Are cotton tote bags as good for the environment as we think?

何乾坤

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

“There’s a trend in New York right now where people are wearing merch：carrying totes from local delis，hardware stores or their favourite steakhouse，”says designer Rachel Comey.

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.

Cotton is water-intensive，and figuring out how to dispose of a tote in an environmentally low-impact way is not nearly as simple as people think，according to Travis Wagner，an environmental science professor at the University of Maine.

You can’t，for example，just put a tote in a compost bin，and only 15 percent 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’re“extremely difficult to break down chemically，”said Christopher Stanev，the co-founder of Evrnu，a Seattlebased textile recycling firm. Printed patterns have to be cut out of the cloth；Mr. Stanev estimates 10 to 15 percent of the cotton Evrnu receives is wasted this way.

That’s not to say cotton is worse than plastic，or that the two should even be compared. While cotton can use pesticides and has dried up rivers from water consumption，lightweight plastic bags use greenhouse gasemitting fossil fuels，are not biodegrade and clog up the oceans.

Buffy Reid，of the knitwear label &Daughter，halted production of her cotton bags in April this year. Aesop is converting the composition of its shopping bags to a 60-40 blend of recycled and organic cotton.“It will cost us 15 percent more，”says Suzanne Santos，the chief customer officer of Aesop，but“it reduces water by 70 percent to 80 percent”.

Some brands are turning to other textile solutions. Designer Ally Capellino recently swapped cotton for hemp，while Hindmarch introduced a new version of her original tote，this time made from recycled water bottles；Nordstrom also uses similar bags in its stores.

In the end，the simplest solution may be the most obvious.“Not every product needs a bag，”Comey says.

棉布袋已經成為品牌、零售店和超市傳達環保理念的一種手段，至少是要表明企業對于過度使用塑料包裝的態度。

設計師瑞秋·科米說：“紐約當下掀起了一波背環保購物袋的風氣，包括本地熟食店、五金店和最喜愛的牛排餐廳的手提袋。”

到現在為止看起來是不是很環保？未必。事實證明，棉布手提袋潮流可能引發了新的問題。

丹麥環境和食品部2018年的一項研究發現，一個有機棉手提袋需要被使用2萬次才能抵消其生產過程中對環境的總體影響。也就是說，必須每日堅持使用一個手提袋長達54年。

緬因大學環境科學系教授特拉維斯·瓦格納指出，棉布的生產需要耗費大量水資源，用盡可能環保的方式處理廢棄棉布袋也遠遠沒有人們想的那么簡單。

比如說，你不能直接將棉布袋放進堆肥箱里。每年生產出的3000萬噸棉布只有15%會被制成紡織品。即使一個棉布袋進入了垃圾處理廠，多數用于印刷標識的染料都是聚氯乙烯材質的，無法被回收利用。位于西雅圖的紡織品回收公司Evrnu的聯合創始人克里斯多夫·史坦涅夫說，這些染料“極難被化學分解”。棉布上印有圖案的部分必須被裁掉，據史坦涅夫估計，Evrnu公司收到的棉制品約有10%到15%是這樣被浪費掉的。

這并不是說棉布袋比塑料袋更糟，或者二者可以相提并論。盡管生產棉花需要使用殺蟲劑，還會耗費大量的水，但是制作輕薄塑料袋的化石燃料會產生溫室氣體，不能被生物降解，還會在海洋中堆積成山。……