The bag ban has been amazing here in NJ. I want them to go further with it. So sick of all the bullshit plastic litter everywhere I go.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Checkout !newjersey@lemmy.world if you haven’t already! It’s been too quiet over there.
Oh I subscribe, I’m one of the few commenters. I should probably post more.
I wish we could federalize a ban on single use plastics.
Yeah these plastic bag laws were a convenient way to make people feel like something was done and the problem was solved. We've moved on. It's "uplifting news". Mission Accomplished.
Where are the efforts to reduce the other 99% of single use plastic waste in the grocery store? It's full of plastic bottles of water most people could do without, bags of candy where each individual piece is also wrapped in plastic, you can find this shit in every aisle.
And the irony is that I actually reused the plastic bags that got banned, whereas the paper bags aren't useful and get thrown out. Now if I want small plastic bags I have to buy them. The plastic grocery bags were good for daily cat litter disposal and other small trash can lining.
Can't paper bags be recycled more easily, or even composted?
I get your perspective, and I'm frustrated that I have to buy garbage bags now.
But my household(s) always ended up with more plastic bags than we could reuse. And before the ban, plastic bag litter was far, far more commonplace.
imo, a good middle ground might've been to charge for plastic bags and use that money to fund the cleanup and recycling of plastic bags. But that's more reactive than proactive, and it'd place disproportionate burden on the lower classes who can't take on the higher costs as easily as wealthier people.
you ended up with more plastic bags than you could use because you didn't bring your own bags to the store. it doesn't matter what type of bag it is, it's that you didn't bring it yourself.
yes, the ability to do this leads to more people doing it. but I still think they should have just charged for the plastic bags and let people make the choice to buy more. some people will just always buy them, some people won't. some people like me would have brought their own bags and then bought plastic ones as necessary (reusing them at home). tbh this wouldn't be an issue at all for me if they sold similar bags at the store, but everything is much more heavyweight and expensive. I just want a cheap shitty bag to bag up my dog shit and use as a garbage bag, I don't need something 10 times thicker
in my other comment I do mention that the plastic bag litter is pretty shitty, agreed on that
I didn't bring my old plastic bags to the store because they tended to wear out quickly and not hold up to repeated usage with weight. So they were better suited to being garbage bags in small bins around the home than they were to regular reuse for groceries, in my experience.
As for dog poo, I thought there were special bags for those that are compostable or something? I don't have a dog, so I'm not sure, but I don't think I ever regularly saw people using grocery store bags for that.
there are municipally compostable dog poop bags, but they're the 'single serving' size, at least that is all that I've seen
I need to use a leak proof bag to place my dog poop into the green bin at home for the city to collect it, and I don't pick up my dog's poop from the yard individually, I do batches every few days, which are too large to fit into the single use bags (also would require many of them!). regular grocery store bags were perfect for this
I thought they specifically were a particularly common thing to blow into waterways or something, in ways that plastic bottles etc. weren’t? [citation needed]
I'm a bachelor, I outright don't like using full size kitchen trash bags because any cat litter or meat scraps I throw away start smelling Republican long before the bag is full. I haven't bought trash bags in years, I only use grocery bags as trash bags.
very occasionally, I ask for one paper bag. After it carries groceries home, it will get cut into rectangles and used for rubbing out the finish on my woodworking projects, because it's cheaper and honestly better than 600 grit sandpaper. One bag will last awhile, I go through one a month when I'm really churning things out.
Now, in my lifetime, grocery stores have changed. My childhood Juicy Juice was poured from a big metal can my mother opened with a church key. My Gerber baby food came out of glass jars, some of which I still have and still use as containers for screws and such 35 years later. Russet potatoes weren't individually shrink wrapped. Cat food came in metal cans and paper bags. Now, all of those things and more are packaged in plastic. None of that is being addressed.
I mostly agree with this
those grocery bags always had another purpose and got used several times, or at minimum just once as a garbage bag
now I have to buy dedicated bags, which are much more material per bag. and there's still basically nothing being done about all of the plastic waste in single use products that account for much much more material usage, like water bottles as you said.
I will admit that seeing trees full of plastic bags on a windy spring day after the snow has melted is pretty disheartening. but I don't think it's any more disheartening than the plastic trash strewn across the parks and near the garbage cans, and arguably the bags are even easier to clean up.
like yay we got rid of thin plastic bags that had multiple uses, and every fucking vegetable in the grocery store is wrapped in plastic or in a plastic container
If you reuse old plastic bags, how does this ban on stores giving them away even affect you?
Did you read the full comment? They said they reuse them for cat litter disposal and wastebasket liners. Y'know, the sort of things for which someone would normally purchase single-use plastics anyways.
I'm happy to reuse a bag after it's held canned goods and fresh produce. Cat poop and used tissues? Not so much. My old stock only lasted so long.
my bad I somehow didn't see that
Hard to continue using plastic bags when you ban them
Fr where are these 9% holdouts?
If it's like my state, plastic meat and produce bags are still available in the stores. Also extra thick "reusable" plastic bags are available for a small fee.
My supermarket bolted the thick plastic bag holder to the packing flat surface of the check out machine. Makes it less convenient to use your own reusable bag, taking up space and encourages everyone to pay for the thick plastic bag on every check out. Such BS
We need researchers to validate to us that use of plastic bags was almost eliminated after they were banned? I mean... Y'all could've just asked me. I would've told y'all, "yes. Yes, they are used less now."
that is not always true. where i live (third world country), plastic bags are officially banned, but usage is just as much. good implementation of law, appropriate fining are also required.
Fair enough.
(This was mostly joking anyway. 😁)
i knew it was joke, but i had a problem with the premise itself
The premise included the assumption that people follow the law, I suppose.
I’m not certain that the plastic replacements for single use plastic bags are all they’re cracked up to be. But it’s good to move in the direction of eliminating this source of long term pollution.
For me, the 10¢ plastic bags are much thicker plastic: convenient for me, worse for the environment. Historically I tried to reuse grocery bags for trash but they long since got too cheap for that, but now I don’t want to spend the 10¢. It would be good to know what the payback threshold is: how many times do I need to reuse them before it was a good tradeoff.
It’s probably disgusting that I never clean them: if they get a spill just throw them out. My replacement rate is governed by my mistake: did I remember to bring them? Did I accidentally recycle them?
Reusable cloth bags seem like the thing to do but I have no idea how to find them. Everything online is made of “nonwoven material” which has got to be a euphemism for plastic
We get “cloth” bags made of plastic that’s ostensibly recycled. They’ll last for quite a long time.
Stores hand them out for a small fee if you forget your bags. But now I’ve got approaching a hundred because I’m terrible at remembering bags and I don’t have options when I get to the till. So they’re really disposable to me because I just have too many.
Not cleaning them definitely is a problem; I wash them occasionally but it’s kinda gross to think about. Some have a base in them that needs to be taken out and that makes it even less frequent that they are washed. As they’re used and when they’re washed they shed microplastics.
I’d like paper better, if I knew with certainty that the forest that was harvested to create, the pulp was actually intended for pulp, instead of being some old growth forest that a forestry company has green washed. Then, there’s a fair bit of nasty chemicals, involved in the paper making process.
I have a few cotton bags, which are fantastic, because they are easily washed, hold a great deal of weight, and definitely last longer than the plastic versions.
Is that a glass pun?
Just watched a video of someone exploring a mansion that was abandoned in the 2000s. Eventually they got to the kitchen and found a cupboard that was stuffed full of used plastic bags and I was like, 'Huh, that definitely was a thing.'
Bonus fact: A plastic bag that is caught high up in a tree that rustles in the wind are called 'Witches Britches ' in some regions.
So what now? Now you only have bad guys with plastic bags. All the good guys no longer have plastic bags. The criminals are just going to run amok with their illegal plastic bags now!!!