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Paper and canvas bags already do this. What an engineering marvel.
Whilst paper and canvas is biodegradable, plastic as a material has certain useful traits compared to paper and canvas, hence why making/developing similar biologically based and degradable materials helps reduce our reliance on it.
Examples of such traits: Liquid resistance, non-permeable to water, see-through.
And the #1 most important factor, and why plastic bags are the most common:
The cost
If we can’t find a cheaper solution, it won’t be adopted without regulations.
To be fair, corn is much faster to regrow than trees if we’re talking about this vs. paper.
Hemp as well. I’m certain we could make some sort of plastics with hemp, we can make practically everything from hemp. The added benefit of hemp is that it stores 85% of the excessive amount of carbon it consumes in its roots, so we can do whatever we want with the rest of the plant, harvest the roots, compress them into a cube much denser than water, drop them into the Mariana Trench, and not worry about that carbon for a few hundred million years.
I like cannabis sativa for it’s medicinal and psychoactive properties, but I love cannabis sativa for its material, ecological, and agricultural properties. It’s a damn fine plant
Nice! With the best will in the world I always forget my standard shopping bags and I feel that the “bags for life” just replace one thin and crap lump of plastic for an overly engineered one.
How are they over-engineered? They last much longer. Canvas ones forever, pretty much.
The plastic ones (here in the UK at least) also split and fall apart, they’re better than the “standard” ones but they don’t usually last that much longer.
Also I have a million of them because I always forget to bring them.
I have both opinions: certain canvas bags will last you a lifetime and even you can fix them if necessary. Most stores sell you “bags for life” that aren’t either recyclable (truly) nor meant to last a year of daily usage, probably because they are cheaping out on the materials and production.
So we still end with a pile of garbage.
However, I am against single-use anything and would say that promoting truly lasting bags should be a priority over trying to figure out a solution for a single facet of a large issue.
Hey Pete,
What helped me with the same problem and others is to act like it really mattered,cause it does. For me I ask myself “if I were to get 20 million $£€ if i did this perfect for a year, would I.” then try and act like it. If I were to give you this money, you would not forget your bags at home. You would always have them when needed and in a quality that wouldn’t rip easily. Act like that. Then it will quickly be a habbit that you won’t have to think about.
I’m sorry for the naivety, maybe there is something cool I’m not catching.
Haven’t we had biodegradable, compostable “plastic” shopping bags for like 20 years now? What’s the news here?
Corn has plenty of drawbacks even if it offers a few of the benefits of plastic.
