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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I've been using the same set of bags for 8 years now. That's a whole lot of plastic reduced.
Your one of the rare ones. Overall it has been far worse which is concerning. Now that the supermarkets know they can make a fairly significant profits as well, they are quite happy to sell extra bags.
In 2019 UK supermarkets sold 1.5 billion reusable bags. That is 57 per household. Greenpeace estimated you need to reuse a cotton bag some 7100 times before it is the equivalent of plastic. I hope you did not buy cotton as you likely will need to have those bags for life to offset the energy needed to produce them.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/13/world/reusable-grocery-bags-cotton-plastic-scn/index.html
One of the bags is made by my daughter from reused cotton and the other two are made from hemp.
It's not only about energy though. For me it was about not using plastic anymore.
And to be fair, the tote my daughter made is just superior. I love it. It has a square base with some straps sewn on the inside of the walls to fixate bottles and four handles, two long for shoulder carry and two shorter for regular carry.
It good you are trusting but that is not the norm. Plastic is ugly to be sure but it does not have a huge GHG impact which is the biggest threat by far at the moment. People should be encouraged to reuse to be sure but we definately should not enact policy that is overall far worse.
My wife and I have compact, roll up shopping bags, she always has one in her handbag, mine is in my backpack, for the past 10 years. The only time we used bags from a store was when we shopped for seafood in Hong Kong's wet markets.