In which I confess to the love that dare not speak its name: plastic bags (a thread) stuff.co.nz/business/money…
1. Plastic bags are actually pretty amazing technology. They cost a couple cents, can hold 1000x their own weight, are durable, and fully recyclable. I grew up with the supermarket freebies, and I love 'em.
2. Counterintuitive fact of the day: Plastic bags are way more efficient to produce than paper or cotton. Like, several hundred times more efficient, especially when reused as a bin liner/storage (‘single use’ is a misnomer). This is from the UK govt review: 
3. That means banning plastic bags will actually make global warming worse, UNLESS people remember to religiously use the cloth bags several hundred times without tossing them when they get manky, breaking them, or buying a replacement when they forget to bring them in.
4. Some people will absolutely do so - but they’re the same minority who reuse, recycle and dispose of plastic bags correctly right now. For everyone else, the cheap/free cloth bags will become the new normal, and treated with the same casual disdain we currently treat plastic.
5. The supermarkets can't believe their luck. Overseas experience suggests sales of bin liners - which they’ve effectively given away for free all these years - will boom. They get amazing PR, even though the packaging/foam/clingwrap is actually a ~300 times bigger problem.
6. It's not just about carbon. Plastic bags do terrible, heart-breaking things when they get into the ocean, and take forever to degrade.
7. However, they only make up about ~0.2% of the waste that goes to landfill. Since they’re fully recyclable and can also be disposed of safely in landfill or incinerated (not NZ), what we really have is a littering problem.
8. Even though banning plastic bags seems like a no-brainer, it may, on balance, have a negligible or negative environmental impact. People seem to increasingly care more about intentions than consequences, which is Sad.
9. If you want to make a difference, eat less meat, fly less (or offset your miles), drive less and bike/walk more, and donate cold, hard cash. Buying a $2 eco-bag really ain’t gonna cut it. The moral of the story: Easy things are easy, but hard things are hard.
