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Will COH ban single use plastic bags


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I quit buying anything that comes in a plastic bottle. It was difficult since everything is sold in plastic bottles, but really isn't that hard once you get used to it.

Are You helping anything by doing so? Switching to glass, for example, is causing more energy use to both produce and recycle than plastic.

http://www.wisegeek.com/does-plastic-or-glass-require-more-energy-to-recycle.htm

Even cartons are not good choices, since they are not recyclable, and making paper is very energy intensive. Like the plastic bag argument, you might just be a better steward of the planet by buying plastic jugs...as long as you religiously recycle them.

Quite the opposite of you, I tend to look for recyclable plastic over other packaging, precisely because I can recycle them easily. I recycle glass and metal too, but plastic is easier, mostly because the screw on cap is also plastic, and therefore keeps my recycle bin clean. Of course, the most efficient policy is to consume less. Next, is to reuse the product or packaging (sorry, I'll leave the unpackaged beans and rice to the granola eaters). Last, is recycling, and plastic uses the least energy to recycle, as well as to produce it in the first place. It is only bad if you throw it in the trash.

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It's plain that we generate far more waste now than we ever did pre-recycling, so I am generally hostile to the panacea of recycling, while yet avidly recycling everything possible (I can hold 2 opposing ideas in my head at once!). Samagon, we are kindred spirits: I do just as you do and shop with a "no plastic" ideal in mind, honored sometimes in the breach. Sour cream, for instance. But I could be making that myself with cream and buttermilk in a sterile jar left on the counter overnight, so I really have no excuse there.

I include your faithfully recycled plastics in that waste stream, RedScare, because they are not cycling into more containers but instead into nonrecyclable plastic things. In my view that's just a detour on their way to becoming the trash they were born to be.

Glass, particularly clear uncolored glass, recycles beautifully because of its simple materials, just as one would suspect.

Recycling alleviates guilt, and I don't take that as an entirely bad sign. It shows that people have internalized some feeling for the environment.

If anybody is recycling those plastic bags, though - well, y'all can skip that.

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Are You helping anything by doing so? Switching to glass, for example, is causing more energy use to both produce and recycle than plastic.

http://www.wisegeek....-to-recycle.htm

Even cartons are not good choices, since they are not recyclable, and making paper is very energy intensive. Like the plastic bag argument, you might just be a better steward of the planet by buying plastic jugs...as long as you religiously recycle them.

Quite the opposite of you, I tend to look for recyclable plastic over other packaging, precisely because I can recycle them easily. I recycle glass and metal too, but plastic is easier, mostly because the screw on cap is also plastic, and therefore keeps my recycle bin clean. Of course, the most efficient policy is to consume less. Next, is to reuse the product or packaging (sorry, I'll leave the unpackaged beans and rice to the granola eaters). Last, is recycling, and plastic uses the least energy to recycle, as well as to produce it in the first place. It is only bad if you throw it in the trash.

Well, I misspoke, I still buy milk in gallon sized plastic containers and drop those in the recycle bin, but I have a few aluminum bottles I pre-fill with water if I know where I'm going doesn't have water fountains. Beer, I prefer to drink what's on tap unless they only have crap beers on tap.

I follow the old conservation "3 Rs" with Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and recycling being what you should do if you can't reduce, or reuse whatever it is. Which is what you reference. I think too many put too high of a value on recycle over the other 2 Rs of conservation.

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The Reduce aspect of the 3 R's was pretty quickly suppressed. I don't mean by that anything as literal as "Industry co-opted recycling" (though of course they did). No, I really believe calls for reduced consumption - just like, more significantly, concerns about population growth - are seen as counter to the prevailing (hundreds-of-years prevailing) humanism. To each according to the every desire of a few. The hipsters y'all are always going on about are conflicted on this point. Well, they were (briefly!); the argument's over. You're the first I've seen mention it in some time, Samagon.

I'm pretty much a blank slate on organic chemistry and have no idea how much energy is required to turn cellulose into plastic. Maybe we'll be using plastic forever.

Since there's a little market for aluminum cans, recycling aluminum must be worthwhile. I don't know anything about steel recycling, but I recycle several dozens tomato cans a year. Scrap metal generally always disappears within minutes on Bulky Item Pickup Day around here.

Randall's still has quarts of milk in paper (I could never get through a gallon of milk). Yes, it's more expensive per ounce. No, it's not more expensive than pouring a half-gallon of sour milk down the drain. Yes, sour milk can substitute for buttermilk in corn bread. It doesn't serve as well for biscuits.

Trees, sand: paper, glass. I tend to go for whatever seems simplest. Reusing a container as a container, not using something once and then pouring energy into turning it into something else. For this reason I save random plastic spoons: it was a useful plastic spoon five minutes ago, why is it trash now?

We will doubtless be chided for straying from the fascinating bag ban topic. I just want to reiterate that, ban or no, we've not lost our minds completely: a plastic bag is not more environmentally friendly than an old tote bag out of your closet, a tin pail, a bindle, or a brand-new non-woven polyproplylene bag.

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Recycling alleviates guilt, and I don't take that as an entirely bad sign. It shows that people have internalized some feeling for the environment.

What guilt? Yeah, I don't recycle anything at all...ever. Recycling is essentially unimportant at best, but is actually a further waste of resources in many cases.

The fact is, all of the nation's landfills would only take up the area of about one midwestern county. Moreover, the total amounts of refuse being sent to landfills per person has been on a long-term decline. Environmentalists would like to attribute that to recycling, but I attribute it to companies reducing the amount of weight and volume of their products and packaging as a cost-saving mechanism. The sort of folks that are genuinely interested in saving the world should commit themselves to a life of poverty with as little interaction with the economy as possible. Plant a garden and harvest road kill for loincloths.

And as for myself, I'm just one cog in a huge ancient unfeeling machine. It doesn't particularly care about me and I don't particularly care about it. It'll be there long after I've been worn down and replaced with a new cog. Might as well get what I can from it: my existence and a lube job now and then. There needn't be a cause, purpose, or delusion.

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Saving the world? I can't begin to think what that would mean, but sometimes I lack imagination. The world seems fine, much the same as ever.

Saving the planet? Also nebulous.

Saving species diversity and habitat? Contra The Niche, you should most certainly not waste time running over and roasting a squirrel, or if you must, make it a nutria; and the garden is your own affair. You should go to work doing whatever you do, then donate $$ or time to groups involved with purchasing, whether through fee simple or conservation easement, large amounts of habitat, or restoring that habitat where it has been lost (e.g.Texas).

You do sound interchangeable with all of the other cogs, The Niche. Your sheer numbers make you a potent force, though, however passive you may feel.

Oh, and .. plastic bags ... blah, blah, blah.

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Saving the world? I can't begin to think what that would mean, but sometimes I lack imagination. The world seems fine, much the same as ever.

Saving the planet? Also nebulous.

Saving species diversity and habitat? Contra The Niche, you should most certainly not waste time running over and roasting a squirrel, or if you must, make it a nutria; and the garden is your own affair. You should go to work doing whatever you do, then donate $$ or time to groups involved with purchasing, whether through fee simple or conservation easement, large amounts of habitat, or restoring that habitat where it has been lost (e.g.Texas).

I don't understand what it would mean to save the world, either. But that's my point about most such persons that would be interested in so fruitless an enterprise. They don't know what it means either. It's all just empty rhetoric and delusion. To be more specific does not aid in curing the delusion, mind you. What does species diversity and habitat mean to a mere mortal?

You do sound interchangeable with all of the other cogs, The Niche. Your sheer numbers make you a potent force, though, however passive you may feel.

I am not wholly interchangeable, only replaceable to within a measure of tolerance and a thousand times redundant.

Nor am I passively indifferent. That I respond to you should be indication enough that I go out of my way to inform you that I am indifferent. Without purpose but by my nature, I am actively engaged in the persuasion of others to become indifferent like me.

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The Niche, my reasons for conservation has nothing to do with saving the planet, or guilt, it's all pure greed.

It's way way way cheaper to carry my own refillable water bottle and fill it with tap water at the house (or even cheaper at the park water fountain) than pay Dasani hundreds of percent more for the convenience that it I don't have to fill it at the tap myself.

That this is a good practice for the environment is only a double bonus.

In fact, the first two Rs I spoke of both have economic benefits for me, if I reduce what I use, I spend less, if I reuse what I've already bought, I spend less. Recycling, well, I pay taxes, the city provides a service, I am paying for it, I am going to use it.

Now, if I were going to commit myself to saving the planet, I'd probably go even more radical than shedding my dockers for a nutrea loincloth, I'd probably spend more time on 4chan than on haif and try to martial the script kiddies to shut down coal power plants, or refineries, instead of taking over taylor swift's webpage.

To the question of what does 'save the planet' mean. this is what I like to confront the people who believe in AGW, sure I believe that humans are having an effect on global warming, but when you really stop and think about it, the global problem and what would have to be a global solution, the nations that participate in negotiations can't even agree, let alone the other countries that aren't involved. It's a hopeless situation that won't be solved by me trading in my Subaru STI for a Nissan Leaf.

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In fact, the first two Rs I spoke of both have economic benefits for me, if I reduce what I use, I spend less, if I reuse what I've already bought, I spend less.

So all this money you save...I'm sure that you let it accumulate in cash and stuff it under the mattress. Right? Say you spend it on a trip to Thailand. You're a planet murderer. Say that you keep it in a checking account so that banks can lend it out to others...like me...so that they (or I) can go and indulge my yellow fever. Then you are only complicit to planetary murder (and possibly some other things).

Recycling, well, I pay taxes, the city provides a service, I am paying for it, I am going to use it.

I dare you to use Fox Park, if you can find it. You're paying for it after all, and it is located in the East End. Let me know whether you enjoyed it and felt like your tax dollars were well spent.

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I am not wholly interchangeable, only replaceable to within a measure of tolerance and a thousand times redundant.

Nor am I passively indifferent. That I respond to you should be indication enough that I go out of my way to inform you that I am indifferent. Without purpose but by my nature, I am actively engaged in the persuasion of others to become indifferent like me.

Sigh. You've totally derailed us now. Replying in the Way Off Topic forum where we belonged all along.

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I don't think he has really derailed the thread. He is merely daring you to think, and to investigate. Rather than take at face value what the "greens" tell you, Niche dares you to research it for yourself. Truth be known, Niche Reduces and Reuses himself. He simply does not recycle much. But, he is just as cheap...possibly moreso...than you, and apparently for the same reasons. He, as you, sees little value in paying outrageous prices for ambiance (especially faux ambiance), or for products that you wish your friends to see you with. In fact, Niche sees right through the whole green movement. He knows that green hipsters are largely hypocrites, purchasing huge amounts of 'green' products, when simply using less of a product is actually better for the environment. He knows that Whole Foods brings in products from all over the world, at great cost of fuel, while Walmart is buying locally grown, but unhip, vegetables.

The hip are not content that you conserve. You must conserve for the right reasons. It matters not to them that Walmart is the country's largest user od solar energy, because Walmart does so to say money. It doesn't matter that buying all of your staples in one trip to Walmart saves gas. They drive their Prius to WF, Central Market and soon, Trader Joes, and buy some crap they claim saves the planet, oblivious what they did to the planet to get it.

The reason plastic is cheap is because it cost little to make it. The reason it cost so little to make is because it uses less energy. Less energy is good for the planet. That the plastic will not decompose is a dubious claim, since it will be buried in a landfill that no one will ever dig up. What does it matter? This gets us back on topic. Houston is looking to ban plastic to burnish its 'green' bonafides. We could stand to look better to the world, given our Energy Capital status. But, don't think we are saving the world by banning plastic bags. We will simply consume something else that takes more energy to produce.

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So you're The Niche's bagman? He most certainly did derail our topic, quite deliberately. I could do the same in his favored METRO forum by pointing out that - roads, rail, what does it matter, who cares what time he gets to work - 'cuz the sun is going to die; or, more immediately, huge sums of public money will be spent either way, at least up until the point that every last dollar of the GNP (or GDP - The Niche will enjoy giving me an Econ 101 smacking on the difference) goes to "health care."

Beyond that - I'm sorry - I can't exactly make out what you're saying. The tangent about Walmart doesn't help. I don't need to tell you where I shop, but Walmart's produce is terrible. I don't know if it's their distribution model that hamstrings them, or if it's just that HEB has a lock on the best suppliers.

Re plastic being cheap: gasoline is cheap, too, for now - but that doesn't mean there's no environmental cost to the extraction of fossil fuels and the burning of them. So, your point is...?

This was a thread about the banning of plastic bags (a ban enacted where I live principally because of their outsized representation in litter). That plastic is lightweight weighs in its favor in terms of transport, but that is but one consideration. It is indisputable that the best thing to do is to drink water out of the tap from a glass and tote your groceries home in your own bag, because making nothing at all is far more efficient than making something disposable out of plastic.

Actually the only argument for making lots of plastic stuff that makes sense to me is: well, it's preferable to burning it. I'm pretty sure that's frivolous thinking, though. In any case, the oil is all coming out, at least until getting it is more expensive than liquefying gas; greens don't have much to do with it that I can see. That doesn't obviate the problem of what to do with our trash, and how much of it we generate.

I don't precisely believe in recycling, except for aluminum, the value of recycling which is well-established; and building materials, very well-recycled here where I live, thankfully. When I say I don't believe, I mean, I can scarcely believe it's really all being processed - I think they must be keeping it all somewhere, like in old movies when they open the closet door and a mountain of stuff falls out. Unless it's all going into roadbeds. Being a radical eco-con I would consider that a Pyrrhic victory.

I don't know anything about The Niche and his daring "outside the box thinking," but if he's feigning views that are not his own merely in order to indulge his passion for ridiculing bourgeois values, well, there's even less novelty left in that than there is in deriding the environmental movement and bizarrely blaming all manner of ills on it.

"We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic."

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I don't think he has really derailed the thread. He is merely daring you to think, and to investigate. Rather than take at face value what the "greens" tell you, Niche dares you to research it for yourself. Truth be known, Niche Reduces and Reuses himself. He simply does not recycle much. But, he is just as cheap...possibly moreso...than you, and apparently for the same reasons. He, as you, sees little value in paying outrageous prices for ambiance (especially faux ambiance), or for products that you wish your friends to see you with. In fact, Niche sees right through the whole green movement. He knows that green hipsters are largely hypocrites, purchasing huge amounts of 'green' products, when simply using less of a product is actually better for the environment. He knows that Whole Foods brings in products from all over the world, at great cost of fuel, while Walmart is buying locally grown, but unhip, vegetables.

The hip are not content that you conserve. You must conserve for the right reasons. It matters not to them that Walmart is the country's largest user od solar energy, because Walmart does so to say money. It doesn't matter that buying all of your staples in one trip to Walmart saves gas. They drive their Prius to WF, Central Market and soon, Trader Joes, and buy some crap they claim saves the planet, oblivious what they did to the planet to get it.

The reason plastic is cheap is because it cost little to make it. The reason it cost so little to make is because it uses less energy. Less energy is good for the planet. That the plastic will not decompose is a dubious claim, since it will be buried in a landfill that no one will ever dig up. What does it matter? This gets us back on topic. Houston is looking to ban plastic to burnish its 'green' bonafides. We could stand to look better to the world, given our Energy Capital status. But, don't think we are saving the world by banning plastic bags. We will simply consume something else that takes more energy to produce.

At the potential cost of putting us completely back on topic, I am not hip with the city banning plastic bags, I am very much in favor of companies giving me an incentive to use my own bag. 5 cents savings isn't big, but it pays for the dollar I spent on the bag in 20 trips, and from then on out it's nickels under my mattress.

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Saving the world? I can't begin to think what that would mean, but sometimes I lack imagination. The world seems fine, much the same as ever.

Saving the planet? Also nebulous.

Saving species diversity and habitat? Contra The Niche, you should most certainly not waste time running over and roasting a squirrel, or if you must, make it a nutria; and the garden is your own affair. You should go to work doing whatever you do, then donate $$ or time to groups involved with purchasing, whether through fee simple or conservation easement, large amounts of habitat, or restoring that habitat where it has been lost (e.g.Texas).

You do sound interchangeable with all of the other cogs, The Niche. Your sheer numbers make you a potent force, though, however passive you may feel.

Oh, and .. plastic bags ... blah, blah, blah.

It does bother me when someone believes that buying something new is helping to "save the world". My favorite example is when someone claims a hybrid vehicle purchase means they are saving the environment, while ignoring the resources and pollution involved in the vehicle's production and shipment. It will take many years to offset that initial toll in terms of reduced petroleum usage, and even then they are polluting the air with the same fuel as a conventional car, albeit at a slightly reduced rate.

As for plastic bags, as I mentioned earlier, I think they are lousy for carrying most items, and they often seem to be treated as merely a proof-of-purchase when a shopper walks from the cash register to the exit door. I frequently witness a single item, itself with a handle, being placed in a plastic bag for no apparent reason. I'm not opposed to folks who want to use plastic bags, but I also wouldn't mind if there was some incentive for cashiers/baggers to be mindful and less wasteful with them.

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At the potential cost of putting us completely back on topic, I am not hip with the city banning plastic bags, I am very much in favor of companies giving me an incentive to use my own bag. 5 cents savings isn't big, but it pays for the dollar I spent on the bag in 20 trips, and from then on out it's nickels under my mattress.

I agree, and this would likely help with the purported problem of litter, too. If the bags cost a nickel far fewer will be left to float around. Look what it did for soda bottles back in the day, and what the higher price for recycled aluminum does for soda cans. And, if I need the bag for dog poop, I may just keep it for 5 cents.

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The fact is, all of the nation's landfills would only take up the area of about one midwestern county. Moreover, the total amounts of refuse being sent to landfills per person has been on a long-term decline. Environmentalists would like to attribute that to recycling, but I attribute it to companies reducing the amount of weight and volume of their products and packaging as a cost-saving mechanism.

Googling this vague (on its three counts) claim was difficult. The "long-term decline" of household waste that began after 2000 seems to have returned us to 1992 levels of trash, but also to have plateaued. It's impossible to look at further-back historical trends because you quickly find yourself mired in horseshit, literally. Another issue is that construction and demolition debris is sometimes included but usually not and that's rarely made clear. Automobile bodies never seem to be included.

Someone who wrote a recent book called "Garbology" said this on the amount of trash generated per person:

Well, it turns out that this is not an easy number to come by. In fact, the “
” – the publication that the EPA puts out to examine our municipal waste – is really badly outdated. Research done by Columbia University and a trade journal called BioCycle shows that we produce, per day,
... it doesn’t even compare favorably to where we were a few decades ago. It’s about twice as much per capita trash as we produced in 1960.

Landfills: I found a plastics trade group website that referenced an observation by a single Resources for the Future economist that the nation's trash would fit into a space three times the size of Oklahoma City, 120 feet deep, a thousand years into the future (assuming our population doesn't treble or whatever). Maybe that was your "midwestern county"?

The tell, as you like to put it, The Niche (or RedScare, I think I'm getting you mixed up - one of you really digs Walmart) there is the choice of Oklahoma City as the metric. Oklahoma City is the country's eighth-largest in land area. But they're counting on people not to know that and be suitably underwhelmed. However, I have no interest in the social "sciences," so I'm less than useless on this subject. I asked someone much smarter than me:

Me: "Would you trust the word of an economist on natural resource issues?"

Him: "Is the economist Ray Perryman?" (that's his particular bogeyman for some reason)

Me: "No."

Him: " 'Cuz I would trust him to lie every time."

Helpful.

Yes, plastics are getting lighter - very noticeable in the last 3 or four years (and there's a guy at UT who has made "paper" that floats in the air, incidentally) - but even the plastics industry website made no effort to claim this accounts for any large percentage of the reduction in waste going to landfills.

Please don't take this as an occasion to wonder to yourself, amid existential musings, what the Grand Canyon is for, if not to fill with trash. That would only make me sad, as in wish-I-was-never-born-sad. If you don't approve of my recyclabes going on a road trip to San Antonio every week, then you need hardly pretend that the existence of raw land Somewhere Else has much to do with solid waste utilities tasked with finding nearby landfill space, especially in agricultural areas. If it were all so simple for the nation to rid itself of 250 million tons of trash a year, I don't think my town would be entertaining the idea of investing in a trash-burning biomass facility halfway across the state.

Anyway, of course there are fewer landfills now - many of them filled up. The average size of a new landfill has also greatly increased, and capacity has been helped along by solid waste being more densely crushed than in the past. (Anaerobic landfills are also apparently creating a problematic buildup of methane from organic waste: Good News for People Who Love Bad News about greenhouse gases.) And - apart from the packaging reduction - we divert so much into recycling, even over and above how much trash we've created by diligently Not Reducing. Here, our blue bins are much larger than our grey bins. (And boy do my neighbors stuff them full: it's like Christmas all the time. Did you know cat litter comes in huge plastic jugs?)

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I agree, and this would likely help with the purported problem of litter, too. If the bags cost a nickel far fewer will be left to float around.

Purported problem of litter? Do you like the bags floating around or not? Not every question is political.

http://marinedebris....nfo/faqs.html#1

http://books.nap.edu...id=12486&page=1

The U.S. ended the dumping of trash in the ocean twenty years ago; ships of course routinely dump their own garbage (plastic waste is prohibited from American ships) in deep water, however only 20% of marine debris is thought to come from vessels. The science of counting things is not equipped with an algorithm to deal with trash-in-the-ocean, but so much rolls down the storm drain and into the sea that the ocean still clearly serves as a not insignificant sink for our trash.

I am prepared to purport that this is a problem, if you are not.

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I am able to foresee no horrible unintended consequences from passing it, though!

I can think of two horrid consequences.

1. Mountains of dog poop all over the city because people don't get free plastic bags to put it in (except for the dog parks, those will be clean since they distribute dog sanitary bags).

2. Cat boxes in peoples houses would never be cleaned.

seriously though, this might have been addressed somewhere, but...

What about restaurants that provide plastic bags for take out and doggy bag service? What about regular retail stores like macys, or whatever that give you plastic bags for your items?

Will the ban only affect grocery stores, or anyone who sells you something and puts it in a plastic bag in Houston city limits? I don't suppose it would be as strict as firework bans where you can't even bring them into the city.

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We are under a plastic bag ban here in Long Beach and I'm not against it but it did give China more business for cheap bag whereas the plastic bags were made in the USA, which put those companies out of business or hurt severely (according to local article highlighting unintended consequences). :blink: Also, having these plastic bags for bathroom trashliners or small amount of smelly garbage helps. Target and the likes were except from this ban, at least for the short-term, so I still get the free small trashcan bags. :D

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I just don't see this happening here. But, would this include produce bags?

If they follow the Long Beach example the produce (i.e. veggie) plastic bags wouldn't be impacted and you would be able to get paper bags for a nominal fee (5 or 10 cents each).

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Googling this vague (on its three counts) claim was difficult. The "long-term decline" of household waste that began after 2000 seems to have returned us to 1992 levels of trash, but also to have plateaued. It's impossible to look at further-back historical trends because you quickly find yourself mired in horseshit, literally. Another issue is that construction and demolition debris is sometimes included but usually not and that's rarely made clear. Automobile bodies never seem to be included.

Construction and all industrial waste should be included. And in fact, if you consider that the manufacturing output per capita has been on the decline for a fair bit of time, even as imports have risen, then that might account for some significant reduction in waste per household. The high-tech manufacturing that has offset some of the lost heavy manufacturing probably also results in less waste per capita.

You shouldn't expect to see too many automobile bodies in the waste category. Most of them get chopped up and exported as scrap metal. In fact, there are several facilities along the Houston Ship Channel that deal heavily in that business. I hear that it's quite profitable.

Someone who wrote a recent book called "Garbology" said this on the amount of trash generated per person:

Well, it turns out that this is not an easy number to come by. In fact, the “
” – the publication that the EPA puts out to examine our municipal waste – is really badly outdated. Research done by Columbia University and a trade journal called BioCycle shows that we produce, per day,
... it doesn’t even compare favorably to where we were a few decades ago. It’s about twice as much per capita trash as we produced in 1960.

I'm less concerned with the weight of trash than the volume of it and its rate of decomposition. When humans start generating dark matter as waste and it's altering the center of gravity of the Earth, then I'll concern myself with weight.

Landfills: I found a plastics trade group website that referenced an observation by a single Resources for the Future economist that the nation's trash would fit into a space three times the size of Oklahoma City, 120 feet deep, a thousand years into the future (assuming our population doesn't treble or whatever). Maybe that was your "midwestern county"?

The tell, as you like to put it, The Niche (or RedScare, I think I'm getting you mixed up - one of you really digs Walmart) there is the choice of Oklahoma City as the metric. Oklahoma City is the country's eighth-largest in land area. But they're counting on people not to know that and be suitably underwhelmed.

Midwestern counties are pretty similar in shape and size. I used them as an example because I've heard this data variously reference counties in Oklahoma (although never before the City), Missouri, and Illinois. But it could just as easily reference a county in the Texas panhandle.

If we're comparing to Oklahoma City, it has about the same land area as the City of Houston, at around 600 square miles. By comparison, Lubbock County, TX (a typical midwestern county by my estimation) has about 900 square miles. But the fact is, if the entire United States shipped all of its garbage for the next thousand years into Terry, Lynn, and a portion of Garza counties (all of which abut Lubbock County to its south), I wouldn't have the slightest bit of concern. That's a tiny land area in the grand scheme of things, and is by no means any kind of an ecological gem or a touist draw. It is basically irrelevant that it should be covered in garbage.

However, I have no interest in the social "sciences," so I'm less than useless on this subject. I asked someone much smarter than me:

Me: "Would you trust the word of an economist on natural resource issues?"

Him: "Is the economist Ray Perryman?" (that's his particular bogeyman for some reason)

Me: "No."

Him: " 'Cuz I would trust him to lie every time."

Helpful.

I concur with that sentiment. Perryman is paid to embrace and expound upon a client's opinion. He's an opinion whore.

Whatever are the precise data regarding garbage, however many counties-worth of land area might be consumed during my lifetime (which is the only relevant period of time, as a matter of global political policy), it's not a meaningful figure. We will not be swallowed up by our own filth. It is a non-concern.

Yes, plastics are getting lighter - very noticeable in the last 3 or four years (and there's a guy at UT who has made "paper" that floats in the air, incidentally) - but even the plastics industry website made no effort to claim this accounts for any large percentage of the reduction in waste going to landfills.

Again, I am unconcerned with the weight of garbage.

I am also unconcerned that a plastics advocacy group appears unconcerned with the weight of garbage or plastic bags in particular. Let's say that the world uses a trillion plastic bags per year and that a plastic bag averages about 4.5 grams in weight. That converts to slightly less than five million tons of plastic out of approximately 194 million tons produced globally. So we're talking about 2.5% of plastics production. A plastics industry advocacy group probably has bigger and less politically contentious fish to fry than local controversies regarding plastic bag production.

Please don't take this as an occasion to wonder to yourself, amid existential musings, what the Grand Canyon is for, if not to fill with trash. That would only make me sad, as in wish-I-was-never-born-sad. If you don't approve of my recyclabes going on a road trip to San Antonio every week, then you need hardly pretend that the existence of raw land Somewhere Else has much to do with solid waste utilities tasked with finding nearby landfill space, especially in agricultural areas. If it were all so simple for the nation to rid itself of 250 million tons of trash a year, I don't think my town would be entertaining the idea of investing in a trash-burning biomass facility halfway across the state.

Anyway, of course there are fewer landfills now - many of them filled up. The average size of a new landfill has also greatly increased, and capacity has been helped along by solid waste being more densely crushed than in the past. (Anaerobic landfills are also apparently creating a problematic buildup of methane from organic waste: Good News for People Who Love Bad News about greenhouse gases.) And - apart from the packaging reduction - we divert so much into recycling, even over and above how much trash we've created by diligently Not Reducing. Here, our blue bins are much larger than our grey bins. (And boy do my neighbors stuff them full: it's like Christmas all the time. Did you know cat litter comes in huge plastic jugs?)

The Grand Canyon is for aesthetic and recreational enjoyment. Oklahoma (or more meaningfully, rural parts of Waller or Fort Bend County, et al.), we can fill with trash all day long and I won't care.

I also am unconcerned with agricultural areas getting used for solid waste disposal. The amount of land used for agriculture in this country has been on a long-term decline. And again, however much land is being used for landfills is basically a non-concern.

I think that it is a good thing that there are fewer and larger landfills. I am unconcerned with greenhouse gases from anaerobic decomposition or global warming. I think that, in and of itself, an increase in economic consumption is a good thing; people should be more wealthy and enjoy being more wealthy. I am unconcerned with plastic jugs full of kitty litter.

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I don't think he has really derailed the thread. He is merely daring you to think, and to investigate. Rather than take at face value what the "greens" tell you, Niche dares you to research it for yourself. Truth be known, Niche Reduces and Reuses himself. He simply does not recycle much. But, he is just as cheap...possibly moreso...than you, and apparently for the same reasons. He, as you, sees little value in paying outrageous prices for ambiance (especially faux ambiance), or for products that you wish your friends to see you with. In fact, Niche sees right through the whole green movement. He knows that green hipsters are largely hypocrites, purchasing huge amounts of 'green' products, when simply using less of a product is actually better for the environment. He knows that Whole Foods brings in products from all over the world, at great cost of fuel, while Walmart is buying locally grown, but unhip, vegetables.

The hip are not content that you conserve. You must conserve for the right reasons. It matters not to them that Walmart is the country's largest user od solar energy, because Walmart does so to say money. It doesn't matter that buying all of your staples in one trip to Walmart saves gas. They drive their Prius to WF, Central Market and soon, Trader Joes, and buy some crap they claim saves the planet, oblivious what they did to the planet to get it.

The reason plastic is cheap is because it cost little to make it. The reason it cost so little to make is because it uses less energy. Less energy is good for the planet. That the plastic will not decompose is a dubious claim, since it will be buried in a landfill that no one will ever dig up. What does it matter? This gets us back on topic. Houston is looking to ban plastic to burnish its 'green' bonafides. We could stand to look better to the world, given our Energy Capital status. But, don't think we are saving the world by banning plastic bags. We will simply consume something else that takes more energy to produce.

This is true but the sheeps (or hipsters) can't comprehend. Don't buy something that you don't need, even it's green, or reuse what you have!

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It turns out that plastic bags are the third rail of an urban issues forum; you might have supposed light rail was that third rail, but no, it's plastic bags. I know I'm never going to touch it again!

Did y'all know that Moscow was rebuilt from the dustheaps of London? I only learned that this year after watching "Our Mutual Friend," a TV adaptation of Dickens' great novel of garbage; and I offer it neutrally, a little snippet all (okay, some) might find interesting.

I wish you luck with getting that bag ban passed.

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We are under a plastic bag ban here in Long Beach and I'm not against it but it did give China more business for cheap bag whereas the plastic bags were made in the USA, which put those companies out of business or hurt severely (according to local article highlighting unintended consequences). :blink: Also, having these plastic bags for bathroom trashliners or small amount of smelly garbage helps. Target and the likes were except from this ban, at least for the short-term, so I still get the free small trashcan bags. :D

Keep in mind that most paper bags used domestically are also made in USA. And while they may use more energy to manufacture and cost a few cents more than plastic bags, I think they still have several advantages. They typically hold more volume per bag, especially for groceries. They are also more reusable since they don't stretch and fall apart as easily. I don't recall ever wrapping my textbooks in plastic bags as a kid, but we did use paper grocery bags. They are easily recycleable and remanufacured from recycled fibers (Whole Foods uses 100% recycled content in their paper bags). Lastly, paper decomposes quickly in the environment, unlike plastic, and it's not as likely to suffocate or cause harm by ingestion, which happens with platic bags in the wild. The only disadvantage I see is with holding liquids, so plastic bags do still have the advantage when it comes to waste receptacles.

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Keep in mind that most paper bags used domestically are also made in USA. And while they may use more energy to manufacture and cost a few cents more than plastic bags, I think they still have several advantages. They typically hold more volume per bag, especially for groceries. They are also more reusable since they don't stretch and fall apart as easily. I don't recall ever wrapping my textbooks in plastic bags as a kid, but we did use paper grocery bags. They are easily recycleable and remanufacured from recycled fibers (Whole Foods uses 100% recycled content in their paper bags). Lastly, paper decomposes quickly in the environment, unlike plastic, and it's not as likely to suffocate or cause harm by ingestion, which happens with platic bags in the wild. The only disadvantage I see is with holding liquids, so plastic bags do still have the advantage when it comes to waste receptacles.

So...paper bags cost more and fall apart when exposed to liquids (or frozen goods that become covered in condensation), and the purported disadvantages are dubious or overblown. The advantage to plastic is absolute.

Any bagging behavior modification law will be done strictly out of human vanity, so that certain kool-aide-drinking constituents can find an excuse to give themselves a hearty and anti-intellectual pat on the back. I am not in favor of stupid people feeling good about themselves. I believe that they are more likely to breed when they feel happy, and I am especially not in favor of that.

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One would think the multiple deleted posts in this topic would have conveyed the message, but as a reminder:

- Keep it on the topic, not about your opinions of other posters.

- If you want to have a personal discussion with someone take it to PM so the rest of us don't have to read through catfights.

Next instance and the topic is closed.

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