Need to save for green solution? Cut costs and help save greenhouse gases by cutting energy use
Published by Deborah DeMann - 17/4/2019
The Bag Debate
Yes, I know we were going to talk about energy savings. We still will, but there is something we need to address. It has been in my news feed and in my social media feeds even though the study is a year old.
A Danish study(1) showed that it is a larger foot print, considering ALL factors, that the polluting, poisoning, single use plastic bag has a “smaller footprint” considering.
Considering what? There are several factors that were considered from cancer to end of life and disposing of the bag and how many times you had to “re-use” that bag in order to decrease the footprint vs the single use bag. The bag with the largest footprint, considering was the organic cotton bag. You needed to reuse that bag 149 times to impact climate change the same as 1 single use plastic and 20,000 times for the cumulative effect.(2)
In the same summary(2), you will notice we can completely find a market bag that needs no reuse at all, in either column. It is the market bag that is “recycled” or “upcycled. Go out to Etsy or to my shop on Etsy and buy bags that are made out of repurposed materials. Here is 1) Not using single use plastic to be polluted or manufactured 2) Keeping another product out of the landfills.
Etsy is full of talented folks. You can find all kinds of market bags (3) or upcycled bags (4), including ours (5).
While this study is very informative and helps us “think” about what market bags to purchase, it can be fodder for nay-sayers. Since you are here, reading the blog, I can only assume you are looking for information to battle the nay-sayers.
1) Danish study. You need to page through a bit to find the English part, unless, of course you are Danish. https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf
2) Summary on the report and several others: https://www.earth.com/news/reusable-shopping-bag/
3) Look at those market bags 250 pages of them https://www.etsy.com/search?q=market%20bag&ref=auto1&as_prefix=market%20
4) Upcycled market bags:https://www.etsy.com/search?q=market%20bag%20upcycled
