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46 comments on City Launches GreeNYC Educational Campaign
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I've talked to quite a number of people that know a lot of about the paper v. plastic debate and certainly from an energy perspective, it seems paper is the loser. It also takes up more room in a landfill.
I know we have many well managed sustainable forests in this country, but I think we should reserve that for other purposes heating and making furniture.
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
"Some bags will be encrusted with rhinestones and other high-energy-waste decorations..."
DAMN those confounded fashionistas! SUCH troublemakers.
(heh heh)
The cloth bag is too small
Too small? Get a bigger cloth bag then. Or is there just one size of bag in LA? I have several cloth bags that carry more than a plastic bag, and I don't have to worry about too much weight breaking them or double bagging.
making them requires a lot more fuel & water than a paper or plastic bag, and washing them wastes fuel & water too.
Well, since cloth bags predate the use of fossil fuels, I'll go out on a limb and say that they don't need use that much fuel, and they also can be made from old cloth in recycling efforts. Washing them doesn't come up much either; you don't have to wear them, just carry them. The fashion sense concern is pretty minimal (perhaps a skewed LA perspective?). Hardly anyone who would carry a fashionable bag like you described (teenage girls, one would expect) would actually be carrying groceries very often.
And to really cut down on the bags, get a backpack, and carry the heavy stuff on your back (20-30 lbs on the back is a hell of a lot easier than in your hand).
If you're carrying fresh meats and vegetables home in a cloth bag, it had better be clean. If each meat or vegetable you put in the cloth bag already has its own plastic bag, or each dried good you put in the cloth bag already has its own cardboard box, then how are you saving the environment with the cloth bag?
Of course, if these products are all made by enormously fossil fuel subsidized processes to begin with, then the cloth bag is just a convenient way to enjoy the benefits of fossil fuels without feeling guilt for destroying the natural world. :)
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/