Are Reusable Grocery Bags Any Better for the Planet Than Single-Use Ones?

Canadians use about 15 billion plastic grocery baggage yearly.

But because the federal authorities introduced a ban on the sale of single-use plastics like cutlery, straws and checkout grocery baggage, efficient as of December this yr, grocers have begun to exchange their skinny plastic baggage with thicker, reusable ones. Sobeys Inc. (which owns and operates Sobeys, FreshCo and Foodland) reviews that the corporate pre-emptively eradicated 800 million single-use plastic baggage in 2019 by offering a reusable choice at checkouts.

In a press launch earlier this yr, Loblaw (which incorporates Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore and No Frills) claimed it has diverted 13 billion plastic grocery baggage from landfills to this point in its efforts to shift to reusable baggage. Such baggage value the client wherever from $0.25 to $5.

The commonest alternative for single-use grocery baggage is the poly-woven selection, which looks like a cross between plastic and cloth. While it’s extra sturdy than a standard checkout bag, it’s nonetheless produced from polypropylene or polyethylene, each of that are derived from fossil fuels.

“These are not renewable or sustainable sources, and they’re not compostable or biodegradable,” says Mohini Sain, director of the Centre for Biocomposites and Biomaterials Processing on the University of Toronto. It additionally requires further manufacturing in an effort to make it shopping-ready.

Plastic fibres are woven right into a cloth-like cloth after which handled with a plastic coating to guard the bag from soilage and moisture. “These processes are very energy-intensive,” says Sain. “The increase in the number of production processes means an increase in greenhouse gas emissions too.”

All in, the carbon footprint of a reusable grocery bag is equal to 109.2 kilometres of driving. Comparatively, the carbon footprint of a single-use plastic bag is equal to only eight kilometres of driving.

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Of course, the extra you reuse a bag, the extra you lower its environmental impression. For a sturdy polypropylene bag to have the identical local weather impression as one skinny, single-use plastic bag, it must be used an estimated 10 to twenty occasions, in response to a 2020 report from the United Nations Environment Programme. But this depends on a client behavioural shift that received’t occur in a single day.

Sain says that getting buyers to recollect to deliver their baggage is tough, particularly given the comparatively low worth and plentiful availability of latest baggage on the checkout. But it’s not unimaginable.

“If customers are educated about the composition of these new reusable bags and the sizable impact their production has on the environment, it might help us take our culture back to a time before plastic bags were ubiquitous and make bringing your own bags the norm.”