There was also a study done which found bacteria including e. coli on reusable tote bags. Guess what? Funded by the plastic bag companies. Guess what else? They didn't test plastic bags. Which I bet had e. coli on them. As does everything, really.
Have you ever read a study about the germs you find on money? If that doesn't make you a confirmed germiphobe, I'm not sure what will.
One of the editorial's contentions was that reusable tote bags require more energy to produce than single-use plastic grocery bags. I don't doubt that this is true. Among my collection of tote bags I still have several of the first reusable totes I ever bought. And they're still going strong! Compared to which, many plastic bags can't even make it home from the grocery store. (They're not even single-use, for pity's sake!)
I buy the totes they sell at Safeway, which cost a dollar, and are made from recycled plastic bags. Each tote probably does take more to make (in terms of carbon footprint, raw material, energy, time, etc.) than a plastic bag. However, by my rough estimate, each tote bag has supplanted about 200 plastic bags a year - and counting!
I'm single and childless, so I have a pretty minimal grocery expenditure. Nevertheless, I calculate that I used to bring home 20 plastic bags a week. That includes a lot of double-bagging, for things like 2-liter soda bottles and gallons jars of milk. (Any more, every plastic bag has to be double-bagged, because the darned things are so flimsy.)
This means that by bringing my own totes, I'm saving 20 plastic bags a week. 80 plastic bags a month. Almost a thousand plastic bags a year.
This brings me to the next point the editorial raised: reusable totes aren't recyclable. That's true. And I have had two tote bags fail over the last year. One failed because I stored about 30 pounds of books in it hung up by the handles for two months. Another failed when the neighbor's extremely large puppy ran over and bit the handles in a fit of puppyish exuberance. I had to throw those bags away.
But you know what? Plastic grocery bags aren't recyclable, either. Sure, you can take them to the grocery store and stuff them into that giant overflowing barrel. But where do they go from there? Your city and county don't recycle those bags - otherwise you'd be setting them out with the rest of the recycling.
So we have two possibilities:
1. The grocery store, at its own expense, packs and ships those bags off to a recycling center somewhere in the country that does accept bags. (Plastic bags recycle very poorly anyway, but that's a topic for another day.)
2. Late at night, when no one's watching… the store manager sneaks out and transfers all those bags to the dumpster.
I wonder! *taps chin thoughtfully*
Photo credit: Flickr/mtsofan