California has banned plastic bags in grocery stores, a giant subsidy and mandate for the cloth bag industry.

When government isn't manufacturing problems to solve, corporations often do it themselves. Some companies ban plastic straws now, when it is only a matter of time before environmental groups pushing paper straws claim the chemicals in those cause birth defects, and after the homeopaths behind the 'endocrine disruption' craze got corporate media to scare people about BPA - which only binds to estrogen 1/20,000th as well as actual estrogen - I was not surprised ConAgra took it out of Manwich cans.

Nor was I surprised the company responded to higher costs by laying off 1,500 people. It turns out activists were not going to ever buy it anyway.

Environmentalists don't care if poor people have to pay for bags, a regressive tax, unless they can foot the upfront cost for buying bags, nor do they care about the health issue with reusing bags. Or their environmental cost.

How often do people wash their reusable bags? Ever? Well, rarely, a study found. Even the most casual cleaner knows you don't want meat drippings on your counter promoting illness the next time you make food, but most won't think about it in bags. And if you keep them in your trunk the bacteria could increase 10X.

Okay, maybe they are disease factories but reusing bags is still good for Gaia, right?

Not at all. A recent study found that a cotton bag will need to be reused 7,100 times (1) for it to make sense from a Life Cycle Assessment environmental impact perspective - all the resources that go into manufacturing. 7,100 times means that if you go grocery shopping once per week (and you shouldn't go more often because that's bad for the environment too) you will have to use that bag for 136 years.


Still better for the overall environment than cotton bags.

As Dr. Trevor Thornton, Lecturer in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Deakin University phrased it, "Our assumptions about what is environmentally friendly don’t always stand up to scrutiny."

Which means we should scrutinize first, and waste money on alternatives later.

NOTE:

(1) "Organic" cotton is even worse for the environment due to older production requirements in order to use the label.