We need to talk about the tote bag.

You know the one – it’s the simple cotton over-the-shoulder bag that smugly shames you from the trolley of a fellow shopper in Woolies, while you quietly respond in the affirmative to the cashier’s pointed “do you need plastic?”.

Or the one, with its bold slogan, slung casually over the shoulder of someone who is not only into “COFFEE, YOGA, NAPS’, but obviously also better at remembering to take it to the shop than you are.

Tell me you don’t have a mountain of totes protruding off your entrance hall coat hooks, or a tote full of other totes, or a cupboard with nothing in it but totes, or maybe a drawer stuffed to the gills?

In our rush to replace planet-killing single-use plastics, we all flocked to the reusable shopping bag, without giving it much thought. It’s the least we can do, right?

As it turns out, switching from plastic bags to cotton bags probably isn’t having the full environmental impact that the slogan on your tote says it does.

In fact, according to a Danish study, cotton bags could be just as bad for the environment as plastic bags, if not worse.

Per Euronews:

[The study] took a look at the environmental impact of different carrier bags throughout their lives, from harvesting the raw material to you putting your carrots and cauliflower in them at the supermarket checkout. Pitting traditional single-use plastics against alternatives like more heavy-duty “bags for life”, paper and cotton, the team used 15 categories of environmental impact to work out how many times a bag needed to be reused.

FYI, a ‘bag for life’ is a reusable shopping bag, made of resilient plastic that you get at shops in Britain. If you lose it or forget it at home, you have to pay for a new one.

This handy infographic breaks down the findings of the study, with the numbers representing how many times a bag needed to be reused to be more environmentally friendly that single-use plastics:

Totes are manufactured almost as if they were disposable bags, which is ironic when you consider that they’re supposed to be a reusable product. Then there’s this from the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF):

Cotton’s most prominent environmental impacts result from the use of agrochemicals (especially pesticides), the consumption of water, and the conversion of habitat to agricultural use.

Diversion of water and its pollution by cotton growing has had severe impacts on major ecosystems such as the Aral Sea in Central Asia, the Indus Delta in Pakistan and the Murray Darling River in Australia.

Organic cotton is worse because cotton grown without fertiliser and pesticides has a significantly lower yield, which means that it needs more land and more water to grow. For your organic cotton tote to have a cumulative environmental impact (water use, energy use, etc.) you will have to reuse it 20 000 times.

But don’t get me wrong – plastic, which eventually finds its way into the ocean, kills marine life, then disintegrates into microplastic that may or may not be on our food supply, is still evil.

Perhaps the problem here is not reusable tote bags, but the sheer quantity of them that we consume.

If you really want to do your bit, it’s probably best to stop buying totes and keep reusing the bags that you already have as many times as possible, even if it means that people will think you still “LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE”, when you actually “BOUGHT PROSECCO INSTEAD OF MILK AGAIN (OOPS!)”.

It’s time to kick that tote habit.

One day at a time.

[source:euronews&wwf]