The Oil Drum: Local

In Taipei it's illegal for a supermarket to provide any bag to shoppers. I think most people bring a wad of plastic bags from home, and reuse them dozens or maybe hundreds of times. This is pretty environmentally friendly, because the bags are reused so many times before being trashed.

I think Taipei's solution is a lot more reasonable than cloth bags for Greens vs. paper/plastic for Normals. The cloth bag is too small, making them requires a lot more fuel & water than a paper or plastic bag, and washing them wastes fuel & water too. I'm sure a lot of people will periodically buy new bags as fashion statements, then toss the old bag in the landfill. Some bags will be encrusted with rhinestones and other high-energy-waste decorations...

In my house in Los Angeles, we take paper & plastic bags home from the grocery store, where they pass through progressively dirty uses until they get broken or slimy. The paper becomes mulch for the garden, and the plastic is thrown away or used in the garden.

One very special paper bag gets to be my lunch bag, until it gets too broken or slimy for that, when it becomes mulch too.

To the top 10 recommendations for New York City I'd add:

x. bag your lunch, and reuse the paper bag. bring a thermos of coffee to work from home.

Today I went to "Vien Dong III Superfood Warehouse" and scored fixings for twelve bulging "Subway" style sandwiches, for about eight bucks. The savings is enough to buy a tank of gas for my car. Replacing a Starbucks habit with a thermos buys another 1/2 tank for me. :)

OT but - has anyone seen Japanese reality TV lately? It's all about forcing D-list celebrities to live together under survival conditions.

In one I saw tonight, two D-list comedians were put on a boat and told that, for the next few weeks they must live on the boat and eat only the fish they caught. They deftly prepared all kinds of meals. I never knew that D-list comedians could cook.

In another one, the Japanese equivalent of a "Spice Girl" made a complex four-course meal entirely of bread crust, in order to meet a $1 price requirement. Spice Girls are frugal cooks?

The Japanese sure do appreciate hardship!

Bryan

I use paper bags for groceries because I can recycle them. I “favor” plastic bags because I have to pick up after a dog. My wife has a big canvas tote she hauls to work; still works fine 16 years later. Plastic effectively never breaks down, not even biodegradable plastic.

“Plastic bags clog everything from sewer drains to the gullets of sea turtles that mistake them for jellyfish. Increasingly, purportedly biodegradable versions were available. Thompson’s team tried them. Most turned out to be just a mixture of cellulose and polymers. After the cellulose starch broke down, thousands of clear, nearly invisible plastic particles remained.

Some bags were advertised to degrade in compost piles as heat generated by decaying organic garbage rises past one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. “Maybe they do. But that doesn’t happen on a beach, or in salt water.” He’d learned that after they tied plastic produce bags to moorings in Plymouth Harbor. “A year later you could still carry groceries in them.””
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/270/

Why throw powerplant fuel into landfills?

Funny you should mention this. At Salon today:
"Plastic Bags are Killing Us."
http://salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/10/plastic_bags/

It would appear that you are, once again, pulling data out of thin air or, ummm, somewhere else. Where is the data on paper consumption? In addition, paper production is one of the most polluting industries we have. Just because you apparently need to waste paper, doesn't mean that the rest of us will experience a reduced standard of living by using cloth bags, which are reusable.

Uhmmm...hate to break it to you...pollution isn't the problem it was in the late 60s and early 70s.

Secondly, most of the paper products we use aren't from America's forests anymore.

Cloth bags. Talk about doing the work for ADM. "Heh, heh, we'll save money on bags by convincing them they should bring cloth bags...", you want to be a tool of big Agriculture, be my guest.

geez, I guess you can fool some of the people all of the time (except me as I'm on to their game.

tstreet,

Paper degrades very well in a compost heap, Worms love it, as well as ,unfortunately, termites and roaches. We have people around TOD who worry about fertiliser after the peak. Worm castings make a premium fertiliser. the only secret is keep the paper wet enough to be edible by the worms. Go to any decent garden supply and look in the organic fertiliser section...duh...its about 3 times the cost of chemical fertiliser

Many people are interested in a small farm as a way to survive the energy downslope. Worm farms are an excellent source of fish bait, or worms can be fed to chickens or farm-raised fish. The secret is to raise your bed, put screen in the bottom and collect the falling worm crap as fertiliser. Then you don't have to stoop to dig worms, and the worm castings can be collected on sheet plastic or recycled plywood, swept up put in a paper bag and sold. Worms themselves can either be sold or bartered for fish.

Paper, if clean, is also recyclable. Recycling companies buy it . Havent you ever noticed the bales of cardboard behind supermarkets? How about the dumpsters behind schools where they sell used paper to help pay for school items like band uniforms? Why do cities collect it and sell it at recycling centers? In Houston they even have probationers working off their community service sepatating paper, glass and plastic from the trash stream.

Tree farms help absorb CO2, and yes, they are renewable. They help both clean the atmosphere and since they absorb light, are positive on global warming. Tree farms, lumbering and paper mills are decent local jobs, and before we exported all those manufacturing jobs to China, the US made millions of tons of paper. Now we send bales of cardboard boxes around half the world. The container ships that go back to China after bringing in Wallmart crap go back with our recyclables-paper, used metals, and cotton rags for the better grades of paper. And this has to change back to the old, frugal methods or our whole world is doomed. And, theres talk of charcoal for terra preta all the time on this site. Paper would make a good source of cellulose.

Sometimes I get astounded at this site. We've got some true scientists and experts, and we also have a bunch of ninnies who talk through their ass. Talking about a forest as non renewable or how paper clutters up landfills when it should be recycled is just stupidity and insulting BMRussellNM and a putting him down is just abhorant and ignorant. Is this a hen party where we pick scapegoats apart?

My grandfather, Eugene D. Ebersole ran the Lumberman's Association of Texas from 1943 until he retired in 1969. Lumbering was the third largest industry in the state for many years, behind cattle and oil. I've recycled for 35 years, and had gardens since I was a kid. And I'm proud of my grandfather. He was a WWI hero, won the French Croix de Guerre for carrying out wounded French soldiers on a stetcher in the Argonne Forest. He was a perfect gentleman, and personally kind. He was a conservative, but of the old fashioned type who was frugal and hard working and believed in the Bill of Rights. Besides his service in running a trade association, he was a fundraiser for the Republican Party on a part time basis, and I loved him and miss him still sometimes.He also kept his family in good style through the great depression, which started when he was about 33 with a wife and two children.

Bob Ebersole

Wiki is your source??

Okay.......right...sure...whatever you say..