Frustration as latest talks on global plastic treaty close

We all need to make decisions thinking about 7 generations after us like Native American Tribes teach.

Many places have legally removed plastic in commonly used items.

Where I shop, plastic bags are provided for free. If they charged $1/bag, our weekly cart of 40+ bags would never happen. We'd always show up with washable cloth bags to carry our items instead, or we'd have bins in our car trunk to secure the items for the drive home. Little things can matter. Same for plastic straws, though cleaning reusable straws isn't exactly the highest thing on my list of joyful activities. I use small pipe-cleaners, which also create waste - plastic waste, but it is much less sense pipe cleaners provide 20+ cleanings before trashing.

We'd always show up with washable cloth bags to carry our items instead, or we'd have bins in our car trunk to secure the items for the drive home. 

Why don't you just do that anyway?

Activists believe they have a laser focus on serious problems. But that laser focus is a form of tunnel vision.

If you limit supply, prices go up. The last few years have seen hyper inflation that has dragged an entire strata of society into poverty. The result is a succession of electoral losses for sitting regimes and a spike in ill health and malnutrition.

There is a limit to the amount of basic stuff that we use every day that can be removed, without having viable alternatives that have lower TCO pollution.

Look around you. Plastic in fundamental to pretty much everything you own and use, including all your tech and everything your food comes in. People will not tolerate being dragged back to the early eighteenth century by activists, whatever their reasoning.

Plastic use will reduce and recycling increase in the first world, but not as quickly as it might have done, now that our economy is sliding. Probably not by much in the developing world, where it is further down the list of priorities. But it isn't going to go away without viable alternatives.

Why don't you just do that anyway?

Convenience. Make it inconvenient to do the wrong thing and people will change their behavior. Making it cost $1/bag would be an inconvenience too, but the retailers here don't want to do that unless every store is required to do it as well - a level field of play.

Where we shop, there isn't a place to fill our own bags, but the "free" plastic bags are setup by the store to be filled and rotated quickly. Other stores do have places for personal bags to be loaded, but they charge more for the actual food as well. It is counter intuitive.

There is just 1 grocery store that I know which will sell you a $10 bag to carry out your groceries. They also don't give "carts" to people for free, so those 2 inconveniences prevent many people from shopping there. The carts are "rented" for a quarter, but if you return the cart, you'll get a quarter back. Minor thing. I've never actually shopped in that store, just saw a video about it online because they want to open one nearby. I knew it wasn't a typical store for our area.

We don't leave cloth bags in our car to prevent mold growing on the bags, so if we shop on the way home from work, which is convenient, we don't have the bags ready to be used. A weak excuse, I realize.

Humans can be smart and can plan ahead. I could remember to place a few cloth bags in the car on the day we plan to shop, but it isn't a habit and I forget. OTOH, if I had been forced to pay $20 for bags last week because I forgot, you'd better believe I'd remember this week.

The economy is going great here. Don't know what this "sliding" is about. There are more jobs than people to do them across all levels. Real wages are up to counter the added costs for almost everything. COVID caused most things to become 20-30% more expensive, but prices have stablized again. We had decades of few/small price increases.

Laws should help people do the right things and discourage doing the wrong things, assuming right and wrong are clear. Unfortunately make wrong things have millions of people claiming they are right these days.

theFu,

Thanks for the response.

Making it cost $1/bag would be an inconvenience too, but the retailers here don't want to do that unless every store is required to do it as well - a level field of play.

Any chance of that happening? Sounds like a letter to your local assembly member is in order.

Where we shop, there isn't a place to fill our own bags, but the "free" plastic bags are setup by the store to be filled and rotated quickly. Other stores do have places for personal bags to be loaded, but they charge more for the actual food as well. It is counter intuitive.

It is counter intuitive. Charge more for not offering a "free" service? As for the place you do shop, is there a suggestion box? Perhaps a strongly worded note.

You are right of course. If you want people to follow a desired course of action, you have to make it easy and cheap. I think that because both Japan and my home country have either banned single use plastic shopping bags or made it a requirement that stores charge for them, I take it for granted that supplying reusable bags is cheaper and easier.

My question was a little tongue-in-cheek, for which I apologise. I just figured that if you were the type of person to clean and reuse plastic straws, you'd also be the first to shun single use plastic bags. I hope at least you reuse them for something, such as trash disposal. On the odd occasion I do find myself with one, I use it to dump a bunch of my daughter's older toys in. If she hasn't asked for one of the toys in three months, off to the incinerator they go. Terrible for the environment, I realise.

Any chance of that happening? Sounds like a letter to your local assembly member is in order.

It would need to be a state law and I don't see that happening. I live in a "red state". The stores aren't inside any city and I don't live in a city - well - not formally. No city has gobbled up the 20K homes here and there are just a few retail store zoned areas at major intersections. The rest of this area is residential, churches and schools. Nothing else.

As for the place you do shop, is there a suggestion box? Perhaps a strongly worded note.

It is a mega-chain, so they seldom do things unless they can do it nationwide. Heck, they don't even have people running the checkout line anymore. Customers check themselves out. Saving hassle is what the company is about - not having extra thin plastic bags available would be against greater convenience. The few times I've spoken with the store manager, nothing was achieved. Corporate headquarters decides everything - and it is 5 states away. The regional stores all charge about 20% more for the same stuff. We shop at both, depending on exactly what we need. Most things come from the mega-chain to save costs. When quality matters, like for fresh steaks or fresh seafood, we use the more expensive stores, but those items are usually 2x the price.

We do reuse many of the plastic bags, but not all of them. The mega-store has a plastic bag recycle box, I think. The bags rip really easily, so if there's anything with fluids, it will leak. I do put veggie cuttings into them to make putting them into the compost pile a little cleaner, but after that, they go in the trash bin ... with stronger bags on the outside.