Are Cotton Tote Bags Really Good for the Environment?

棉布手提袋真的那么環保嗎？

Cotton tote 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.

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 study by the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark. That equates to daily use for 54 years—for just one bag.

Producing cotton is water-intensive， and figuring out how to dispose of a disused 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.

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

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。

丹麥環境和食品部的一項研究發現，一個有機棉布手提袋需要被使用兩萬次才能抵消其生產過程中對環境的總體影響。那相當于每日堅持使用同一個棉布手提袋要長達54年。

美國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。

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 textiles. Even when a cotton 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”. Printed patterns have to be cut out of the cloth，which causes 10 to 15 percent of the cotton to be wasted this way.

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

Some brands are turning to other textile solutions. Ally Capellino， a British designer brand， exchanges cotton for hemp， while Anya Hindmarch introduces a new version of her original tote， 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.

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。即使一個棉布手提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。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，這導致約有10%到15%的棉布被浪費掉。

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會用到產生溫室氣體的化石燃料，它們不能被生物降解，還會在海洋中堆積成山。

一些品牌轉而使用其他針織面料。英國設計師箱包品牌Ally Capellino最近用麻取代了棉，而Anya Hindmarch品牌推出了一款用回收水瓶制作的新版原創手提袋。Nordstrom也在其門店使用了類似材質的購物袋。

說到底，最簡單的解決方案或許也是最顯而易見的——不是每個產品都需要袋子。

Word Bank

telegraph /'tel?ɡrɑ?f/ v. （無意中）流露（思想）

offset /'?fset/ v. 抵消；彌補；補償

dispose of 處理;將（某物）處理掉

clog up 堵塞

Don’t clog up your mind with useless facts.