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April 15, 2019 08:04 pm PDT

Organic cotton shopping bags have to be used 20,000 times before they're better for the Earth than plastic disposables

In February 2018, Denmark's Ministry of Environment and Food published its Life Cycle Assessment of grocery carrier bags, which looked at the overall embodied energy, materials and labor in different grocery bags, and also evaluated the environmental impacts of different kinds of plastic bags.

Their conclusion was that single-use, flimsy disposable plastic bags are the best option in terms of environmental and climate costs (however, the Ministry's analysis did not factor in marine life impacts of these bags, which are severe).

By far the worst performer was organic cotton, which has about 3x the environmental impact of conventional cotton (organic growing requires more land, water, and pesticides than are used when growing GMOs with synthetic pesticides).

With plastic bag bans soaring in popularity globally (127 countries have adopted plastic bag restrictions, and New York just passed one this week), the question of what will replace plastic bags has become more pressing. We know that single-use anything is a terrible idea, whether it is plastic or not, so replacing plastic bags with paper ones will surely have deleterious side-effects like increasing deforestation. Making a paper bag also requires more energy and water than making a plastic bag, so for other environmental considerations besides litter, paper products may be worse than plastic ones.

As the Verge pointed out last year, regardless of the bag you choose, what is likely of vastly greater importance is what you choose to put in it and how you carry it around: Eating less meat, cycling or walking to the store, and buying locally-made grocery products are all likely to make a bigger difference in lowering your personal contribution to environmental problems.

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Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tK5VGr_q3g8/organic-cotton-shopping-bags-h.html

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