From a spam email:
Swapping plastic shopping bags has become probably the most common way to be more sustainable, as many shops have already opted for biodegradable bags, bags for life or paper bags. However, the best way to be green and also save that little bit of money every time you go grocery shopping is to bring cotton tote bags. This will put at good use the ones you probably already have at home and will avoid the needless introduction of new materials into the environment, regardless of their composition.
As has been calculated, you’ve got to use an organic cotton tote bag 8,000 times before it’s more ecofriendly than single use plastic. So we’ve now got tossers teaching us to kill the planet, eh?
All the best,
Fran MariuttiJunior PR Executive
Search Intelligence LTD
Intelligence isn’t quite the word I’d use but a search for it would indeed be nice.
“the needless introduction of new materials into the environment” … I’m impressed that he’s found a way to repeal the law of conservation of matter.
Where did the 8,000 figure come from? The UK’s Environment Agency likes to quote 173 re-uses for a cotton tote bag to be better than plastic (assuming the plastic bag is re-used three times and finally disposed of as a bin-liner). Their report number is SC030148.
It’s surprisingly readable as it covers the impact of laundering the tote bag, energy in transporting the bags etc.
‘More sustainable’ than what?
What exactly means ‘sustainable’?
I was ‘sustained’ through decades of life using plastic bags, nothing in my life changed for the better, the contrary in fact, when plastic bags were banned.
Who/what is sustaining these misanthropists, since none of them engage in productive activity to sustain themselves?
The females in my family tend to deplore the rotten, decaying cotton tote bags I carry around with me. That’s me, the original bag man.
Of course they also deplore my sneakers, held together by masking tape.
But I’ve had to drag a smaller, older pair out from under the couch. The heels on the newer ones were getting a bit too rounded. One of the local librarians was quite excited. She thought I’d bought a new pair.
I was deliberately unfair – it comes from the “organic” part.
60p in bloody Morrisons.
I stopped going when they banned plastic bags, but now I’m not going out of protest at their cost.
Ha! Take that ! Had enough or do you want some more Mr Supermarket Man ?
Until a few years ago, everything was fine. The worried middle classes doing a bit more recycling, reusing shopping bags, and buying a slightly smaller third car was enough to save the planet. It was, at least, good distraction therapy from the fact that none of these would solve the actual problem, to the extent the actual problem exists – and great distraction from the fact that to “solve” the problem would require some nuclear option, like starving most of us to death.
Now they literally do want to starve most of us to death, and are preparing to do so. Openly.
To be fair, the plastic bag tax aims to reduce the number of such bags strewn around the country. In that aim it has been quite successful. Any impact on CO₂ (or any other metric) is orthogonal to the main goal.
We already had a perfectly good solution to this problem: photodegradable plastic bags. In the sunlight they wither away within months. Yet the government went ahead with the bag tax anyway.
A wee problem the Greenies gloss over is that unless you’re very careful with reusable bags you can get rather sick – the package of chicken or ground beef leaks just a little and next trip you’ve got lettuce with salmonella on it.
True, if you keep careful track of which bag was used for what, & wash them carefully, it’s OK.
Of course, in the real-world people aren’t quite this meticulous about details, something about having a life to live gets in the way.
The biodegradable bags have a major fault: they biodegrade! I have long been used to storing things away in supermarket plastic bags – spare electrical cables as an example. When I came to re-use some things I had put in bags that ‘biodegrade’ I found them covered in plastic confetti.
It brought on a relapse into serious Tourrettes …
Bloke in the Fourth Reich said:
“to “solve” the problem would require some nuclear option, like starving most of us to death.”
Or of course the literal nuclear option of nuclear power.
What the bugger is a “tote bag”?
Andrew M said:
“To be fair, the plastic bag tax aims to reduce the number of such bags strewn around the country”
I’m not sure that was its aim; it seemed to be more a way of rubbing our noses in our “green sins”.
But yes, I still don’t understand why ‘single use’ plastic is a problem, other than litter. Yes, we might eventually run out of oil, but since we’re told plastic doesn’t biodegrade, all we have to do is bury it all, remember where we put it, and dig it all up again to reuse it once the oil runs out and we actually need it.
dearieme said:
“What the bugger is a “tote bag”?”
Something to carry your winnings from on-course horse betting home in.
John B said:
“Who/what is sustaining these misanthropists, since none of them engage in productive activity to sustain themselves?”
Oh, very good! I shall probably steal that.
My Mum and Dad were using strong plastic / hessian type bags that lasted forever 50 – 60 years ago. I’ve used a rucksack for over 20.
Plastic bags took over because paper bags are rubbish if stuff is wet or cold and liable to condensation. Chestertons Fence and all that.
Esteban @ 8.59, I guess if you’re Jewish you’d be used to that type of thing…..
Richard T @ 11.31, George Carlin explained that many years ago ‘I mean it came out of the ground in the first place didn’t it? The Earth would become Earth, with plastic’: I’ve posted this before, but it is a gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
@ Esteban
Maybe that is true where you live but not in the North of England. My family (mainly my mother but all of us on different occasions) used the same two shopping baskets and string bag to carry food home from the local shops and market for a dozen years (and, I assume my parents continued to use them after their children left to go to uni) without any such dire effects.
To be fair, using tote bags *that you already have at home* is preferable to buying new plastic bags.
She is working on the assumption that all her readers have a stock of part-used tote bags that they have bought on impulse and/or because they forget to take a bag with them when they went shopping. We are not part of her intended audience.
I do not know what LTD in block capitals in a name that is not wholly capitalised means – the abbreviation for “Limited” is “Ltd” – so your last comments seems justified.
I never did find out how the council were taking the Tesco bags out of my binbags and feeding them to Leatherback Turtles.
I wonder if there are any figures on the increase in shoplifting since customers were encouraged to walk into stores carrying their own bags…?
rhoda klapp: Or, for that matter, why.
Greenie “Ahhhhhhhhhhh! You’re using a plastic straw to drink your drink! A Single use plastic straw!”
me “so?”
Greenie “Well it will end up in the ocean and choke a turtle”
Me “so it’s not single use then”
But, what about the several thousands of Indian children who were employed making plastic carrier bags? In your aim to be ecological, are you willing to have these children becoming unemployed, and therefore, being the main source of income, sentencing their families to starvation and death?
Bastards. All of you.
cotton tote bags
As long as they aren’t Chinese which are non-PC.
Rhoda, you were no doubt ‘doing your bit’ and recycling them as any right thinking citizen would obviously do.
This would mean you diligently sorted your refuse and put the bags in the correct recycling bin for collection by your local council, who sent them to a ‘facility’ where it was ‘graded’, then shipped to China for ‘processing’ – ie: chucked in the river.
Yes, we might eventually run out of oil,
I once calculated how much petrol equivalent there is in the plastic bags for a weekly shop (12). There may be just sufficient to get the average car out of the supermarket car park.
An interesting footnote to Lidl’s introduction of paper replacements. The handles tear off when you attempt to pick the bag up off of the checkout. Must be a common problem because the checkout girl automatically gives you a handful of free spares. If you’ve bought anything from the frozen food range, the bag self destructs inside 5 minutes due to condensation soaking it. A good way to counter this is to swipe a load of the plastic bags from the fruit & veg aisle & individually wrap. Never shop when it’s raining & you’re not using the car.
Re-useable heavy-duty bags are a boon to shoplifters.
“My Mum and Dad were using strong plastic / hessian type bags that lasted forever 50 – 60 years ago. I’ve used a rucksack for over 20.”
Yeah, I generally walk to the supermarket with a rucksack, goody greeny me. The usefulness of the plastic shopping bag was its availability for when one was not planning one’s shopping meticulously or, gasp, made an impulse purchase. It had to go, as it was an enabler of personal choice and spontaneity, which both make green wankers who want to plan everything for everyone feel very very sad.
Quote: Bill aG: The UK’s Environment Agency likes to quote 173 re-uses for a cotton tote bag to be better than plastic (assuming the plastic bag is re-used three times and finally disposed of as a bin-liner). Quote/
First of all, I use plastic bags way more than 3 times. Secondly, what about the environmental impact of all the irrigation used to produce cotton in non cotton growing areas, and, thirdly just what does the tote-toting consumer use as a bin-liner? Knitted muesli?
Their report number is SC030148.
It’s surprisingly readable as it covers the impact of laundering the tote bag, energy in transporting the bags etc.
Doh! The perils of cut and paste!
Grrr!
“It’s surprisingly readable as it covers the impact of laundering the tote bag, energy in transporting the bags etc.”
Isn’t it wonderful that Fat Controllers get huge research grants to decide what we should all do, in painstaking detail, at the most trivial levels of existence? And advise governments to implement a rule that will last for all time and be valid in all places, and never take account of future changes in any of the metrics they feed into their model?
If only we had some kind of alternative to this, that didn’t require Fat Controllers and their research grants, and that could take account of different and varying conditions.