Your "green" cotton bag - make sure you use it another 130 times

I'm often bewildered by the way that "seeming" is more important to some people than "being". And in carrying a cotton or hessian bag we're seeming to care. I just found this chart that puts a pretty solid argument. But I am a little nervous on the source and haven't read the 120 page full report so I suggest some skepticism is in order over the picture painted below.



But the argument is that a cotton bag needs to be reused 131 times before it breaks even with the old thin plastic (now illegal) HDPE bag for greenhouse footprint. If I use my flimsy bag as a bin liner you need to reuse your cotton bag over 300 times.

Still at least the LDPE bags that Coles and Woolies charge 15 cents for only need to be used nine times to break even on greenhouse gases. Surely we get nine uses out of all those bags don't we? Still, use it as a bin liner and I'm sure we don't need the full nine uses at the shops.

I don't care, I'm cool with the printed Coles and Woolies bags - they're fine. But it was all about cost shifting - the supermarkets just removed an expense item and turned it into an (admittedly low margin) revenue item.

Still, if we're carrying a cotton or a hessian bag we must be doing good, right?


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