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Comment by lokar | Hacker News Reader

I have been reusing the same canvas shopping bags for over 10 years.

>A 2018 Danish Environmental Protection Agency report suggested that a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to offset its environment impact when compared to a classic supermarket plastic bag that's reused once as a trash bag and then incinerated. (If that cotton is organic, the figure is an eye-popping 20,000 times, with the report assuming a lower yield but the same input of raw materials.)

Hey if you've been using the same bag for a shopping trip every day, for all that time and never replaced it or got another, and it wasn't organic, you're almost halfway to having a smaller environmental impact than just using single use plastic bags all that time.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/world/cotton-tote-vs-plastic-...

This of course isn't accurate. The original study had a few assumptions which led to this high number, but those assumptions aren't accurate for many even in Denmark, much less throughout the rest of the world. This is a pretty good read about it - https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-s...

So you'd need to reuse a cotton bage 70-1000 times most likely to come out ahead. Or you could reuse cotton you already have and lower that number to effectively 0.

You leave out from that study that for hydrocarbon bags the number is 30-50. Pretty easy to do that in a year.

That’s a narrow view of impact. Sea life does not choke on cotton bags.

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