What do you think of the Bring Your Own Bag movement? Movement. I honestly don't know if I would call it that. But providing your own bag has some benefits. Not just for the environment but for your own health.
We wanted to remove the plastic bags from our home and help protect the environment and it's a good thing, but there are also concerns as well. Whenever you solve one problem you see to create new ones, that does not mean that the solution is useless. And a plastic bag free world is something to strive toward.
One thing should be considered, the amount of bacteria in your bags.
One of the twenty (this is only five percent) reusable shopping bags analyzed in the laboratory contained a high level of bacteria.
This reusable plastic grocery bag contained 8600 bacteria per four square inches, enough to seriously contaminate unprotected foods that a consumer would have inserted into it, such as vegetables and fruit.
"That's potentially enough to make someone sick," says Hugh Rodrigues, co-owner of Thornton Laboratories in Florida, who conducted this well-known test (called the "Total Aerobic Bacteria Count") for Le Journal de Montréal. I looked at the source and they seem to be a daily tabloid based in Montréal.
My guess is that meat or some other contaminated food source was transported in the bag.
Does that mean that the idea is faulty? Not at all. Collectively, the world, uses 500 billion plastic bags per year. Yes, you read that right, the figure is in the billions. If we need to was a few bags, or otherwise clean a couple bags I think we can manage.