Can anyone explain to me how this works in practice? Eg if i now buy meat or cheese or pre-cut vegetables or bread at the supermarket, it’s in plastic packaging. What do legislators propose we replace that by? I understand (and use) reusable shopping bags but keeping sliced ham fresh sounds less practical. For clarity, I’m not skeptical, I’m all for the strictest plastic ban that’s remotely practical. But I don’t get how it would work. Do we all take tupperware into the butchers?
And garbage bags. How the hell are we going to handle garbage without plastic bags? Garbage caused a lot more pollution even in developed countries before everything could be neatly bagged up and buried in a landfill.
I don’t think proponents of the ban have really thought through the society-wide consequences of a single use plastic ban. I wish there were better alternatives but plastic is a bit of a miracle material and who’s to say we’re not going to face the same issue with any other polymer that we use to replace it.
That said, I don’t think we’ve ever properly priced in the externalities of all the garbage we create so maybe it’s time we had a major rethink of how we approach our refuse.
You could get them individually packed, but I believe that shelf-life would likely be affected significantly. Meaning that food waste would also go up. Packing anything with nitrogen or like is really hard without plastics. Same goes for vacuum.
So end result would be more traveling and emissions to go to stores more regularly and lot more wasted food. Again significantly increasing emissions.
