In reality, a household can easily gain 5-10 new tote bags a year as businesses hand them out as swag or with legitimate collections of items or paperwork. There's no way to use them all enough to justify their manufacturing.
The point the article is making is that the "use fewer plastic bags" thing was well-intended, but it incentivized an alternative with too many tradeoffs. Businesses could order a ton of bags, and feel like they were being "environmentally friendly" by handing them out. But in reality, they just flooded the marketplace with so many bags that didn't need to be made in the first place.
Washing and cleaning are surprisingly inefficient and costly (in terms of $, energy, resources, and emissions) compared to manufacturing, and many assumptions about recycling and reuse go out the window once the realistic numbers descrbing how people actually behave replace idealistic assumptions that go into a manufacturers internal emissions calculations.
As someone who loves to use cotton everything- it pretty much never makes sense to use from an LCA perspective (and that's OK).
Or do they sometimes have a part of the stitching failing that takes 2 minutes to repair with a needle and a cotton thread?
I visited some places that package nearly all their vegetables and fruits in 1 use plastic containers, this is bonkers.
If plastic is so efficient, why wouldn’t we make reusable bags out of it instead of cotton? Why is the argument to waste it?
We aren’t getting more oil.
Plastic is a good mechanism for carbon sequestration. Pull some carbon from the air and use it to make something both useful and permanent.
Also I disagree that energy should be the item to minimize. It makes sense if you are burning stuff for it, but we've known how to get free energy from the sky for quite a while.
Good example is South Korea. They were devastated after continual war in the 1950s. So they implemented mandatory recycling. Food waste goings into bin A, metals into bin B, plastics into bin C, ... This allows for reducing the cost of recycling by presorting items. It helped them rebuild and become stronger. To this day they still properly separate their garbage to ease recycling.
Recycling food waste and scraps means creating a nutrient rich fertilize resource. Tossing them into a land fill removes nutrients from the food chain. USA food has less nutrients than years past because of the push for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
There's a balance between safety, cost, and energy use that should be struck. "Just landfill" doesn't seem to be chasing that balance.
We've moved a few times over the years and it's often surprising what is and isn't recyclable in different jurisdictions. This means I often find myself putting something into the recycle that isn't recyclable in my current jurisdiction.
Is this worse than just not recycling, let's say on a per unit basis? I.e. is one unit of recyclable material in the landfill more or less bad than one unit of trash in the recycling pipeline?
Not sure there's an answer, but it's a question I've pondered often.
Whether someone appreciates a modern engineered landfill is a useful Shibboleth for distinguishing real evidence-based environmentalism from narcissistic signaling "environmentalism."
1. https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/officials-say-stinky-fir...