power.
Most of that plastic can't be recycled so it's probably being burned or thrown away.
Japan incinerates most of their plastic.
Bring a cloth bag to put the apples in after checkout.
the places around here are using compostable plastic bags. not sure what it's made of but it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag. one downside is they are green tinted and harder to see what is in there but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it... assuming it's not a plastic that degrades into microplastics.
> it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag
Note that "according to the bag" is very different from "according to your municipality"; my understanding is that most places actually can't handle them, and they might need to divert your compost to the landfill if it has too much of those plastic bags. They can be composed under certain conditions, but whether the facility your municipality uses has those is unclear.
See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
> See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
That really should be prosecuted for false advertising. Just because I can physically flush Orbeez down the toilet doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
I'd assume those bags would be okay considering they break down after a few days of holding compostable materials, and frequently make a mess in the compost bin. The "compostable" cutlery is definitely not compostable under normal household situations though.
My understanding is most manicipal compost facilities can handle them - the vast majority of manicipalities don't have a facility at all. They are expensive. A home pile won't compost them, a pile at manicipal size is likely a health hazzard and so not a good option.
Most of these at least in my region are made from cornstarch. They decompose well/without "microplastics" but only under correct conditions.
Home composts aren't usually meeting these, their temperature isn't going high enough for full decomposition and you can have traces of polymers left behind. I throw them in the trash for compostable waste because thankfully my collectivity collects these to generate biogas and my guess is they do end up in much larger/managed composts where they can fully decompose.
I thought it was all PLA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingeo
I think there's also "biodegradable" plastic which has cornstarch in it which allows bacteria to degrade it, but that's not the same thing?
PLA doesn't actually biodegrade outside of specialist industrial facilities, it was much vaunted as an eco friendly thing when 3d printing started using it, but we rapidly found out it can last decades without breaking down much if at all.
> but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it
It doesn't. The plastics in the ocean don't come from your grocery store. They come from fishing gear and from places without municipal trash service.
Honestly? It's basically greenwashing, it doesn't actually do anything at all. No one ever composts this things, and landfilling or incinerating a bag does not harm the environment.
I just threw one of those into my compost pile last month and it’s still there. No clue how long it’s supposed to take.
yeah I mentioned municipal compost because they can get the compost temperature way higher than we can at home scale. It should break down in the big compost piles they have
Compostable plastics don't compost if you just throw them in a compost heap, you need to compost them in high-temperature conditions.
I've been doing that since before anyone cared, it just seems wasteful to use a bag for a handful of things. I use bags if I buy more than a few of something, or if it's something with dirt on like potatoes.
We've got reusable mesh bags that we use for this.
Why not use a fabric bag?
Either way good on you
Would be nice to have bags like that with their weight printed on them that machines trust.
Where I live they have scales that tare at the beginning as part of the process of using your own bag.
Do you write down the result? How is the process connected? Smart produce scales log weight => Smart checkout scales compare weight to produce logs?
Write down -what- result.
You put the bag on the scale, it then sets this amount to 0.0
You put the product on the scale, (say 500g of apples), It shows 500g.
You remove the bag, it takes off 4g, you add the bag it puts on 4g.
There is no need to write down the result.
In the US, produce is rarely weighted and labeled in the produce section with the bag. Only at checkout is it weighed for sale, so no opportunity to tare the container.
Today I learned.
Are bags so heavy that you need to tare them out?
We have been using linen bags from Rough Linen and have been pretty happy with those.
I’d guess paper would work fine for that purpose, except that it’s harder for the checkout person.
Ironically i only use the produce bags to wrap raw chicken and beef in an entirely different section.
The plastic bag also prolongs the life of the produce, which is the main reason I want it.
Wasting produce is much worse for the environment than wasting a bag. After all if you don't litter the bag, throwing it out is pretty harmless.
we use these fresh and crisp bags. They sound like a gimmick but they really do work. We reuse a bag for months until its full of holes and not doing its job well anymore.
https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/2824/fresh...
I’ve worked for two refining companies. They aren’t about to rebuild their global infrastructure to make this happen…it doesn’t matter what possible, it’s what corporations can buy out politicians and the rich building a society that benefits them.
when you're inside the machine, it's hard to see how it could work differently
You could have said that about motor cars. That the horse industry wasnt going to give up that easy. Its all about incentives
Having said that, deep sustainability initiatives like this require some forward thinking, and i dont see the public buying into preserving their own future when the reaction to climate protesters is eye rolling and the west and east keep throwing the hot potato of blame to each other rather than trying ti solve the problem.
Ideally, the government would introduce regulations to incentivize this for entities for whome the value proposition would, in the short term, be negative. But i dont know if they'll get their act together to do that. So you might be right
There never existed a "refinery" that produced whatever the equivalent of "50 million barrels of crude oil a day" in horses is. "Big Horse" never existed; it was massively decentralized, even when sold at large annual livestock events.
It's a miraculous thing corporations have done convincing us that we're the ones polluting the environment.
I grapple with this all the time. my wife is very eco-conscious and will scrub out a deeply moldy glass jar just to recycle it (whether the recycling system works is a separate issue here). On one hand there is some truth to the fact that if we all just work together to do the right thing the world is a much better place to live in. Sometimes i don't want to do this (scrub gross shit out) because i'm lazy, other times it feels futile. or maybe its just that the latter is a good excuse to be lazy.
I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do. There are plenty of developing nations where consumption and pollution run rampant and unchecked and unregulated which do tons more damage than me throwing 1 glass jar into a semi well managed landfill.
I mean theres just so many facets to this - does recycle work, does collective action work, or are corporations the real devils here doing much more bad than the collective at large?
i feel that the only way to change anything is through government level policy (which also feels futile), but individual actions do little without policy+propoganda to disseminate the right message and change collective behavior.
Developing nations generally leapfrog by adopting the latest generation of developed world tech.
Imagine people saying they didn't want to adopt mobile phones because developing nations didn't have traditional telephones yet.
This applies to both green tech and to green regulations. They'll look to the EU and China for that as the US is going this one alone again. China recycles 30% of its plastic compared with 12% in the US. Presumably they look at it as an engineering problem to solve and not a fake culture war to protect the oil industry.
Slightly older data here but the trend and the major outlier of the US visible here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-recyc...
If you have a dishwasher that will get the jar plenty clean to be recycled and not smell up your house while it's waiting to be taken out.
> I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do.
On the other hand, growing poor behind Iron Curtain, thinking about not recycling glass jars was crazy.
The thing is wealthy societies just buy things. We were not only washing those jars but re-filling as well with what we have produced.
And I think same goes when one is 'eco-conscious'. Recycle sure, but buy less.
Corporations don't do things that people don't want to pay for.
The entire purpose of their existence is to provide products to customers that want them.
The miraculous thing is people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling products to the people that want them.
If ot weren't for all those drug dealers, we wouldn't have any addicts.
Agreed with first sentence ( and only). That's why the state must legislate and fiscalize rules that benefit the population.
I don't even condemn businesses (too much). For a single business to be more eco friendly it must raise costs anf lose competitiveness. For a state to mandate these stuff, all businesses will be on the same level - and they'll have to compete for practical or cheaoet ways to be eco friendly.
It's the tragedy of the Commons, and the only way to win is to enforce rules for everyone.
Your explanation assumes that 1) people have full knowledge of everything corporations do and 2) corporations aren't hiding what they do.
Corporations actively use addiction and psychological manipulation. They're not just passively filling consumer wants.
Your drug dealer analogy actually proves the opposite: we hold dealers responsible precisely because we recognize supply drives addiction. That's exactly why we have laws against dealing rather than just treating addiction as purely a demand-side problem. By your analogy, drug dealing should be legal because it gives the people what they want.
> The entire purpose of their existence is
to make money.
Customers wanting or not the product is only one of the path to that. Aligning with competitors to avoid profit reducing change to the market is one way to optimize for money while giving the middle finger to customers.
> people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling
Eschewing the responsibility of companies with money flow the size of a small nation, crazy marketing budgets, plenty access to lobbying and political power at an international level is way worse in my book.
> Corporations don't do things that people don't want to pay for
Have you heard about lobbies and the billion of dollars companies spend in advertising targeting everyone from the moment their mom shits them out in the world?
Are people born wanting an iPhone 98 Max S pro and a Ford mustang gt5000 7.0 ultimate? I doubt it, but they sure are influenced by comics/movies/ads 24/7 into wanting them.
Do you think the average Joe stands a chance again zuck and his friends hiring the top behavioral scientists and paying the 1m a year to make sure their ad delivery platform are addictive as possible?
Every person I know that works "back of the house" says the amount of plastic that you don't even see as a consumer is at least 10x of the final consumer packaging
I've been down this road before, and been brutally downvoted, but I'll say it again:
- corporations are responsible for creating products which can be recycled;
- the consumer is responsible for proper disposal of their waste, and also for electing officials who have actual policies on reducing or eliminating pollution;
- local government is responsible for setting up recycling centers, and for enforcing correct behavior in consumers.
The consumer is at the bottom of all this, directly responsible for polluting the environment.
Oft-stated opinions like yours are lazy and ignorant.
It’s not a radical thought to hold corporations accountable after they have limited our choices and controlled markets. So many things most Americans buy are manufactured needs so built into the culture that we think we need it. Proctor and gamble have written books about strategy that synthesize a market.
ok, but I find this simplification to be what is lazy. Obviously the world isn't as clear cut as only those 3 groups as if they're not intertwined.
And what does "directly responsible for polluting the environment" even mean? If I pay someone to take my trash out and throw it in the ocean am I all of a sudden excempt because I'm not the one "directly" polluting?
Pollution comes from a complex system so it has to be solved as such. Blaming individual participants (specially the ones with less money and power) is reducing the responsability of the rest which is the perfect excuse to do nothing
dudes never heard of industrial waste :D ^^^ ?
That's a whole other argument about which I have even stronger opinions - namely about the dismal failure of government, and the flaws in our democratic systems that allow corporations to infiltrate governments and manipulate policies.
The 20 year old me would have been so excited about something like this. The 39-year old (ok 40 next month) is more reserved. It is not that I don't think this will be adapted but more like : What needs to happen (government, civic groups whatever economic forces) for companies to adapt this? It's going to be a slow burn for sure if this needs to work at a global scale but the impetus should begin with incentives, sadly.
I couldn’t just leave an upvote because rather than read and agree, I immediately had the identical reaction and then saw your post. I may as well still be reading the order section in the back of my comic books or the gadgets in Popular Science.
I’m grateful the work is being done because it’s essential but no longer have faith in these things being solved in 5, 10, or 20 years.
Did they reinvent cellophane?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
No chemist, but the outcome - a cellulose film - seems to be about the same even though the production process is different.
Yeah that’s the problem. Plastic solves a logistics problem, not a structural problem.
Are your Twinkies stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a week? No problem!
It doesn't _only_ solve long-term logistical problems. Plastics are used for things like takeout containers, drink cups and straws, amongst others - things that are only needed for a short time.
All of those need to hold hot and wet things for long enough without contaminating them.
Agree, but I don't see any mention of that in the article, so I don't have enough information to argue for that.
I'm sure we can agree though that having 17-day decomposing plastics that don't contaminate with heat and water is a good thing, so I hope it is that.
I’m pretty sure 17 days is far too short for most serious uses.
Who cares. If 50% of the usage is short term stuff like takeout, grocery bags, etc then this wipes out that waste.
If even 5% of the time it fails, no one will buy it for those purposes.
I know that's not true because takeout containers certainly leak more than 5% of the time.
What contaminants would result from cellulose-based plastics like in the article? I'd guess probably things that'd at worst make the hot and wet thing taste bad, no?
Is your shipment of drink containers stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a month? No problem! They’re plastic
My point is it doesn't have to be a complete solution to replacing plastic to be able to have some benefits to replacing some plastics.
You can have local manufacturing processes so that it doesn't have to get stuck in a truck in Texas for a month.
And there'll still be uses for the long lived plastics. You don't have to use one plastic for everything - like we don't today.
Building a box that can last for centuries when you're only going to use it for 25 minutes and toss it is pretty wild if you think about it.
Bro I’m not agreeing with it, single use plastics are ridiculous. The failure in replacements continues to be what problems they solve for the supply chain.
Unless you want to eat at Applebees, a small, locally sourced, organic, etc restaurant owner can’t conjure up a supply of biodegradable containers. But your local joint can order 5000 of them and keep them in a back room in less than ideal conditions for a year at minimal costs.
Not saying it’s right, just trying to draw attention to reality
Again, not all replacements need to replace 100% or even 10% of plastic use to be able to have an a positive impact. There's space for a short-life plastic just like there's (currently) reasons for long-life plastics
They used to make it work with waxed paper. There's no reason why that can't be used for a large proportion of food packaging again.
I assume that anything sold today as waxed paper has plastic in on it, but I don't really know.
I want my produce wrapped in this plastic not the forever plastic. Maybe the bio-degradable plastic has it's use cases for other special purpose packaging with a very short self life.
I don't know much about this area at all, but it seems like it would be neat to have a plastic that stood up well to heat and moisture, but you could leave it soaking in some petrol/diesel/oil liquid, and it would melt into that and leave you with something still useable.
As I write this, it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature. Perhaps there's something a little less far-fetched that people are working towards?
> it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature
That's what plastic IS. That's why it sounds like it, because plastic is in fact solid hydrocarbon.
So not only is it not farfetched, it exists today, which is also why incinerating plastic for energy is the best possible way to dispose it. You remove the plastic from the world, you reduce the amount of oil pumped for fuel, and you get to use the oil you do pump, twice! Once for plastic, and again for fuel.
It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides. (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
Polyolefin plastics like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropylene
and even
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene
are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that. One reason we quit burning trash in many places is the presence of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride
which produces HCl which eats the incinerator. [1] Sure you can build a chemically tougher incinerator and add lime but practically stripping toxins from incinerators is a function of building a stripper tuned to whatever toxins are expected to be in the particular waste and frequently adding something that reacts with them. You can't really "burn up" heavy metals and certain other poisons and those either go up the stack or are part of the ash that has to be disposed of.
A technology you hear about more than you hear about real implementations is "chemical recycling of plastics" through pyrolysis which implement more or less controlled combustion and captures petrochemical molecules that can be used either for fuel or to make plastics and other chemicals: these manage to capture or consume most of the products but some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced when you burn plastic are practically drugs that cause cancer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzo(a)pyrene
[1] Plenty of others contain oxygen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate or nitrogen such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styren... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon
Most disposable plastic is not PVC. Because Chlorine prolongs the life of the plastic, it's specifically used on things that you don't throw out.
In any case incinerators can handle the chlorine - it's so reactive that it's actually very easy to filter.
> You can't really "burn up" heavy metals
There are no heavy metals in plastic, and very little in consumer waste as a whole.
> are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that
But those 3 you listed are the vast majority of the thrown out plastics.
Municipal waste has a large fraction of waste from demolished buildings which includes wood, concrete, bricks, all sorts of stuff. PVC is a significant part of that waste because it is used for siding, floors, etc.
In a consolidated municipal waste stream heavy metals are a concern because they concentrate in the ash which has to be carefully stored. This kind of system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
is supposed to encapsulate heavy metals into slag particles that aren't very mobile and can be incorporated into roads, building aggregates and such but people have struggled to make them work, part of it is that the syngas plant and whatever uses the syngas and cleans up the syngas and/or the products of using the syngas is a chemical factory that depends on the inputs having a certain composition and the composition of a municipal waste stream is not at all constant.
PET is a major thrown-out plastic that's not a hydrocarbon, it's also the most recycled. Polystyrene, funny enough, is easy to chemically recycle but not through pyrolysis, it's the sort of thing you might even demo in a high school chemistry class if styrene wasn't so carcinogenic. It's never caught on because expanded polystyrene is hard to handle, transport and bring back to a chemical factory large enough to efficiently consume.
How is PET not a hydrocarbon (for the purposes of burning it)? It's (C10 H8 O4)n the oxygen makes it not technically a hydrocarbon, but it will burn just fine and cleanly.
Your point about building waste is valid, but I think most of that stuff goes in dumpsters and can be directed to a different wasting handling.
Hah.
We burned shavings/rejects from a polyester-resin+glass boat building.. in a 200L drum.
That was quite smoky and smelly, but still I think better than just shipping it all off for burying in a landfill. And fiberglass decomposed basically into fine sand too.
Environmentally speaking, shipping it off to a landfill would have been orders of magnitude better; burning it released thousands or millions of times more pollution. Most polyester resins are aromatic, so incomplete combustion can produce a wide variety of quite toxic substances.
I guess we did release some. Mostly soot and half-burned hydrocarbons to be decomposed by solar UV. Still, thinking of all this just being buried for like 2e6 years ... that seems even more wrong.
> It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides
In relation to directly burning oil for fuel, yeah. In relation to other disposal methods, there's still the pretty major downside of being dependent on a non-renewable resource, in addition to…
> (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
Greenhouse gas emissions are still an issue, though, no? Or do the incinerators capture that?
If you were going to burn oil for power, and instead you burn used plastic that for power, greenhouse gas emissions from the burning are roughly similar. However, you skip the emissions from oil extraction and transport, assuming the plastic is burned close to its use / collection.
How do these systems handle the extra crap on the plastic?
So do we already do this? And if not, why not?
We sure do, Sweden imports trash (actual trash, not recycling) because it's a huge part of their energy source.
A large amount of plastic recycling is burned, but always in secret, because when people find out they freak out, because they mistakenly think that making some new plastic out of it is somehow better.
Petrol is really quite harsh and includes cancerous chemicals like benzene in sizable quantities. It’s not something you can soak something in and then use to expose to food.
Diesel and other oils tend to be (somewhat) less bad - but there are many oils in food which are nearly identical, and hence anything which breaks down in those situations is likely to breakdown while in food contact too.
Some people are skeptical about biodegradable materials, but honestly, ten years ago nobody believed paper straws would catch on either. I think if we can turn leftover plant waste like grapevines into something useful, there's a real chance to start phasing out throwaway plastics in the kinds of products we only use once and forget.
I can't belive that people have been fooled by the environmental credentials of "paper" straws.
Paper straws are horrible, I don't think they should be chosen as a counterexample to skepticism about biodegradable materials.
Agree. Give me a metal one or design the cups so that I don't need one at all.
I already use cellulose based bags for my compost waste, and they only stay reliable for about 3 days of usage after something is put in them. This makes them a huge pain to use. I think they also degrade quite a bit (i.e. shorter lifespan in use) after just a few months because each new roll of bags seems better at the beginning.
I found that using bags for compost isn’t really necessary at all. I just dump the container out each night and clean it along with my dishes. It’s nice this way because then nothing is ever actually rotting in my indoor trash.
Having a stainless steel compost container helps with this, as it’s easier to clean and doesn’t retain odors like the plastic bins.
I put my bags + compost in the fridge freezer, which prevents smell and also prevents the bag from biodegrading before I can take it out.
I recommend this approach in general.
3 days are more than enough
The major innovation of this paper seems to be a rayon process that uses less harsh chemicals than the current viscose and lyocell processes.
Ever since energy conservation and environmental protection became a focus, supermarkets have started charging for plastic bags. But I think relying on this kind of approach to reduce usage does not really solve the root problem. Instead of using penalties, we should be thinking of practical and eco friendly alternatives that make people genuinely want to change their habits.
Penalties are a key part of the picture though. They help cover the otherwise unpriced negative externalities.
It will require someone like LEGO (others) to fully adopt it and prove its effectiveness, and for the governments to mandate its usage while providing incentives for adoption. However, the plastics industry will likely resist this change strongly. There’s also the issue of monoculture, the ideal is reduction (such as re-use durable cotton bags) — I wonder if plastics bags disappeared overnight wouldn’t people adapt? Probably a few extra trips to the supermarket at the start but shortly after a reusable container wouldn’t be forgotten. There’s more to plastics pollution than plastic bags though, water bottles, fast fashion and synthetic fibers, etc.
This is a novel material with a set of properties and a production "story" that looks rather cool - recycled vines.
If those parameters meet the requirements for a material that you need to use then cool. Use it. I don't see any attributes in this article, which is fine but "stronger than ..." is a bit weak.
The biodegradeable thing is probably going to be key if this stuff can hold hot liquids without poisoning the imbiber or can make plackey bags without falling to bits within seconds.
they linked to the study... https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2025/fb/d5fb0...
> These films exhibit a transparency of 83.70–84.30% mm−1 and a tensile strength of 15.42–18.20 MPa. They biodegrade within 17 days in soil at 24% moisture content. These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications. Our research approach of repurposing agricultural byproducts to create high-value products helps reduce plastic waste, conserve the environment, and provide economic benefits to farmers.
on the lower end of plastics but might be fine for this application: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/3-Tensile-strength-and-i...
seems comparable to LDPE which i think the common bags are made from.
Alternatives to oil based plastics have been developed for decades, sometimes with oil industries support. But astonishingly enough, we still burn oil for making unhealthy and unsustainable containers. I wonder what is that force that is pushing us backwards every time we try to tame oil industries.
Oh I got it: corruption!
Why is it that we read about so many inventions like this - once - and then never hear of them again?
Most countries have to import plastic along with their oil. Surely the economics of this gets worse every time oil or shipping prices rise. And more so if you account the cost of waste disposal.
There are economic incentives to scaling up these biodegradable alternatives. Are they not big enough to result in a push?
Google says global oil production is 90 to 95 million barrels per day.
That is a lot of grapevines, grapevines grow slowly, and growing grapes is the best way to use grapevines.
We read about technologies like this because science grad students have to do something, grad schools have low standards for useful work, and universities employ a lot of press release writers.
Per TFA, this is a highly manual one off process with a not-well-scaled resource - a specific type of vine cutting that can only be harvested every other year without affecting the overall vibe health.
So Id wager it's the brutal road from proof of concept to scaled production.
It's some tough stuff, I had to cut up a bunch once for my smoker, very strange type of wood, extremely stringy.
What about paper bags? In the UK retailers have to charge for single use plastic bags. Clothes retailers hand out strong paper bags for free, and charge for plastic.
Supermarkets charge for plastic bags. Paper bags for fruit and veg work well. They also provide quality reusable bags that cost a small amount (£1 or so), and people actually reuse them.
Isn’t this cellophane?
Amazing! They discovered cellophane!
As an owner of 30 trees, mainly oak trees, why the heck don't we do this with leaves...? I throw away 3 bins FULL of leaves every week and I can't even keep up. They drop leaves year round.
Vitis riparia (wild grapevine endemic to the whole eastern side of North America, grows like a weed all over extremely disease resistant and cold hardy) and hybrids with it also produce gum arabic from their spring pruning wounds: https://agresearchmag.ars.usda.gov/2015/dec/grape/
Combined with the high sugars in the fruit and this cellulose things, overall an extremely useful plant.
It is also used as grafted rootstock for Vitis vinifera in majority of vineyards (at least in Europe). BEcause of Phylloxera [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloxera#Fighting_the_%22phy...
If I’m not mistaken this is ecologically basically a paper bag that looks like a plastic bag. Remember when we all switched from paper bags to plastic bags to save the environment? The environmental issue isn’t plastic bags, it’s that you don’t reuse them.
That is neat, but not breaking down quickly is why we use it so often and why we find it so useful. We already have and use a ton of cellophane, but stores and producers avoid it in favor of plastic because plastic doesn't meaningfully degrade in the store or warehouse even if climate control conditions are shitty.
you could innovate to zero emissions but if the culture is hostile to it or angrily doesn't give a crap because 'culture' - then its worthless
> grapevine
The headline is practically a demonic summoning ritual for the naturalistic fallacy. The article is talking about cellulose. We've had cellulose forever. Cellulose is dirt cheap. We are a post-cellulose-scarcity civilization. Extracting it from grapevines ought to be mocked as our century's version of bringing coal to Newcastle.
There's a reason we don't use cellulose packaging for everything and it has nothing to do with grapes.
Hint: moisture exists in the world. Biodegrading in 17 days usually means that it breaks down a lot sooner in conditions we care about.
> Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.
What useful research could we have funded instead?
The argument, which doesn't seem insane, is that this film is useful because it is particularly optically clear and strong, which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose. I agree 17 days is too short, but that seems like an interesting opportunity for future research. I would highlight that the number is 17 days when buried in wet soil, not sitting around on a shelf. Cardboard will break down when buried in wet soil, yet we use it extensively in packaging without issue.
> optically clear and strong, which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose
You never heard of Cellophane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
Cellophane is still used to refer to LDPE grocery bags in former soviet immigrant diaspora
Yeah I know this usage from older people when I was a kid, they referred to any clear thin wrapping as cellophane where to me it was just plastic. My father told me that cigarette packs are kind-of environmentally friendly because they are made up of nothing but paper, tobacco obviously, cellulose acetate for the filters, and cellophane for the wrapper. Recently I got interested into whether they still use cellophane instead of plastic, so I did some * * * science * * * by dunking a wrapper in water (and yes, it did soak up some water) and burning some (it burns cleanly like paper with grey ashes, unlike plastic which stinks and leaves behind hard black tar). So apart from the printing colors, it looks bio-degradable, with the other reservation being that especially the filters will spend a really long time underground before becoming integrated.
Or movie / photographic film?
That's cellulose acetate, though (or, previously, nitrate.) Cellophane is just cellulose. It's like the difference between drinkable ethanol and ethyl-acetate nail polish remover, or between morphine and heroin. Clearly related but significantly different substances.
> which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose
You know why we've lost so much early cinema history to fire and moisture?
Because silent-film-era film is made of cellulose. It burns. Rapidly. Photography pioneers knew that. They used cellulose anyway because it's flexible and transparent. Right technological decision at the time.
We've known about cellulose properties for literally over a century. There's nothing new here.
The article explains why grapevine waste is a concern, and why it’s a particularly effective source of cellulose.
> What useful research could we have funded instead?
This research seems useful enough to me.
> grapevine waste is a concern, and why it’s a particularly effective source of cellulose.
We have markets and prices. If cellulose became scarce enough that the cheapest source for it became agricultural waste, we wouldn't need the government to fund research into an extraction process. Industry would be all over it on its own.
State funding for research is there to solve the problem of industry incentives being aligned against foundational, long term research. What we're looking at here isn't anything like that. It's just one more organic extraction process, another entry in a long tradition of such things.
You know, I'm sure if biodiesel/bioethanol can be a thing, then extracting cellulose from grapevine can make it too. It's just a matter of marketing it correctly ;)
The point is that it’s like finding research into how to acquire air. It’s everywhere - just go collect some. Who needs this?
I think it’s a valid point.
So... what's the reason? :)
We don't have a good mechanism for waterproofing cellulose without various complicated industrial processes. Finding a way to do that would be interesting research.
But anything involving grapeviles is just ecomasturbation.
Actually, no, it's worse, because it robs attention and funding from real problems. Plastic pollution isn't predominately plastic bags or (plastic straws for that matter) that seem important because the sort of person who writes articles on a laptop for online publication encounters them daily and doesn't see the stream of untreated industrial waste mostly from the big rivers in Asia.
IMHO, the best investment in mitigation of plastic pollution would be automatic cleanup mechanisms, especially for microplastics in the ocean.
In fairness, those industrial waste streams are mostly produced by “recycling” facilities for consumer waste.
The whole plastic straw thing is nuts. The old waxed paper straws were fine. The new “paper” straws are coated in PFAS and way worse for your health and the environment than most alternatives.
This article reminds me of that. Cellulose isn’t a new technology, but, like wax paper straws, it’s apparently forgotten arcane knowledge.
It's interesting to me that you think the point of greatest effectiveness is exactly where I'd say realistically all hope is lost, the oceans being so vast of a surface and volume. This is end-of-pipe thinking where I believe we should really start at one of the many points earlier in the process: industrial consumption of materials and industrial waste management are such points, and as you say protection of waterways from pollution. Given how lousy mankind has proven to be when it comes to collecting and effectively re-using plastic waste while avoiding concomitant pollution of water and air and material down-cycling, the real mistake lies in the sheer enormous tonnage-per-year and its growth of plastic. This volume of production should have never happened in the first place. But of course it has so there's a place for ocean cleanup efforts. But to state that "the best investment [...] would be automatic cleanup mechanisms" while denigrating research efforts to produce better plastic-ersatz to me sounds like futuristic techno-boondoggle-babble, not unlike that crazy 'hyperloop' thing. Automatic ocean cleanup robots! Yaay! LA to NY in under 30 minutes! Yaay! Colonies on Mars! Yaa---wait wot?? People can't even cleanup after themselves or avoid throwing their trash into the next river, but no problem, we'll clean that up in no time AUTOMATICALLY?? C'mon give me a break.
Another day has come around here since, I've slept over this argument, and I still find it genuinely anti-scientific and smug. As for the coals to Newcastle, did you know that there are steam engines that want to be fed particular types of coal, not any type, to run well (I think I learned that from YouTuber Cruise the Cut)? So there's a point to made that sometimes bringing coals to Newcastle is exactly what you want. Other than that we need much more research in all kinds of cyclic processes that we can utilize to make our activities more sustainable. Right now much too much material is on a one-way trip to the landfill or the incinerator, and how to continue mining and farming is solely left as an exercise to the future reader, with no hind- or foresight, at all. Traditionally people used all kinds of wrappings and containers, many of them suboptimal from a modern POV which we now have replaced with all kinds of plastic which is littering the planet, land and water alike. A solution will not be simple or easy, but if cellulose from grapevine can be part of it, that's probably a good thing.
So, celluloid?
Isn’t most plastic waste incinerated these days? Is this material much better for that?
I think it highly depends on your city, county, and country. Aren't landfills still super common in the US? The city I live in Germany indeed incinerates most trash including plastic.
A very good article
Now just ship it before oil industry wakes up and lobbies this to death
I'm skeptical that new materials like this will meaningfully drive down the demand for virgin plastic packaging. The problem is not just the absence of good alternatives; it's the fact that plastic is the fossil fuel industry's backup plan for the global transition to cleaner energy sources.
That is: in preparation for a decrease in global demand for energy from fossil fuels, the industry is ramping up production of plastic to compensate so that it can maintain profitability (instead of, you know, just slowing down the extractive capitalism). Plastic production is set to triple over the next few decades as new facilities are built to support this transition.
(Source: Paraphrasing from my vague recollection of A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon, and also articles like this one https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-production-pollution-foreca...)
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This is why I'm constantly asking: why aren't we planting vineyards in the Wasatch Front? Silicon Slopes didn't work out but can we at least farm some effing grapes?
I don’t know SLC very well but I’d guess it’s a combination of water consumption, and a bad value:land ratio because the wine won’t be good.
I don't think there are good or bad wine growing regions as much as there are places where people have figured out how to make good wines. The Finger Lakes had a bad reputation once but people figured out Rieslings and some more affordable whites that reputation changed. More recently it was famous for soda-pop sweet wines like Red Cat but I've had some dry reds lately that weren't as bad as what I had 20 years ago.
People are making progress in Utah too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_wine
It was a rhetorical question.
Despite there being many great breweries in that region, most people shy away (initially) from a state run by a prohibition-style religion. Probably illogical, but definitely real in my experience.
Here in Oregon, vineyards and especially hop yards are being taken out, demand for alcohol overall is down, and same goes for the related tourism.
Biodegrades into what? Microplastics?
Great, just what we needed as companies are pushing even more aggressively for planned obsolescence. "Biodegradable" just means "self-destructs automatically so we can keep selling you more".
For plastic packaging that you immediately throw away? They aren't pitching making tools or car parts out of this plastic.
Give it enough time and lack of opposition, and they'll... find a way.