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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • While in principle this is a great piece of news, reality isn’t as optimistic and I’d suggest asking questions before deciding to celebrate. When single use plastic shopping bags were outlawed, reusable bag sales went up (as you’d expect), but based on the numbers I saw, the reusable bags cause overall greater levels of emissions and refuse than the plastic they replaced.

    In layman’s terms, if a 1-use plastic bag has an environmental cost of “1 carbon”, and a (bigger, heavier, made of multiple things) reusable bag has an environmental cost of “14 carbons”, the reusable bag has to be used 14 times to be a better option, but in practice they’re used around about half that many times before being damaged / thrown away.

    Source: live in New Zealand and worked in a relevant part of the grocery industry until 2022.