Canadian Politics Today

Most of Canada's waste plastic does not end up in a lake/river of plastic, at least as far as I know.

It's not toxic if it's in a landfill, which have linings to prevent the waste from seeping into the ground.  At least for 100 years until those linings break down, but maybe they replace the linings/landfills i'm not sure.  Now, it doesn't remove the waste thats for sure, it just stores it.

Do replanted trees grow as fast as we cut them down?  Is it sustainable?  Or is it net-negative trees even with replanting over the longterm? As you say, bamboo might be good since it grows fast.  With landfills though, you also have to destroy natural habitat to create them.

These are questions we're not knowledgeable enough to answer, but we should be asking the questions is the point.  I don't care whether landfill plastic or paper is the best for the environment, i just want to use whichever is indeed better for the environment.  If you're going to argue paper or bamboo is better overall for environment, you have to provide scientific research proving that.

Link?

A lot of garbage containing lots of plastic is being burned in Canada?

Those wooden spoons are designed to be reusable.  You can make plastic spoons that are reusable.  We're talking about single-use products.  When you go to a fast food/take-out food joint & they need to give you cutlery or containers we need to make it out of something.

Again, you or I don't have the info the calculate the total impact on plastic vs wood vs whatever, so this discussion is pointless unless we have data, otherwise we;re just talking out of our asses.

On the first point, it rings true for me since my household switched reusable shopping bags years ago. Since then we have had to regularily buy much thicker kitchen garbage bags at Costco. The trade off works for us but I am not sure the landfill benefits.

The study found that:
 •The environmental impact of all types of carrier bag is dominated by resource use and production stages. Transport, secondary packaging and end-of-life management generally have a minimal influence on their performance.

 •Whatever type of bag is used, the key to reducing the impacts is to reuse it as many times as possible and where reuse for shopping is not practicable, other reuse, e.g. to replace bin liners, is beneficial.

•The reuse of conventional HDPE and other lightweight carrier bags for shopping and/or as bin-liners is pivotal to their environmental performance and reuse as bin liners produces greater benefits than recycling bags.

•Starch-polyester blend bags have a higher global warming potential and abiotic depletion than conventional polymer bags, due both to the increased weight of material in a bag and higher material production impacts.

•The paper, LDPE, non-woven PP and cotton bags should be reused at least 3, 4, 11 and 131 times respectively to ensure that they have lower global warming potential than conventional HDPE carrier bags that are not reused. The number of times each would have to be reused when different proportions of conventional (HDPE) carrier bags are reused are shown in the table below.

 •Recycling or composting generally produce only a small reduction in global warming potential and abiotic depletion.

What do you use for bags in your kitchen?

The only alternative is to use garbage bins without liners and simply dumping the loose stuff directly into my garbage bin. But this is messy and creates unnecessary work because the bins would need to be regularly washed with soap.