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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 o

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.

samrus 1y ago
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
- fiatpandas 1y ago
  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).
- adastra22 1y ago
  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...
- timeon 1y ago
  The goal of green-washing is to keep 'unlimited' growth.
mcv 1y ago
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.
- alexchamberlain 1y ago
  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...
  - vanviegen 1y ago
    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.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      > 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.
      - vanviegen 1y ago
        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-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2022.750199/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...
sircastor 1y ago
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.
- 2III7 1y ago
  Why not have the bags in the cart and put the scanned products straight into the bags?
  - bcraven 1y ago
    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)
upcoming-sesame 1y ago
For fruits and vegetables - Why is a bag needed at all ? I just put my fruits and vegetables directly on the conveyor belt.
- mschild 1y ago
  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.
gspr 1y ago
> 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.
- varjag 1y ago
  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.
darkwater 1y ago
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.
- upcoming-sesame 1y ago
  doesn't it add significant weight to the price ?
  - darkwater 1y ago
    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.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      I've never seen a meat counter employee re-zero the scale after putting a container or wrap on it. I do occasionally see them reading -0.1oz or something initially, presumably to avoid the need for the employees to zero it out each time they weigh something.
      - darkwater 1y ago
        My feeling is that they have a few presets available for the containers they use, but it totally can be changed to a custom one.
- shellfishgene 1y ago
  I don't think containers that come from the customer are allowed behind the counter here for food safety reasons.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    Here they put a sheet (that they would use anyway) on the scale to separate it physically from the container, and what enters the container doesn't leave it (or goes to the trash).
samplefruit 1y ago
[dead]
elric 1y ago
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.
- eptcyka 1y ago
  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.
  - elric 1y ago
    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.
- oniony 1y ago
  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.
throwawayffffas 1y ago
Plastic bags are making a comeback. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plastic-bags-rise-online-shopping-ocado-b2813230.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plastic-bags...

samrus 1y ago

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

fiatpandas 1y ago
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).
adastra22 1y ago
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...
timeon 1y ago
The goal of green-washing is to keep 'unlimited' growth.

mcv 1y ago

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.

alexchamberlain 1y ago
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...
- vanviegen 1y ago
  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.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    > 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.
    - vanviegen 1y ago
      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-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2022.750199/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...

sircastor 1y ago

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.

2III7 1y ago
Why not have the bags in the cart and put the scanned products straight into the bags?
- bcraven 1y ago
  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)

upcoming-sesame 1y ago

For fruits and vegetables - Why is a bag needed at all ? I just put my fruits and vegetables directly on the conveyor belt.

mschild 1y ago
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.

gspr 1y ago

> 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.

varjag 1y ago
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.

darkwater 1y ago

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.

upcoming-sesame 1y ago
doesn't it add significant weight to the price ?
- darkwater 1y ago
  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.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I've never seen a meat counter employee re-zero the scale after putting a container or wrap on it. I do occasionally see them reading -0.1oz or something initially, presumably to avoid the need for the employees to zero it out each time they weigh something.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      My feeling is that they have a few presets available for the containers they use, but it totally can be changed to a custom one.
shellfishgene 1y ago
I don't think containers that come from the customer are allowed behind the counter here for food safety reasons.
- darkwater 1y ago
  Here they put a sheet (that they would use anyway) on the scale to separate it physically from the container, and what enters the container doesn't leave it (or goes to the trash).

samplefruit 1y ago

[dead]

elric 1y ago

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.

eptcyka 1y ago
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.
- elric 1y ago
  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.
oniony 1y ago
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.

throwawayffffas 1y ago

Plastic bags are making a comeback. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plastic-bags-rise-online-shopping-ocado-b2813230.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plastic-bags...