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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Wait till you hear about the plastic bag crazy. Pretty much all the chains got rid of them in my area and began selling the reusable bags. At about 2.50 each. One store I liked used to have old cardboard boxes but they want you to buy the reusable bags as they make about 2 dollars in profit per bag and the average costumer buys 1 bag per 100 in groceries. That alone is a2% increase on average in profits for the grocery chain. That is huge for them.
Worse is that they take about 50 times the energy to produce and they figure the average bag is only used 5 times before they end in a land fill. The net result is a 2.5% increase in your grocery bill and almost 10 times the increase in GHG compared to a plastic bag.
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.