Ask Lemmy

Have you ever learned about supply and demand?

• Why should I return my cart? Someone else will come get it.
• Why should I drive a smaller more fuel efficient vehicle? Others pollute more than me

There are a thousand decisions like this.

You have to decide where your ethics are. You're right, they'll keep making them. It doesn't matter what others do, it's what you choose to do that defines you. Are you okay with taking a single use plastic bag and letting it sit in the landfill for thousands of years (or in the ocean) so you can have the convenience of not carrying a fabric bag in? Are you okay with a minimum wage worker collecting your cart so you wouldn't have to take the 20 seconds to push it into a corral?

These are questions you can't ask the internet, it's your personal morals. I know where my morals are. Everyone else can be who they are, but I am the only one who has to live with my decisions.

Retailers order more plastic bags when their inventories fall below a certain level. If you reuse a bag, their inventories will last longer and they will order bags less frequently; and manufacturers will reduce production due to the decreased demand.

The amount of bags made is not fixed. If shops don't buy bags from the manufacturer, they won't continue making them in the same quantities.

In Germany you can't even get disposable plastic bags anymore.

It's not about how many are made nearly as much as it's about how many are thrown away.

I'm sure it probably varies geographically, but when the plastic ban came first came into effect for us you'd see a lot of reusable shopping bags that were made from plastic.

I remember reading a study that suggested the typical reusable plastic bag used as much plastic as two-thousand disposable bags. So if you had one of those bags, you'd have to use it once a week for forty years to offset your plastic karma burden.

But anyway, as they say, you should bring your own bag because otherwise they'll make more disposable bags. It has to be legislated, otherwise corpos are going to corpo and we'll continue drowning in plastic.

These shopping bag bans don't go far enough imo. The amount of plastic in packaging, shipping, medicine, fishing, whatever industry you choose - it's just mind boggling.

Here's a funny plastic quibble I have: a store near me sells bread which comes in a plastic bag, but the little clip/tag to tie off the bag they recently switched to cardboard. A token gesture, but hey, it's still nice to see. Now if you want to buy in bulk, you can buy a bag of bread with two bags of bread in it. The outer bag is tied off with a plastic tag.