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>A 2018 Danish Environmental Protection Agency report suggested that a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to offset its environment impact when comp
by kdkdodl 4y ago
>A 2018 Danish Environmental Protection Agency report suggested that a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to offset its environment impact when compared to a classic supermarket plastic bag that's reused once as a trash bag and then incinerated. (If that cotton is organic, the figure is an eye-popping 20,000 times, with the report assuming a lower yield but the same input of raw materials.)
Hey if you've been using the same bag for a shopping trip every day, for all that time and never replaced it or got another, and it wasn't organic, you're almost halfway to having a smaller environmental impact than just using single use plastic bags all that time.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/world/cotton-tote-vs-plastic-bags-environment-climate-cost-scn/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/world/cotton-tote-vs-plastic-...
- lokar 4y agoThat’s a narrow view of impact. Sea life does not choke on cotton bags.
- theossuary 4y agoThis of course isn't accurate. The original study had a few assumptions which led to this high number, but those assumptions aren't accurate for many even in Denmark, much less throughout the rest of the world. This is a pretty good read about it - https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-study-on-the-environmental-impacts-of-grocery-carrier-bags-b8c97eb6c8fb https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-s... So you'd need to reuse a cotton bage 70-1000 times most likely to come out ahead. Or you could reuse cotton you already have and lower that number to effectively 0.
- djleni 4y agoYou leave out from that study that for hydrocarbon bags the number is 30-50. Pretty easy to do that in a year.