
Pakistan to ban single-use plastic bags - pseudolus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pakistan-moves-to-ban-single-use-plastic-bags-the-health-of-200-million-people-is-at-stake/2019/08/12/6c7641ca-bc23-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html
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psychometry
Meanwhile in the U.S., the GOP is banning the banning of plastic bags
(hopefully soon to be undone by the new Democratic majority in Michigan).

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/2016/12/30/yes-this-is-real-michigan-just-banned-banning-
plastic-bags/)

~~~
rsj_hn
Banning plastic bags is bad policy that promotes resource waste and food
contamination.It's a rolling back of the gains from sanitation that we've
made, for no purpose other than muddle-headed virtue signaling by people who
can't be bothered to learn the facts before passing their intrusive bans.

[https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/726035361/why-banning-
plastic...](https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/726035361/why-banning-plastic-
grocery-bags-could-be-a-bad-move)

[https://fee.org/articles/banning-plastic-bags-isnt-just-
bad-...](https://fee.org/articles/banning-plastic-bags-isnt-just-bad-
economics-its-bad-for-the-environment/)

~~~
mundu_wa_hinya
As a policy in action in Kenya, I'd say that it is working. (We have a ban
that has been in place for more than a year). practically everyone at the
supermarket uses reusable bags compared to pre-ban mentality of 'oh I'll get
yet another bag at the till'.

~~~
umvi
And don't said reusable bags cost thousands of times the carbon emissions of
single use plastic bags? So unless you use your reusable bags for years and
years, you won't break even.

~~~
phil248
"So unless you use your reusable bags for years and years..."

That is literally the exact point of reusable bags. The hint is in the name.

~~~
rsj_hn
The issue is how do you sterilize the bags between re-use to achieve the same
level of hygiene as disposable bags? Doing that is very energy intensive and
you are in a situation in which the energy cost of washing a bigger reusable
bag is comparable to the cost of making a brand new plastic one. That is why I
was emphasizing sanitation. We don't use disposable needles, containers for
meat and produce, dairy, because they are cheaper per se, we use them because
we are concerned with hygiene.

And of course the larger issue is the totalitarian nature of this. Who needs
two cups of coffee? Ban the second cup! This idea that we should start using
the government's monopoly on violence to ban what are symbolic and irrelevant
things -- even without thinking through the repercussions for sanitation and
energy -- is a very dangerous one.

~~~
jabits
No one will look out for the environment we live in, especially business. Try
living with re-use bags for a month and find out just how inconvenienced you
are...we as citizens are making these laws to live in a clean sanitary world,
not Some unnamed totalitarian regime.

~~~
rsj_hn
No, you are doing it to _feel good about yourself_. You are doing it to _feel_
like you are making the world better.

But you are not making the world better, you are forcing random laws on people
as part of an empty performative ritual.

If you wanted to live in a cleaner world, you would focus on _improving
systems of sanitation_ rather than trying to force a very marginal reduction
in waste going into these systems.

90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers in India and Asia. The
plastic is in the ocean because of poor garbage pickup and disposal
infrastructure, it's not there because some guy in San Francisco is using a
single use plastic bag when he goes shopping. If you want to make the "world"
cleaner, then improve the waste management infrastructure rather than trying
to reduce plastic waste by 0.000000001%. The thin disposable bags are not
gonna put you over the top.

These are all symbolic acts that have real world deleterious consequences in
terms of personal liberty as well as increasing the number of food poisoning
cases, emergency room visits, etc, due to people re-using bags without
properly sterilizing them between each use.

------
77ko
I hope it works. The problem in Pakistan is trash in general, Pakistan needs a
country wide "don't litter" campaign, sort of what happened in many developed
countries.

Plastic bags just happen to be the most pervasive and visible source of trash.

There aren't many places to throw trash, the norm is to just throw trash
anywhere outside your house. Even the more upscale suburbs in the big cities
have essentially no trash cans, and the garbage collection areas are open
dumps, so plastic bags fly all over the place.

The trash is sometimes picked up and burnt, or other times just burnt in
place, and the smell is toxic as there is generally a lot of plastic.

The whole plastic bag problem has a huge cost on basic city infrastructure: In
most of Karachi, every drain and sewer pipe is either choked with plastic
bags, or has just been cleared and will get choked again in due time. And so
every time it rains, the city floods, and there is a grand proclamation of
building more drains and sewers.

In North Pakistan, around the most remote and beautiful lakes, ones where no
one lives as they are too high and remote, many have plastic bags scattered
all around, most I assume carried there by the winds from nearby
towns/villages, as some of the ones I visited don't get enough visitors to
have thrown the amount of plastic bags I saw.

Visiting places (again) which used to be pristine not that long ago really hit
home how much we humans have spread our "stuff" everywhere.

Edit: The ban is a bit too harsh. Should have been rolled out slowly, to give
ppl more time to adapt, like targeting larger stores (which are in the tax net
and thus easy to monitor and punish) and then rolling it to other stores, and
finally everyone.

~~~
selimthegrim
My cousin to me walking on Tariq Road while tossing a plastic bag; “Who cares,
this isn’t New York or America”

Me: “Yeah, and it never will be with that attitude”

------
selimthegrim
dang (or some moderator) should correct this headline; the ban only applies in
the Islamabad Capital Territory

~~~
abdullahkhalids
You are correct. But there are similar bans either already implemented in
other provinces or in the works. See for example

[0] [https://www.dawn.com/news/1498790](https://www.dawn.com/news/1498790)

[1] [https://propakistani.pk/2019/04/30/cm-usman-buzdar-
announces...](https://propakistani.pk/2019/04/30/cm-usman-buzdar-announces-
plans-to-ban-plastic-bags-in-punjab/)

------
c22
They banned single-use plastic bags where I live. Now every place has
"multi"-use plastic bags which are 10 times thicker and cost a nickel. I have
yet to see one of these bags being re-used.

~~~
NullPrefix
If we make then extra thick maybe the wind will not scatter them all over the
place and gathering will be easier.

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refurb
This is interesting as what I've seen in other developed countries is a very
efficient use of plastic bags. Most things you buy that need a bag (salt,
rice, etc) come in a super small and thin plastic bag.

Far more efficient than the packaging we have in the west which tends to be
either super thick paper or super heavy plastic bags with added packaging on
top.

~~~
77ko
The flip side of thin bags is that often people end up double (or triple
bagging!) heavier stuff, or things likely to leak, or just cause they don't
trust using only one bag.

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amelius
If all the food items in a supermarket came with a built-in loop, you'd just
run a rope through the loops and you could carry as much groceries as you can
lift, without needing a bag.

~~~
mikestew
The loop that, if strong enough, would consume more plastic than a bag? For
every single item? I mean, I loved your idea when I first read it, clever. But
loops aren’t cost-free, unfortunately.

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ShadowFaxSam
There should be more countries who are also taking these steps in order to
help reduce waste and help the environment. We are fully aware of the harm
plastic bags cause and there are many other alternative including paper or
reusable bags.

~~~
beatgammit
I thought paper was just as bad, if not worse, because it takes more energy to
produce. [Here's a random site about it[1], though please note that I've done
pretty much nothing to vet the information.

I reuse plastic bags (garbage, traveling w/ liquids, picnics), and if I have a
bunch of extras, I take them to the grocery store, where they have a recycling
bin for them. I don't know if they actually get recycled (I read that they
often end up in the landfill regardless), but there's a chance. I rarely get
too many though because most of my shopping is at Costco, which doesn't
provide them.

I disagree that a ban here is necessary or useful. I use them quite a bit, so
at least for me, I'll be producing "more" waste because I'll need to buy new
bags instead. Paper bags aren't as useful (can't hold liquids, are more rigid,
break easily), and I always seem to forget my reusable bags.

I wish more stores would follow Costco's lead and reuse those cardboard trays,
which are just as useful for carrying groceries to/from the car and are
obviously recyclable and biodegradable. Honestly, I prefer them most of the
time because they keep things from rolling around, I can carry more in one
trip to the house, and it's easier to see where certain things are for
organizing later.

What we need isn't a plastic bag ban, but maybe a tax on them based on the
cost of cleaning up discarded plastic bags. It costs $0.05-0.15/bag to buy
small garbage bags (bathrooms, office, etc), so the tax shouldn't be more than
that. Charging for plastic bags seems to work[2], so why not just do that
instead of a ban? Those of us who find value in these bags can continue to use
them (I love them for dirty diapers, rotten food, and other stuff that
shouldn't hang around the house for days), while those who don't can use other
bags.

[1]
[http://www.allaboutbags.ca/papervplastic.html](http://www.allaboutbags.ca/papervplastic.html)
[2] [https://neweconomics.org/2016/09/why-the-plastic-bag-
charge-...](https://neweconomics.org/2016/09/why-the-plastic-bag-charge-is-
working/)

~~~
astrodust
Is there a giant swirling mass of paper bags in the Pacific Ocean?

Do paper bags hang from trees and phone lines for _years_?

Do paper bags cause enormous damage from clogging up sewers and sewage
processing plants?

They don't.

~~~
magduf
>Is there a giant swirling mass of paper bags in the Pacific Ocean?

I'm quite sure there's no giant swirling mass of plastic bags in the Pacific
Ocean.

Sure, there's a huge amount of plastic pollution there in gyres, but it's not
from people using plastic bags at the grocery store in middle America. It's
from stuff like shipping containers blown overboard, and various other trash
that has gotten into waterways.

Your other points are sound I think, but not this one. If you want to complain
about the gyres, then you need to take aim at ALL plastics and discuss banning
them ALL. That'll basically set our technology back to the early 1900s or so.

~~~
astrodust
The problem is if a plastic bag ends up in the ocean it never really breaks
down or degrades. Turtles tend to eat them since they look like jellyfish, and
this causes enormous knock-on problems when turtles start dying from eating
too much plastic.

Turtles could eat paper bags all day and probably be fine.

They may not be the #1 contributor to the Pacific Garbage Patch, but they're a
component of it.

~~~
magduf
My point is that plastic bags from most places in America are not winding up
in the ocean. They sure as hell aren't getting to the ocean from people in
Kansas being sloppy with plastic bag disposal. There's a lot of problems with
plastics in the oceans, and I have a hard time believing that plastic grocery
bags are one of the major contributors.

But as I said somewhere else in this discussion, I think all these grocery
bags should be made of the corn starch plastic that breaks down quickly, and
I'd like to know what those weren't mandated since they've been around for at
least 20 years now.

~~~
astrodust
Canada just got on with a ban on single-use plastic items
([https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-to-ban-single-
us...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-to-ban-single-use-plastics-
as-early-as-2021-source-1.5168386)) which presumably includes plastic bags.

Single use non-plastic items made of other materials like corn starch would be
interesting, but they're going to have to be sure to not brand them as
"plastic".

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aitchnyu
Tangential, but India insists on thicker plastic bags for recycleability. And
yet we have seas of plastic bags and bottles floating around. Would we be
better off with thinner burnable bags and clean incinerators?

------
joelrunyon
The laws of unintended consequences.

Banning plastic bags in San Diego led to a Hepatitis A outbreak.

[https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/sep/08/stringers-
pl...](https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/sep/08/stringers-plastic-bag-
ban-led-hep-health-crisis/)

2nd and 3rd order effects are not so easy to anticipate.

------
RedBee
Finally some smart people, it should have been done years ago and not only in
Pakistan but all across the world. The nature sends us obvious signals that it
is not okay what we are doing and we need to take serious actions.

