This chair can't take it anymore. Photo / Supplied
Plastic bag shaming
This month a market in Vancouver started selling plastic bags branded with "The Colon Care Co-op" and "Adult Video Shop"; the embarrassment is a reminder to their customers to bring their own bags. It was great marketing, but banning plastic bags may not be the great environmental
panacea, according to NPR's Planet Money.
People in the cities with single-use-plastic-bag bans used fewer plastic bags, which led to about 18 million fewer kilos of plastic rubbish per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for picking up dog poo or lining rubbish bins still needed bags, so sales of bin liner bags skyrocketed — and those bin bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags.
Replacing plastic with paper was also problematic because paper bag production increases carbon emissions. And what about those cotton tote bags? "The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution," Planet Money reported.
"These factors make cloth bags even worse. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment."
