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https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/bans-on-plastic-bags-can-backfire
Governments are increasingly banning the use of plastic products, such as carryout bags, straws, utensils, and microbeads. The goal is to reduce the amount of plastic going into landfills and waterways. And the logic is that banning something should make it less abundant.
However, this logic falls short if people actually reuse those items instead of buying new ones. For example, so-called “single-use” plastic carryout bags can have a multitude of unseen second lives—as trash-bin liners, dog poop bags, and storage receptacles.
A U.K. government study calculated that a shopper would need to reuse a cotton carryout bag 131 times to reduce its global warming potential—its expected total contribution to climate change—below that of plastic carryout bags used once to carry newly purchased goods. To have less impact on the climate than plastic carryout bags also reused as trash bags, consumers would need to use the cotton bag 327 times.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rich on Wednesday August 07 2019, @11:58AM
...is the plastic around pre-packaged items. I just went to the kitchen and got out the scales. A rather large and sturdy plastic carrybag with two solid attached handles came at 25g. An empty pack that held 150g of sliced ham weighed in at 26g, alone. Once the carrybag is reasonably loaded, it will amount to maybe a tenth of the total plastic waste. The other 90% are waste after single use, while the carrybag gets reused a few times, before it meets its fate as trash bag (saving one of those).
In the end we're talking about plastic carrybags being responsible for a single digit percentage of waste. To me, it looks like the wrong thing to start with if one is serious about reducing waste levels. I have wondered before where the push to reduce exactly these comes from. I could only imagine that the intent is more about selling upmarket options or adding a "premium" touch to checkout zones (who wants to see poor people carry around plastic bags?).
And let us not get started on compound (eg. carton/metalized plastics for drinks) material containers. To solve the issue, standardized reusable containers would be best, which are refilled at the point of sale. But that would require, god help us, the state telling free people to stick to mandated standards.