Cotton totes that replace plastic bags fast piling up to create more waste

NEW YORK • Recently, Ms Venetia Berry, an artist in London, counted the free cotton tote bags she had accumulated. There were at least 25.

There were totes from the eco-fashion brand Reformation and totes from vintage stores, as well as totes from Soho House, boutique countryside hotels and independent art shops. She had two totes from Cubitts, the millennial-friendly opticians and even one from a garlic farm.

"You get them without choosing," said Ms Berry, 28.

Cotton bags have become a means for brands, retailers and supermarkets to telegraph a planet-friendly mindset - or, at least, to show the companies are aware of the overuse of plastic in packaging.

There was a brief lull in cotton tote use during the Covid-19 pandemic, when there were fears that reusable bags could harbour the virus, but they are now fully back in force.

Designer Rachel Comey said: "There's a trend in New York now where people are wearing merch - carrying totes from local delis, hardware stores or their favourite steakhouse."

So far, so earth-friendly?

Not exactly. It turns out the wholehearted embrace of cotton totes may actually have created a new problem.

An organic cotton tote needs to be used 20,000 times to offset its overall impact of production, according to a 2018 study by the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark. That equates to daily use for 54 years - for just one bag.

Based on that metric, if all 25 of her totes were organic, Ms Berry would have to live for more than 1,000 years to offset her arsenal.

"Cotton is so water intensive," said University of Maine's environmental science professor Travis Wagner.

And figuring out how to dispose of a tote in an environmentally low-impact way is not nearly as simple as people think.

One cannot, for example, just put a tote in a compost bin.

Ms Maxine Bedat, a director at the New Standard Institute, a non-profit focused on fashion and sustainability, said she has "yet to find a municipal compost that will accept textiles".

And only 15 per cent of the 30 million tons of cotton produced every year actually makes its way to textile depositories.

Even when a tote does make it to a treatment plant, most dyes used to print logos onto them are PVC-based and thus not recyclable. They are "extremely difficult to break down chemically", said Mr Christopher Stanev, co-founder of Evrnu, a Seattle-based textile recycling firm.

There is also the issue of turning old cloth into new, which is almost as energy intensive as making it in the first place.

"Textile's biggest carbon footprint occurs at the mill," said Ms Bedat.

The cotton tote dilemma, said Ms Laura Balmond, a project manager for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Make Fashion Circular campaign, is "a really good example of unintended consequences of people trying to make positive choices and not understanding the full landscape".

How did we get here?

Arguably, it was British designer Anya Hindmarch who put the reusable cotton bag on the map. Her 2007 "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" tote, created with the environmental agency Swift, sold for around US$10 in supermarkets.

Some brands are turning to other textile solutions. British designer Ally Capellino recently swopped cotton for hemp, while Ms Hindmarch introduced a new version of her original tote, this time made from recycled water bottles.

In the end, the simplest solution may be the most obvious.

"Not every product needs a bag," said Ms Comey.

NYTIMES