**The occasional plastic carrier bag is fine **
A single-use plastic bag: the sin of any environmentalist. Many of us know the agonising pain of turning up at the supermarket, then realising you’ve left your reusable shopping bags at home. The next 10 minutes is a comedy show, seeing how many items you can stuff into your pockets, clutch in your arms, and even grip between your teeth. You will not let the team down by asking for a plastic bag. I do the same. Even though I know better: the data shows us that the occasional plastic carrier bag is not that big a deal. In fact, in many ways, a single-use plastic bag is better than some alternatives. At least when it comes to the carbon footprint, it’s much lower than the rest. You’d need to use a paper bag several times, and a cotton one tens to hundreds of times to ‘break even’ with the plastic carrier.35, 36 This is also true for other environmental impacts such as water use, acidification, and the pollution of water with nutrients such as nitrogen. This doesn’t mean you should switch back to using single-use carrier bags: it just means you should make sure you’re reusing the other types of bags a lot. If you’re buying a new organic tote bag every second visit, you’re really making things worse. And as seen in previous chapters, you should be focusing much more on what you put in the bag than the bag itself. It will have a much bigger environmental impact. The problem with plastic bags, then, is that they can pollute our waterways. But, like any other form of waste, only if we don’t manage it properly. In rich countries, unless you’re littering near a river or coastline, they’re probably not going to end up in the ocean. Even sending it to landfill is not a big deal. This is a problem in low- to middle-income countries where the use of plastic bags is on the rise but the infrastructure to deal with the waste is not. That’s where tight rules on single-use plastic bags, and the availability of alternatives, really make a difference. So, be conscious of how much you’re using. Take a rucksack or a sturdy bag and reuse it again and again. But you don’t need to stress out if you reach the supermarket till and realise you’ve left it at home.
“Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet” by Hannah Ritchie
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