this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Wait till you hear about the plastic bag crazy. Pretty much all the chains got rid of them in my area and began selling the reusable bags. At about 2.50 each. One store I liked used to have old cardboard boxes but they want you to buy the reusable bags as they make about 2 dollars in profit per bag and the average costumer buys 1 bag per 100 in groceries. That alone is a2% increase on average in profits for the grocery chain. That is huge for them.
Worse is that they take about 50 times the energy to produce and they figure the average bag is only used 5 times before they end in a land fill. The net result is a 2.5% increase in your grocery bill and almost 10 times the increase in GHG compared to a plastic bag.
Who cares about GHG for bags? The goal is to reduce waste, so you should evaluate it based on the amount of materials used.
Far more material is used in reusable bags and they are thrown out far earlier than it takes to cover the equivalent. Not only is this creating more GHG, it is also creating more tons of waste overall.
And GHG will kill us far sooner then plastic bags.
The marginal GHG from a thicker bag is completely and entirely negligible. The waste footprint is outsized given the GHG footprint.