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by liminvorous 1388 days ago
The breakeven point seems to be around 50-100 uses depending on the exact kind of reusable bag, so you’re probably winning: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
1 comments

I never would have imagined the environmental impact of cotton bags was that high. It would take me several lifetimes to get 7000 uses.
This very similar to the "if you wash recycling in water heated via coal burn generated electricity then it creates CO2" argument.

Okay, let's stop burning coal then, because we use electricity for a lot more things than just recycling.

Similarly, if cotton is that bad for the environment, maybe we need to fix that generally rather than just switch to disposable plastic bags for this one minor use case?

https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/cotton