Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

they always get several uses after I bring them home: Cat poop containers, lunch bags during the week, bags for marinating meats

Are those the uses in order? Because I think you're doing it wrong.

And I would think that if saving the environment was your primary concern your alternate bag wouldn't be $30 God Damn dollars. If people already don't want to use your bag why do you think overcharging for it will convince them?

I've been looking for a way to use up all that extra Valrhona praline paste I have left over from New Years. I've had that 5kg tub of it sitting in my garage ever since. :/

Hey!

Unnecessarily large portions are OUR thing, get your own terrible food idea Japan.

Microwaves got a bad rap from the 80s when people thought they could be used for anything. Anyone who had to endure a rubbery chicken breast because mom didn't have time to make a full meal knows what I'm talking about.

But the problem is once you accept that a microwave isn't good for everything it loses a lot of it's convenience. If I have to fire up the stove anyways, I might as well boil the water there.

It is still nice for making 90% of the meal in the oven and then just steaming the vegetables right before you eat, but that's about it.

CookiePie, on corn plastics (also called PLA) it's not as good as the propaganda. Sure, they are compostable but it requires a special process that no backyard will approximate and few towns or cities have in place. So, it's a contaminate to composting but also one to plastics as it can't be recycled and indeed ruins recycling efforts of plastic.

According to a biodegradability standard that Mojo helped develop, PLA is said to decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a “controlled composting environment” in fewer than 90 days. What’s a controlled composting environment? Not your backyard bin, pit or tumbling barrel. It’s a large facility where compost—essentially, plant scraps being digested by microbes into fertilizer—reaches 140 degrees for ten consecutive days. So, yes, as PLA advocates say, corn plastic is “biodegradable.” But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen. NatureWorks has identified 113 such facilities nationwide—some handle industrial food-processing waste or yard trimmings, others are college or prison operations—but only about a quarter of them accept residential foodscraps collected by municipalities.

Then there's the issue that more and more people are allergic to corn (which some tie to the genetically engineered strains that have appeared just in the last decade or so) and these plastics are literally deadly to them (which can be ironically unfortunate if they go to the hospital for ingesting food that wasn't supposed to contain it and end up worse because of all the corn derivitive contaminated equipment and medicines there.

The GE corn also requires intensive chemical inputs just to grow which are leaching into our groundwaters and oceans creating other issues such as dead zones which are destroying marine life (including seafood).

Does anyone have any good info on the biodegradable plastic bags? I got all excited when I first heard about them (clearly I need to get out more), but then I read that they're no good unless you compost (not really possible in Brooklyn) and that the energy used to grow the corn that goes into making them does much worse damage than regular plastic bags. @Chisai is right - in the city we have to use plastic bags for trash, so all of mine get reused. But I'd be happy to use canvas for grocery shopping and then buy biodegradable plastic bags, if they're any good for the environment. Help!

Whole Foods sells non-woven fabric or recycled plastic reusable bags for $1.00, and they often have promotions where they give them away w/purchase. The canvas-and-burlap Feed 100 bag is a fundraiser for charity. That really should have been explained in this entry, link or no. The way it reads suggests Whole Foods is going to make customers buy $30 canvas bags.

For the record, I've been using the non-woven bags for three years now, and they're still in great shape.

So I'm reading this thread ironically while watching National Geographic's Strange Days special on our waterways (that everyone who eats should watch) and what should come up but plastic. Coincidence? No, only about 1% of the 16 billion plastic bags that are made each year are recycled. Even the ones that "breakdown" only turn into smaller bits of plastic that contaminate the dirt and water and become "litterally" no-nutrition filler food for birds and animals while fish and other marine life think it's plankton and all we care about is what we are going to put our pet poop in?

As Ed Norton who hosts the shows says:

“People say, ‘What’s the one thing they could do to help?’ I say you gotta do more than one thing,” he said. But, he continued, “One thing for sure is the bags. Plastic bags are turning out to be one of the worst stupidest things that we’re doing to the environment. Those little bodega-deli plastic bags we use for 30 seconds and then throw away.”

He wants them banned, a move many countries have already taken. “When China is ahead of us in banning these things, when other countries around the world are banning these things, we need to get in line with that and catch up,” he said. “That is a simple, small thing that everybody can do—forget about those silly plastic bags.

There's a giant cesspool of plastic in the Pacific twice the size of the United States about 500 west of California. There's estimated to be 46,000 pieces of plastic trash in each square mile of ocean. In some places there is six pounds of plastic for every pound of fish. Americans use 380 BILLION plastic bags each year and some cities the cost is 17 cents disposing of each one.

Really, take a look at some pictures and see if you feel the same about convenience afterwards.

It's wonderful times we live in when people can be so serious about something so silly!