We’re awash in reusable bags, it isn’t as green as you think

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There are currently 25 “reusable” grocery store-style bags sitting at my front door, half a dozen large shopping bags and a similar number of bags with dividers to carry bottles home from the liquor store.

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Can we finally agree that doing away with paper and plastic shopping bags was a mistake and an environmental disaster?

There is no way that these “reusable” bags, which will live for years and years, are having a smaller environmental impact than what they replaced.

“Help us protect the environment. Use this bag each time you shop,” say the bags from one grocery store chain.

“Wash in cold water,” says the bag from another store.

Yes, you likely didn’t realize that these bags that carry meat and vegetables, cleaners and canned goods to your home needed to be cleaned regularly.

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“Reusable grocery bags and bins can collect harmful bacteria from foods. These bacteria can also contaminate other foods or items in the bags/bins and put you at risk of food poisoning,” warns Health Canada.

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Also little known is that the total environmental impact of reusable bags is often greater than the plastic bags they replaced.

Depending on how your “reusable” bag is manufactured, you would have to use that bag between 45 and 52 times before it would be better for the environment than an old-fashioned plastic grocery bag.

Is that likely to happen?

Maybe for some, but most likely not for most of us.

The study on how often “reusable” bags need to be used wasn’t conducted by a right-wing think tank but rather the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. Unlike so many of our environmentalists, they laid the facts on the line rather than trying to put forward politics as science.

Did you know that for an organic cotton bag to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic grocery bag, it would need to be used 2,000 times?

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If you want to use an organic cotton bag for your shopping, knock yourself out but know that the construction of that bag comes with a cost — environmental and otherwise. For far too long, we’ve taken hardline positions that don’t recognize the reality of the situation.

Plastic is always bad, even paper bags are bad to some. The sturdier “reusable” plastic bags are obviously considered better, according to our policymakers and green-oriented corporations, even if the total environmental impact is bigger than a plastic shopping bag.

It’s a kind of green virtue signalling.

It would have been more than 20 years ago when I was interviewing an honest environmental expert on the issue of what kind of shopping bag is best. At that point, the debate was whether paper or plastic bags were best.

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“It depends,” said my expert.

He went on to detail that factors such as the weight of the bag, how far it was being shipped, whether it could be reused — all played into the environmental impact.

We don’t get thoughtful analysis like that these days; we get declarations that companies will show their green bona fides by banning shopping bags, except the “reusable” kind that they will charge you for and make a handy profit on.

For the 25 “reusable” grocery bags sitting in my front closet — never mind the half dozen in the trunk of my car — they would have to be used between 1,125 and 1,300 times to be an environmental benefit.

There is nothing wrong with using a “reusable” bag if you want to, but enforcing it by government or corporate edict isn’t the win advocates claim it is.

Let’s drop the dogma and get back to reality.

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