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A 2020 law banning plastic bags in Vermont has nearly eliminated their use in the state
(www.burlingtonfreepress.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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I'd happily pay $1/paper bag with handles, just for the convenience. That's about what it's worth to me.
I'm absentminded as all hell, and I'm not gonna remember to bring an armful of bags into the grocery store with me. And then, if I'm not using a cart, I gotta carry them around? Nah.
I mean, it's a super first world problem, and not a big deal at all in the grand scheme of things. But in all honesty I'd rather just pay $1/paper bag than have to deal with it.
Damn, that hurts me to read haha. Like, I get the absent mindedness thing, but it’s a ridiculously easy step that if all 330 million people in the US (I assume that is also where you are from, sorry if I’m wrong) were to stop then it would actually have a tangible effect on resource consumption. Obviously that isn’t going to solve all of our problems, but the whole idea of ‘whatever, this is slightly more convenient’ should instead be ‘eh, it’s not that much of a hassle.’ I think that’s fully the fault of 100 years of that mindset being pushed down our throats in the form of CONSUME, but we’ve got to break free of it if there’s ever going to be a chance.
I'd be really interested to see a quantitative analysis of how much difference it would make if all 330mil of us swapped to renewable bags.
My gut is that paper bags are pretty clean overall, and that grocery bags are a tiny fraction of paper usage in the US. But I'd be really interested to be proven wrong.
My quick search keeps popping up the statistic of 14 million trees for 10 billion paper bags used annually in the US, but in 1999 so I’m sure that is higher. You’ve also got to consider the high energy usage and large environmental concerns of paper mills. I don’t know if you’ve ever been near a paper mill, but they’re known for their air pollution, they make entire towns stink.
This stat taken from http://www.forestecologynetwork.org/climate_change/plastic_or_paper.html
ENERGY TO PRODUCE BAG ORIGINALLY (BTUs) Safeway Plastic Bags: 594 BTUs Safeway Paper Bags: 2511 BTUs (Source: 1989 Plastic Recycling Directory, Society of Plastics Industry.)
I do think the BTUs portion is less concerning in the greater context. Both 600 and 2500 are negligible compared to, say, my daily commute, or a single plane trip, or basically any other activity that requires energy.
But the first part is kinda interesting. Doing some super sloppy back of the napkin math, I think that makes paper shopping bags about 6.5% of all paper products made in the US. Paper products account for around 50% of all wood products in the US, so call it just over 3% of total wood use (which may have gone up some due to increased prevalence of paper lately.)
Which isn't nothing for sure. I would have guessed lower. I do think it may be overstating it to say we'd see a huge shift if everyone started using reusable bags overnight. A 3% drop in timber harvesting would be good, but not world changing I would think. But not insignificant either.
Again, I want to point out this is a minor change that you can make that if everyone did, would have a positive impact in this world. Huge impact, maybe not. But when our entire society is built to destroy the planet that we require for life, we need to remove as many cuts as possible.
I hope this doesn’t come across as rude, but conversations like this one are the reason that I have zero faith in humanity. It’s easy to point fingers as the obvious evil we have going on in the world, which clearly has more of a direct threat. But even if we were somehow able to rid the world of the truly despicable, we’d still be left with a world full of ‘its more of an impact than I thought, but still not so bad’ people. And our planet cannot continue on like that. It absolutely amazes me how many people (including good friends of mine) who think the same way. And there is no way to change this mindset, its as ingrained as any of the bigotry and hate on the other side. We just have no chance against this.
I think there's a couple of things in play here though.
First, this kinda has, "if millennials just didn't drink Starbucks they could afford rent" energy. Would it make a difference? Maybe. But in the grand scheme what it would do is just take away something they enjoy, while they remain unable to make their student loan payments, much less but a house. The actual problems are more systematic, and the "don't buy Starbucks" argument is to some degree just a distraction from fixing those more systematic problems (or an intentional effort to divide people so they can't cooperate to fix those systematic issues.)
Second, I think you're maybe exhibiting a little bit more brinkmanship than is warrented. It's important to care about the environment, and there's obviously a ton that needs to be done there. But as you say, there are bigger and worse threats out there than people buying paper bags, and it sounds like you're letting your existential dread over the environment sour your actual, meaningful interpersonal connections. It feels a bit over the top to "lose faith in humanity" just because most people buy paper bags. Most people are good people, and it's not unreasonable for them to take small conveniences, even if those conveniences aren't environmentally "optimal."
I live in a state that has banned the use of them, so no, most people I know don’t use them. The people that said the same thing as you complained for all of a month before they acclimated to a simple fucking task. All parts of our system are fucked, but if it is a trivial matter to unfuck one small part of the system, then we should do that. And then fix the next trivial fucking thing that people say they would rather spend a dollar per bag on and argue for twelve hours about whether or not chopping just 14 million trees per year on top of the other billion trees we chop is all that bad.
This is exactly why I say I have no faith in humanity, your dollar a bag comment says more to how fucked we are than anything. People absolutely will not change. They will literally hurt themselves just so they can hurt the environment because ‘haha, I forget sometimes so I don’t want to try.’ Even when presented with the evidence they ask for on the environmental impacts, they will say ‘worse than I expected, but not that bad when everything else is shit.’ I’m tired of everything being shit. And I’m tired of people saying, oh it’s a just a little shit. Quit accepting shit people. And don’t buy starbucks, because it’s shit coffee from a shit company.
I think the "more than I thought it would be" comment was more a reflection on how low I thought it would be than on how high it is. It's still a pretty tiny fraction of the overall problem.
But, like, look. The optimal decision, and the only way to "stop accepting shit" as you put it, is for every single person to drop what they're doing and go live as a hermit in the woods, and never produce or consume another product.
That isn't realistic for the majority of people though. And while I could succumb to self-flagellation as a form of symbolic protest, I think my time and effort is spent participating in the system as it is, and donating to organizations that can make more systematic changes that might ultimately do some good.
Beating yourself (or others) up for "not doing enough" is at best a form of coping with things that are beyond your control, and at worst a form of alienating people who broadly agree with you.
And, to be clear, I didn't say I'd pay a dollar a bag for any old paper bag. I said I'd pay that much for one with handles. Big difference.
Bringing in a bag to store that I know I am going to be bringing items out of is not self-flagellation. Refusing to bring a bag into a store because I’ll just use a single use item instead is shitty behavior. It’s that simple. Minor shitty behavior? Sure. If you’re cool with that behavior, well obviously this isn’t going to change that opinion. It is a trivial behavior for you to change.
Look, it's easy to have the viewpoint that anyone who isn't doing everything you're doing to save the world is a shitty person, and anyone who does more than you is obviously just a try-hard.
Everyone, yourself included, makes "shitty" decisions for convenience sake every day. I assume you buy food from the grocery store instead of foraging through trash cans. I've had friends who did the latter, and called the rest of us shitty if we ever threw anything away.
Just because someone looks at a situation and comes out with a different "worth the effort" assessment than you, doesn't make it "shitty." That's just life man. Are you driving a car instead of a motorcycle? Using toilet paper? Buying food from restaurants instead of eating out of trash cans? These are all decisions you could trivially change in your life today to make the world a little greener. So why aren't you?
But, really, I think our actual disconnect here is that I've not articulated my position well enough. I'm talking paper bags with handles! I mean, if that's not worth a dollar, what is?
I appreciate the multiple attempts to diffuse with the bag handles, and I fully agree that we have to draw the line somewhere. My issue is that if people are unwilling to do something a simple as bringing a bag into a grocery store, then there is absolutely zero chance that we will change the more difficult but more necessary problems. How are you going to convince Bezos to reduce his footprint when you can’t even get people to stop using a straw? Who the fuck even uses straws? How am I going to convince people to buy less, when everytime they want to buy something, they buy a thing to carry they thing they want to buy? (Insert xzibit meme)
Yes, it is something as dumb as bags, and even if we did switch it may not have much of an impact. But so what? Far more important to me is the mere fact that bringing in a bag to carry items in is too much of a hurdle for people to help the planet? Doomed I say.
I think that it's a bit of a false equivalent to say that since we can't convince people to use reusable bags, we can't get Jeff Bezos to reduce his.
They're different problem sets. Industrial pollution (or pollution from people with access to industry levels of capital) is something that can be addressed with legislation. It's also something with fairly broad, populist appeal. And it's something that, if addressed might make meaningful and lasting impact.
The "people need to take personal responsibility for recycling" narrative has been largely funded by oil companies and polluting industries as a cover to avoid people realizing that those things make up such a tiny fraction of the overall problem. They work to turn people against each other so that were too busy fighting to address the much bigger environmental issues.
Also, I love straws. If I don't have one the drink gets in my moustache.
It isn’t a different problem set though, just a different flavor of the same issue: over-consumption and overexploitation. It is also something that can be addressed through legislation, as the article this discussion originated from is an article about how legislating bag bans is effective.
People do need to take responsibility. That’s the whole issue. People at the bottom do not take responsibility, they do not push for people above them to take responsibility, and they will actively curtail measures to improve things because ‘it’s the big guys we need to worry about.’ No, we all need to make efforts. And in the example of bags, I am asking you to make a trivial change to your lifestyle, that you would all but forget about once you had made the change.
Let me try to use a different example. Cigarette butts on the ground are fucking gross right? Major ecological concern as well. Nobody should be throwing cigarette butts on the ground, I think we can all agree. You throw a cigarette butt on the ground? No big deal, coal plants are worse. Same energy.
You kept at this way longer and put far more energy into it than it was probably worth. Imagine if instead of bitching about bag bans to anyone online we just, like, looked up from our phone and paid a tiny bit of attention to bringing a bag to the store. Then we wouldn't have to spend all this time justifying our lack of care.
I appreciate the examples you gave and I hope someone benefits from them. The simple fact is that the person you've been going back and forth with will not.
Haha, I’ve had years of practice failing to persuade my father in similar ways for forty years now. I know it changes nothing, but the other option is to not try. I appreciate the support.
I think the issue is that we each have our own internal line of "acceptable participation in the upkeep of the world around us," and they're different.
So, like, if there's a line graph here, it has the following points: 1: not throwing cigarette butts on the ground 2: not using disposable bags 3: eating food out of trash cans.
I've said, existing between points 1 and 2 is my personal level of "acceptable participation," and you have said it's between 2 and 3. Many people exist above point 3, and many exist below point 1.
And someone above point three might approach you and say, "why are you letting perfectly good food go to waste," and hit you with all the stats and figures about how food waste is destroying the earth. And it would be such a tiny change for you to, instead of making or ordering food, just find some in a nearby trashcan. It's all over the place, and super accessible. And it's really dangerous. Freshly thrown away food is pretty much always potable.
But you have chosen that your personal level of "acceptable participation" doesn't require that of you. Should the "above point 3" people judge you for not making that tiny lifestyle change?
And honestly, perhaps they should? You are living below what they have determined is the "minimal acceptable level of social responsibility." You aren't doing your part to help combat a real environmental problem.
But a majority of people have chosen not to eat out of trash cans. Just as a majority of people don't bring reusable bags into the grocery store. And the only difference between those things is where your personal line of "acceptable participation" is.
And yes, there is a "generally societally agreed upon level of participation" which would say that throwing your cigarette butts on the ground is unacceptable. But you know why I know that's the generally agreed upon standard? Because only a minority of people do it. The general societal standard for disposable bags is on the "use them" side.
And sure, would it be beneficial to put in work to shift the Overton window on that issue, sure. Campaign for it. Push the cause. (Which I recognize is kind of what you're doing here). Who knows, maybe I'll pick up some bags and forget them in my car next time I hit the store, only to get mad the stores paper bags don't have handles.
But I think there's a big difference between advocating for a shift in the societal expectation, and investing emotional energy into despairing over the condition of your fellow man. You can recognize that, just because someone is on the other side of an issue than you, doesn't mean they're "bad" or deserve derision. None of us, yourself included, are doing all the "little" things we could be doing to make the world a better place. There's always a higher level of societal participation. But I think my concern here is that your mentality is, "people who chose differently than me are bad," not, "how can I best advocate to help encourage people to improve."
You keep bringing up the eating out of the trash can thing. My counter to that is, we throw too much away. That’s another issue we should be working on. I used to live near the Portland Fred Meyer with the famous photo of cops guarding a dumpster because it was filled with unspoiled food during covid.
It isn’t about whether or not I am willing to eat food out of a dumpster (do donuts count?) it’s that we as a society need to all work towards addressing how much food is wasted. There are a multitude of ways in which this can be addressed both on an individual level and on a societal level.
But if you keep wantonly wasting food of your own, because ‘fuck it, have you heard about the time armed police barricaded a dumpster?’ then I’m going to (hopefully politely) spend apparently a full 24 hours pushing the issue of maybe don’t do that.
Again, it’s the same energy as with the bags. It is a trivial step to take. It is easier than continually coming up with reasons to tell a stranger on the internet that you just don’t want to.
And that’s fine. Like you said, we have different ideas of what the line is. We all justify our actions. I do it as well. And we as a species are going to justify ourselves into completing the sixth mass extinction of this planet.
To be fair, it's probably only been, like, an hour. Just spaced out over 24hrs, lol.
But I think we're talking past each other a bit. The point of me bringing up eating food out of the trash (and sure, donuts count) wasn't to chastise you for not doing it. I'm not trying to call you a hypocrite or something.
My point was more about charity and empathy. It was about viewing the decisions that people wo are "worse than you" (my words not yours) not as people to be looked down upon, but as people to be encouraged.
I think it's tied up in the brinkmanship of your last statement. Will climate issues be a major problem that we'll have to grapple with in the coming century? Absolutely. But allowing that to lead to misanthropy is unhealthy.
I feel you on the misanthropy, and it’s always been a fine line I’ve had an eye on haha. Or as I like to say, my entire life I’ve tried not be a nihilist and after many years of hard work I can finally say that I’m an absurdist.
I’ve got a degree in ecology and evolution, I think about this stuff way too much. I think many of the adaptations that allowed us to get to where we are now are also what will bring about our end. The super organism that is humanity cannot change itself fast enough to recognize our collective power. Or as some have put it, we cannot properly conceptualize exponential growth.
The fact that using reusable bags, again not life altering but insanely simple, is too big of an ask says everything you need to know about our hope of making real change for the future. Actual sacrifice is coming, and we aren’t going to have a choice. If this is too far, then we are well and truly fucked.
As soon as that real change comes, people are going to look to a strongman who can turn it all around. He’s gonna tell them what they are doing isn’t that bad and it’s the mean old scientists that are making life difficult. That and the freeloaders. And those people are going to eat it up. And all of the little environmental improvements that now seem like no big deal but were fought over for years are going to be removed. Asbestos of all things may be deregulated. Sound familiar?
Now for the democrats. Zohran Mamdani is, I would assume, going to have a bag ban as part of his platform if NYC doesn’t do it already. I’m sure Eric Adams will hammer him over it at some point as well. And I am equally sure that there is at least one liberal in that city that is going to say ‘you know what, fuck that, I like my bags, especially those one’s with the handles.’ Will it make a difference? Maybe not, but it still sucks knowing that’s how it is and that’s how it’s gonna be.
Sorry if that went off the rails haha, and I don’t think anything bad about you. But I’m not exaggerating when I say this is why I think we are doomed. I’ll still be using my bag though, which by the way is a fucking rad petrified forest national park one that I’ve used for almost four years now.
Fair on all counts. I don't disagree with you that the situation is bad.
I do think it's somewhat hard to feel it for a lot of people. Partly, as you said, exponential growth is hard for most people to grasp. I also think a lot of older people who have followed climate science over the years are a little jaded too, as climate science has, rightly or not, beat the drum of "imminent global destruction within the next decade" for the past 7+ decades now, and I think people have gotten a bit of a "boy cried wolf" mentality about it.
But one would have to be blind to not see that things are getting noticeably worse, and as you say, exponential growth is a mofo. The jar is half full with one second to midnight, as they say.
But understood on all counts, and definitely no hard feelings on my end either. I tend to see the good in people, even those that make decisions I wouldn't. I think it probably leads to a happier life, but then again, how much of that is choice vs disposition?
And seriously, all that said. I simply cannot stress enough how much better the bags with handles are. And if the earth burns to a crisp because of them, well, was that not a sacrifice worth making?
The timber part is no big deal - it’s all farmed trees and sawmill waste product. The water and energy use to make them, store them, ship them is more significant.
Agreed, and it's not like clean energy generation and good wastewater treatment are impossible - just more expensive. Perhaps 10x the normal cost per bag would pay for the difference?
I dunno not being willing to even carry bags, things that are literally made for carrying, kinda seems like a you problem rather than a first world problem. Like there's the regular biases toward convenience we all have and there's Jesus fucking Christ how are you this incapable of tolerating the most minor of tasks.
You know how you handle the onerous task of carrying a bag while shopping? You put the bags in the basket with everything else, put the food in the bags themselves, or just loop the handle over your shoulder.
I think you're overstating my position. It's not that I'm "not willing to carry bags." It's that I've weighed the options and decided that the provided disposable bags are more convenient, so I'm just gonna do that. I'm unconvinced that switching would do much beyond slightly inconvenience me.
And you say it's just a "me problem," but a quick and unverified Google search says that 70% of people in the US don't use reusable bags (and 57% worldwide). So it seems like it's not so much a "me problem" as a "literal majority of the world" problem. Though I'm sure it probably felt good to attack me personally, as that gives you someone to lash out at.
There's a reason I only commented on the "carry bags throughout the store?!? not me" position. That's the one that outs you as unusually unwilling accept even the most trivial of inconveniences. That you even include that in your justification speaks volumes about your personality.