Canadians use about 15 billion plastic grocery baggage yearly.
But because the federal authorities introduced a ban on the sale of single-use plastics like cutlery, straws and checkout grocery baggage, efficient as of December this 12 months, grocers have begun to switch their skinny plastic baggage with thicker, reusable ones. Sobeys Inc. (which owns and operates Sobeys, FreshCo and Foodland) studies that the corporate pre-emptively eradicated 800 million single-use plastic baggage in 2019 by offering a reusable possibility at checkouts.
In a press launch earlier this 12 months, Loblaw (which incorporates Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore and No Frills) claimed it has diverted 13 billion plastic grocery baggage from landfills up to now in its efforts to shift to reusable baggage. Such baggage price the client anyplace from $0.25 to $5.
The most typical substitute for single-use grocery baggage is the poly-woven selection, which seems like a cross between plastic and material. While it’s extra sturdy than a standard checkout bag, it’s nonetheless made out of polypropylene or polyethylene, each of that are derived from fossil fuels.
“These are not renewable or sustainable sources, and they’re not compostable or biodegradable,” says Mohini Sain, director of the Centre for Biocomposites and Biomaterials Processing on the University of Toronto. It additionally requires further manufacturing as a way to make it shopping-ready.
Plastic fibres are woven right into a cloth-like material after which handled with a plastic coating to guard the bag from soilage and moisture. “These processes are very energy-intensive,” says Sain. “The increase in the number of production processes means an increase in greenhouse gas emissions too.”
All in, the carbon footprint of a reusable grocery bag is equal to 109.2 kilometres of driving. Comparatively, the carbon footprint of a single-use plastic bag is equal to only eight kilometres of driving.
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Of course, the extra you reuse a bag, the extra you lower its environmental influence. For a sturdy polypropylene bag to have the identical local weather influence as one skinny, single-use plastic bag, it must be used an estimated 10 to twenty instances, based on a 2020 report from the United Nations Environment Programme. But this depends on a client behavioural shift that received’t occur in a single day.
Sain says that getting consumers to recollect to deliver their baggage is tough, particularly given the comparatively low worth and plentiful availability of recent baggage on the checkout. But it’s not not possible.
“If customers are educated about the composition of these new reusable bags and the sizable impact their production has on the environment, it might help us take our culture back to a time before plastic bags were ubiquitous and make bringing your own bags the norm.”
Source: canadianbusiness.com