They certainly replace plastic bags, but canvas bags pose other ecological concerns

We no longer count the tote bags that accumulate in our wardrobes, offered to everyone at the slightest purchase. From a marketing point of view, it is a formidable promotional weapon since this small cotton canvas bag allows it both a brand to give the impression that they care about the planet, and to advertise on the back (or rather on the shoulder) of their customers who will wear it publicly.

In the solitude of the cotton fields (tote bag)

Only that the use of these cotton shopping bags is a little too similar to that of the single-use plastic bags they were supposed to replace… We receive and accumulate so many that it is difficult to reuse them, and thiswe wouldn’t have too much of a single life to make their environmental impact worthwhile.

An article underlines this New York Times of August 24, 2021, which headlines directly on a stock market crisis. In particular, it cites a 2018 study by the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food which measured thatan organic cotton bag is reused at least 20,000 times to offset its overall impact on production. Or daily use for 54 years! So I’ll let you do the insoluble calculation if you have several canvas bags.

Sometimes we forget it but cotton is a particularly greedy raw material for pesticides, and requires a lot of water even in organic farming. Furthermore, its cultivation is often linked to forced labour — from slavery under colonization to the Uyghurs of Xinjiang in China who today produce 20% of the world’s cotton, a continuum of violence surrounds this material so used in fashion in general and for bags in particular.

Their end of life also poses several problems since then only 15% of the 30 million tons of cotton produced each year ends up in textile warehouses. It’s just that recycling them isn’t easy: the prints made on cotton canvas shopping bags are often screen-printed in non-biodegradable PVC that is difficult to recycle… Not to mention that the recycling process itself is energy intensiveobviously, so incineration quickly appears to be the lesser evil option.

There are no miracle materials, so let’s think about our uses

From Charybdis to Scylla, should we go back to plastic bags? Of course, it’s more complicated than that: in addition to our business, these two options also know how to bring their share of problems.

Where cotton consumes too much water and sometimes comes from forced labour, plastic comes from fossil fuels, emits greenhouse gases and pollutes the oceans because it cannot biodegrade there. Attempting the comparison is therefore equivalent to concluding thatthere is no miraculous raw material.

Not even bio, since, as the expert Nathalie Lebas-Vautier explained to us in the fashion podcast Raw material, there are many more brands claiming to use organic cotton than actually produced – a sign that there is eel under the rock, or rather pesticide under the flower. Especially as this production is proving too low to meet global demand, and it may be better to use organic cotton to create underwear worn next to the skin rather than the canvas bags that have to sleep so fast at the bottom of our closets.

In addition to the possibility of alternative bags in hemp or flax, crops that consume less water, pesticides and more local from France, the avenues for solutions to best limit breakages are ultimately found in our habits and uses.

It’s up to the brands to stop offering them at all costs at the minimum purchase, on the one hand, but it’s also up to us to refuse them because we’ll have returned one that we could easily use! And why not reuse them to make other items like tawashi (a wet mop like a sponge, popular in Japan, easy to DIY with scraps of cloth)?

In the end, we always return to the same precepts to better respect the planet: reduce, repair, reuse, recycle and reinvent.