Comment by RattlesnakeJake
4 days ago
If I bought one cotton bag and used it for my whole life, the argument would seem silly.
In reality, a household can easily gain 5-10 new tote bags a year as businesses hand them out as swag or with legitimate collections of items or paperwork. There's no way to use them all enough to justify their manufacturing.
The point the article is making is that the "use fewer plastic bags" thing was well-intended, but it incentivized an alternative with too many tradeoffs. Businesses could order a ton of bags, and feel like they were being "environmentally friendly" by handing them out. But in reality, they just flooded the marketplace with so many bags that didn't need to be made in the first place.
If you have enough bags, you don’t need to keep accepting new ones. We have used the same collection of bags for over 15 years.
Yet they continue to be manufactured.
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