I’m sorry for the naivety, maybe there is something cool I’m not catching.
Haven’t we had biodegradable, compostable “plastic” shopping bags for like 20 years now? What’s the news here?
Probably that it’s based on corn-waste. Most I’ve seen are sugar-cane based. US grows a lot more corn than sugar cane.
Decomposes in 180 days under what circumstances? 'cause if it requires high-temperature municipal compost, the vast majority of bags produced aren’t gonna decompose.
We have some in Cambodia made from cassava.
Paper and canvas bags already do this. What an engineering marvel.
To be fair, corn is much faster to regrow than trees if we’re talking about this vs. paper.
Hemp as well. I’m certain we could make some sort of plastics with hemp, we can make practically everything from hemp. The added benefit of hemp is that it stores 85% of the excessive amount of carbon it consumes in its roots, so we can do whatever we want with the rest of the plant, harvest the roots, compress them into a cube much denser than water, drop them into the Mariana Trench, and not worry about that carbon for a few hundred million years.
I like cannabis sativa for it’s medicinal and psychoactive properties, but I love cannabis sativa for its material, ecological, and agricultural properties. It’s a damn fine plant
I’ve done the math, and we could totally reverse anthropogenic climate change with a reasonable amount of hemp production. It could be done in as little as a decade with an unreasonable amount of production. Something like 5 billion acres of production per year, but if we got just 500 million acres into production, and threw away the excess carbon, we would wipe out the excess carbon we’ve put into the air over the last 12,000 years in just over a century.
At that point we could scale back production to use the hemp as a global thermostat, slowly adjusting the average temperature by a hundredth of a degree every decade or so.
The maths for Kushtopia add up.
It also takes a whole lot more energy and water to manufacture paper bags rather than plastic. I personally use synthetic reusable bags that will probably outlive me whenever possible.
Yeah, maybe. The paper industry is a farming industry like any other, so growth is a consideration but not necessarily the only one.
Whilst paper and canvas is biodegradable, plastic as a material has certain useful traits compared to paper and canvas, hence why making/developing similar biologically based and degradable materials helps reduce our reliance on it.
Examples of such traits: Liquid resistance, non-permeable to water, see-through.
And the #1 most important factor, and why plastic bags are the most common:
The cost
If we can’t find a cheaper solution, it won’t be adopted without regulations.
100%, most contexts a use for plastic and should be replaced with paper or cloth through regulation.
An Indian entrepreneur is using sugar, cellulose, and corn fibers to make a plastic-like carrier bag for small Indian businesses.
His company Bio Reform has already replaced 6 million plastic bags in the checkout counters of stores all over India.
Based in Hyderabad, Mohammed Azhar Mohiuddin first got the idea during the general mayhem that arose during the pandemic. Mohiuddin was looking at global environmental issues with the hope of finding one his entrepreneurial spirit had the capacity to tackle.
Corn has plenty of drawbacks even if it offers a few of the benefits of plastic.
Nice! With the best will in the world I always forget my standard shopping bags and I feel that the “bags for life” just replace one thin and crap lump of plastic for an overly engineered one.
How are they over-engineered? They last much longer. Canvas ones forever, pretty much.
The plastic ones (here in the UK at least) also split and fall apart, they’re better than the “standard” ones but they don’t usually last that much longer.
Also I have a million of them because I always forget to bring them.
Buy some actual good bags and store them in your car.
I don’t drive every time I go to the shops, plus I also have to remember to put them back once I get my shopping inside.
Just buy a new one every time and tell yourself next time you’ll put some in the car.
Ngl, this is basically what we do :(
I have both opinions: certain canvas bags will last you a lifetime and even you can fix them if necessary. Most stores sell you “bags for life” that aren’t either recyclable (truly) nor meant to last a year of daily usage, probably because they are cheaping out on the materials and production.
So we still end with a pile of garbage.
However, I am against single-use anything and would say that promoting truly lasting bags should be a priority over trying to figure out a solution for a single facet of a large issue.
I feel like the thicker ‘bags for life’ are a bit of a false economy. I could be remembering wrong but with those, you need to use them something like either 12 or 20 times for them to work out as being less harmful than the old disposable plastic bags.
I try to avoid using them where possible but where I can, but when I have, I can’t say I’ve been able to use them more than 5 or 6 times on average.
We had some from Lidl that broke on the way out of the shop! I wouldn’t trust most of them for 3 trips, let alone a lifetime of them.
Agreed. Of the supermarkets I go to, lidl make the weakest ones.
Bag for week would probably be more accurate but doesn’t quite have the same ring to it 😂
I remember using them a lot (I’m from the UK) and they were much stronger, could hold more, and would last ages if you didn’t strain them.
Hey Pete,
What helped me with the same problem and others is to act like it really mattered,cause it does. For me I ask myself “if I were to get 20 million $£€ if i did this perfect for a year, would I.” then try and act like it. If I were to give you this money, you would not forget your bags at home. You would always have them when needed and in a quality that wouldn’t rip easily. Act like that. Then it will quickly be a habbit that you won’t have to think about.
