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OPen cupboard with paper, plastic and cloth bags spilling out

2025 Grateful 37: Bags

Paper grocery bags are a very American thing. I saw it all the time on the telly. They come in from the grocery store with a bag under each arm, fumble for their keys, and then dump the bags on the kitchen counter. Always two, it seemed. Never three or four or even one. Always two.

When I was stateside, someone told me never to store those paper grocery bags in the house, as they are a breeding ground for cockroaches. I never kept those paper bags. They had one use only.

In Ireland, the plastic bag trees that lined the country’s roads were enough to warrant a charge from 2002. No more freebies. So many plastic bags were escaping to the wild, getting hung up on branches or snagged in fences, it looked horrendous. Mostly white. Perhaps if they’d been all sorts of colours it wouldn’t have looked so bad. According to one British study, though, it’s an aesthetic problem, not an environmental one.

The birth of the reusable cloth or heavy-duty plastic bag seemed the answer to everything. They became the classic conference giveaway. So much so that in time, people were amassing quite a collection. And if we keep collecting these cloth bags when we need to cut back on consumption, then it spells trouble. It’s not rocket science – more material goes into a cloth bag or a heavy-duty reusable plastic one than goes into your bog-standard paper or plastic.

We have loads. Too many. The boot is full of reusable shopping bags we rarely use but might need someday. It’s a collection that’s added to whenever we unload and forget to reload. But at least they’re resusable – and that’s good.

Right?

Maybe not.

Had I to put them in order of evil, I’d go plastic, paper, cloth. In terms of production, paper takes more energy than plastic, so much so that, according to a British study, you’d have to reuse a paper bag three times to align the global warming impact of a plastic bag.

As for plastic being bad, the Danes reckon some low-density polyethylene plastic bags have the smallest environmental footprint of all.

When it comes to landfills, Rachel Nuwer, writing for the New York Times, says:

Most paper and plastic bags wind up in a landfill or, to a lesser extent, in an incinerator. In landfills, paper bags produce methane and carbon dioxide, both potent greenhouse gases, as they break down. A plastic bag in a landfill produces neither, but, when plastic escapes into the environment, it can degrade into microplastics that sometimes last for centuries.

But when it comes to plastic, if we keep using it, we keep the fossil fuel industry in business, and this we know is bad.

Back to those cotton bags, though – think of all the water and fertiliser needed to grow the cotton and make the bags and then the shipping costs from wherever they’re made. That’s a massive environmental expense. And are we really saving anything?

Nuwer cites a couple of studies:

The British study found that a cotton bag, for example, would have to be reused 131 times to reach the equivalent carbon footprint of just one single-use plastic bag. The Danish study put that figure at 149 times.

Forget cotton. According to Nuwer, hemp and bamboo are the way to go, preferably made locally. Better still are rag bags – bags made from old clothes.

We’re getting creative:

Faerly sells totes made from cement bags by a women’s group in Dakha. Passenger has bucket bags made from recycled nylon. And Kind make their totes from plastic bottles and then take the bag back when you’re done to recycle again.  Oh, if I didn’t have so many already!

Forgive this minor digression but isn’t this yellow Elvis & Kresse tote stunning?It’s made from decommissioned firehose and lined with parachute silk. Am buying a scratch card this evening 🙂

Whatever shopping bag you opt for, use again. And again. And again. The fight isn’t against paper or plastic or cloth; it’s against single-use.

Thanks to Rachel Nuwer for this education. I’ll be a tad more conscious in future as I gravitate towards yet another cloth bag.

And a hat tip to ChatGPT for the image.

One Response

  1. I once sent a son off to the recycling point with an IKEA bag full of plastic stuff. He returned without the bag. Why? – Because he didn’t have a bag to carry it back in…

    Reply

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