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linktext[0]="Our Bags...
Each of our bags is designed to:
• Be used weekly for two+ years
• Replace up to 416 plastic bags
• Stand approximately 100 washes
• Hold up to and including 40 pounds
Put together, these small changes add up to big changes for our environment."
linktext[1]="Measuring A Bag’s Environmental Impact
When people talk about bags, the conversation almost always focuses on disposal. It is true that our cities have millions of bags to dispose of, causing countless problems. However, the impact of bags begins long before disposal, and scientists now see that the best way to measure bag impact is through a Life Cycle Assessment.
Every time you throw away a bag—even a biodegradable bag—you throw away precious resources. We must access the impact of the bag through the following three stages: birth, life, and death.
Birth:
When discussing the birth or creation of a bag, we seek to find the full extent of resources used to manufacture it. That includes raw materials, like petroleum for plastic bags or trees for paper bags.
Furthermore, it includes the materials used to make raw materials.
Life:
Analysis of the life of a product aims to assess the impact of typical usage. For bags, this includes how many trips the bag is expected to last, how many items each one can carry, and how many people are likely to adopt it. Traditional paper and plastic bags are designed for single trips. Canvas bags are designed to be used once a week for a year, and PP bags are designed for up to two years of weekly usage. The more we re-use any one bag, the lower the impact of the bag on our environment.
Death:
Here is where we focus on disposal. Disposal includes issues such as litter, degradation of our waterways, damage of our rural and urban landscapes, the problems associated with landfill, and the costs our cities pay for disposal and clean up.
• Biodegradable bags (including plastic and paper bags) have their own end-of-life impacts, including the cost of composting and the problems that arise when they are not composted but end up as garbage in a landfill (where their impact is similar to other plastic bags), as litter (where they can pose a threat to wildlife in the 18 months that it takes them to biodegrade and where some will not have the conditions to biodegrade).
• Even recycling has its impacts: usage of petroleum to transport recycled materials can be significant if the recycling materials are sold on the world market and transported around the world looking for a recycling manufacturer. Recycling must also account for the energy and chemicals used to sort and break down post-consumer waste and make it ready for manufacturing again.
Absorbing the above information aids us to see that our disposal problem is but the tail end of a long line of impacts. Instead of trying to find better disposal, we could save more resources by using fewer bags.
By dramatically reducing the number of bags we use, many of our disposal problems would be consequently reduced or eliminated."
linktext[2]="Why we don’t use recycled plastic
There is a reason why recycling is last when we say, "Reduce • Reuse • Recycle". We should reduce our usage first, reuse anything we use for as long as possible, and only then should we recycle it.
While it is possible to get our bags made from recycled plastic, after a Life Cycle Assessment, we find recycling the plastic raises the cost of the bag but does not help our environment.
For recycled fabric to be made, the water bottles and other end-use materials would have to be collected from around the US and around the world, sorted, and shipped back to manufacturing centers, usually in India or Asia. Then, these materials must be reprocessed in order be reused as raw materials. New chemicals must be added at this stage in order to break down the old products and make them usable as raw material again. By the time this is done, we really haven’t saved any more petroleum, energy resources, or emissions than we would have by using virgin raw materials."
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