
Germany to meet EU guidelines to ban single-use plastics by 2021 - yboris
https://mymodernmet.com/germany-single-use-plastic-ban/
======
air7
From my reading of the data, I feel that banning plastic bags (for example)
would do more harm than good (in 1st world countries). The alternatives
require more reuse than actually occurs in order to be environmentally viable
[0], waste management makes sure that no garbage gets into the ocean and is
either kept in a landfill or incinerated responsibility. And "dumping plastic
overseas" is a non issue: Its at most 10% of the exporting country's plastic
waste.

It's not that plastic doesn't cause expenditure of resources but rather that
life requiees that anyway and in most use cases plastic may be the most
enviormently friendly way to answer a need such as a carrying vessel for
forgetful people (again, in 1st world countries with excellent waste
management)

[0]
[https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...](https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf)

~~~
molmalo
> The alternatives require more reuse than actually occurs.

Where I live, we banned plastic bags in 2017. Every store at first sold cloth
bags, for buyers who didn't bring their own. Some weeks later, everyone had
several reusable bags, that they would bring when buying stuff, not a hard
thing to do.

Those bags last even years, so I don't understand why you think people
wouldn't reuse them. They actually are quite better (they don't make my
fingers hurt, won't break so easily, etc).

~~~
dogma1138
Because there is a study showing that some bags needs to be reused 50,000
times, degradable plastic bags which are then reused as rubbish bags or put
into recycling are a better option than the trendy cloth bags that have a
pretty substantial environmental impact and not the beneficial kind.

I don’t know about you but even if a bag lasts for years I don’t think it will
be reused more than 1000 times.

~~~
zaarn
It's not 50000 times. It's 131 times. Paper bags 3 times.

You can use a cloth bag 131 times easily.

[https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-
reusable](https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable)

If like you assume the bag will not be used more than 1000 times, it beats
it's target to be better than plastic bags by a factor of 10.

------
teach
I hope this doesn't turn out like the ban on single-use plastic shopping bags
in Austin.

Many grocery stores "complied" by replacing the single-use bags with much
thicker "reusable" plastic bags. So now customers still don't bring their own
bags into the store, the new bags still aren't easily recyclable and I suspect
most are thrown away just as before.

Edit: on the other hand, the city of Austin's waste management is very
supportive of recycling and hopefully they'll support plastic film in the
single-stream collection and make it much easier for the average person to do
the right thing.

~~~
andrew_eit
This _may_ be a just factor of culture and attitude.

In Germany, single use plastic bags have not been allowed in supermarkets for
several years now and it has worked quite well IMO.

Yes you can buy thicker re-usable bags (sometimes made out of textiles or a
mixture of textiles and plastic) but by far many people bring their own bags,
or just load the stuff into shopping trollies and take it to their cars
(unfortunately the petrol/diesel car culture is still going strong :( ).

Also, in places like Lidl and Aldi, it's quite normal to just look for an
empty box of some product on the shelf(e.g. a box that had some canned goods)
and use that as your 'basket', stuff your items there, pay, go home and
dispose of the box in the paper recycle bin.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention, as an example of culture/attitude: plastic
bags are still available for fruit & vegetables but even then, people do make
their own choice to just take the produce without a bag, and place it 'loose'
at the cashier for them to weigh.

~~~
mjevans
I'd like to see a return of paper bags. That technology is very ecologically
friendly.

Really crummy paper bags for (dry) fresh food isolation, heavier re-usable for
takeout and carry. It's nice to have bags to be able to give to others and
forget about.

Re-usable produce containers should be sold too, and I'd prefer if those were
sold from a special part of the store so that consumers could pack in their
own togo containers.

~~~
gruez
> I'd like to see a return of paper bags. That technology is very ecologically
> friendly.

How? Random search turned up

>According to the previously cited U.K. study, it takes three reuses of a
paper bag to neutralize its environmental impact, relative to plastic. A bag’s
impact is more than just its associated carbon emissions: Manufacturing a
paper bag requires about four times as much water as a plastic bag.
Additionally, the fertilizers and other chemicals used in tree farming and
paper manufacturing contribute to acid rain and eutrophication of waterways at
higher rates.

[https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-
reusable](https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable)

I guess you can argue that paper bags are compostable, but I'm not sure
whether that matters much. Plastic bags that are sitting in the landfill
doesn't harm the environment, and their bulk is negligible due to how
thin/light they are.

~~~
novia
> I guess you can argue that paper bags are compostable, but I'm not sure
> whether that matters much. Plastic bags that are sitting in the landfill
> doesn't harm the environment, and their bulk is negligible due to how
> thin/light they are.

The biodegradability of paper bags is the whole point here. You've seen the
sides of the roads. You've seen the streams and rivers. People get done with
their garbage and just throw it wherever. With garbage made out of plastic
that doesn't break down, this is a big deal.

~~~
gruez
>You've seen the sides of the roads. You've seen the streams and rivers.

My local rivers are relatively plastic-free. Same with roads. They're not
completely free of plastic, of course. Given that there are thousands of
plastic bags being dispensed in my neighborhood every day and that the
roads/rivers aren't being regularly cleaned, the fact that the neighborhood
isn't completely filled with plastic bags makes me think that the overall
disposal rate is pretty good.

Plastic litter might be the most _visible_ externality of single use plastics,
but I'm not quite sure whether tripling our co2 emissions from plastic bags is
a worthwhile trade for eliminating plastic bags from our neighborhoods.

------
andrew_eit
I have strong feeling that in the coming decades we will see strong growth in
the re-usable / repairable product market.

It's high time we got more creative in the products we mass produce, we've
grown complacent, something as simple as the plastic bag or the plastic straw
have caused such environmental destruction yet can actually be phased out with
behavioural modifications.

I would also argue that reusability and repairability is a part of the
equation of 'long-term economic mass production', at least for day-to-day
necessities where sterilisation isn't paramount.

Seriously, just looking at what I have lying around at home, even something as
mundane and as simple as a broom seems to have special plastic elements
(plastic hook on the top to hang on a wall, plastic lining in on the pole).

There's a lot of unnecessary un-recyclable waste out there and while banning
Single-Use plastics is a great step in the right direction, we need a paradigm
shift in how we think about the objects we construct.

~~~
vondur
I miss having glass Coke bottles. I can’t remember what shopping ing was like
when I was really young, but I’d imagine plastic containers were rare.
(1970’s)

------
kachurovskiy
It's always good to have less waste and single-use items. At the same time,
maybe it's better to use the oil in it's processed form (plastic) before
burning it[1] instead of burning it right away[2]? On the go, now you're
forced to pick up a 500g single-use glass bottle instead of a 20g plastic
bottle. Only 1-10k tons of German trash ends up in the ocean from 50M tons and
I don't think plastic spoons are a material % of that.

It's not that I love plastic, it's just the optimal choice for food packaging
now. Saying "I don't use plastic spoons" while following current consumption
standards makes no dent whatsoever.

[1] [https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/muenchen-grosse-muell-
luege...](https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/muenchen-grosse-muell-luege-warum-
verbrennen-wir-so-viel-abfall-9828158.html) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Energy_consu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Energy_consumption)

~~~
badestrand
> It's not that I love plastic, it's just the optimal choice for food
> packaging now. Saying "I don't use plastic spoons" while following current
> consumption standards makes no dent whatsoever.

IMO the value is not only in the concrete measures taken (e.g. using wooden
spoons) but in the overall trend. We have the movement away from plastic right
now and while some single actions or policies may only have a negligible
effect there is a huge value in the big picture: Research for alternative
materials, lots of companies and consumers trying to figure our ways to reduce
waste and plastic usage. And boom, after a few years or decades we might have
a plastic free future where everyone consumes less and close to 100% of
materials are recycled.

Could we search for alternatives without banning single-use plastic bags?
Probably yes but the workings of society are messy and not always rational so
better take the path that actually works.

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LargoLasskhyfv
Oh my gawd! Now vee vill be burried under heapz of dogpoop!

No, really. What about the dogpoo-bags?

It's mandatory to pack the shit of your dogs into bags, and drop them into
some trashbin in most places here.

Example: [https://www.hamburg.de/saubere-
stadt/7174714/gassibeutel/](https://www.hamburg.de/saubere-
stadt/7174714/gassibeutel/)

[https://www.hamburg.de/behoerdenfinder/hamburg/11260865/](https://www.hamburg.de/behoerdenfinder/hamburg/11260865/)

[https://www.hamburg.de/hundegesetz/](https://www.hamburg.de/hundegesetz/)

~~~
oseityphelysiol
I don't see why they can't be made out of paper.

------
pl-94
This measure is more of a symbol than an effective way to reduce carbon
emissions. Attacking symbols is a always nice, but isn't it a little bit late
for that? I can't wait the day where EU will try for real to follow Paris
agreement.

~~~
andrew_eit
I think you are talking about two different environmental issues.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the Paris Agreement covers climate change,
carbon emissions, energy production, etc.

The topic of single-use plastics, while related to sustainability, covers an
entirely different emerging issue, namely: the infiltration of micro-plastics
into our environment.

Besides the environmental effects that microplastics already seem to have,
such as hindering plant growth [1], microplastics are also entering the food
chain, and making their way back to us. The long-term affects are as far as I
know, quite unknown.

[1]
[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b01339](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b01339)

------
dgellow
As said in the body of the article, it’s a EU directive, Germany is just the
first country to act on it but other will follow. I feel that should be part
of the title instead of singling out one country.

~~~
akerro
There are also other non-EU countries that are following this directive,
Canada and Wales, it's a nice global movement.

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stock_toaster
Does this also apply to medical devices? Some are disposable (like syringes)
for sanitization reasons.

~~~
jankassens
A different source [1] describes certain product categories. Initially
products like swabs, forks, plates, cups, stick for balloons that have non-
plastic alternatives.

[1] German: [https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/umweltschutz-verbot-von-
ei...](https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/umweltschutz-verbot-von-einweg-
plastik-kommt-mitte-2021-a-51e5fb32-7dca-4139-a8a9-734a4b893d00)

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BallinBige
They also banned all ads for cigarettes & vapes. I think that's great.

