That means I've used them maybe 100 times. Now they're starting to fall apart, and soon I'll need new ones.
I wonder, since they're much heavier and clearly use a lot more plastic, whether I would have used less plastic with the disposable ones.
Okay, let's stop burning coal then, because we use electricity for a lot more things than just recycling.
Similarly, if cotton is that bad for the environment, maybe we need to fix that generally rather than just switch to disposable plastic bags for this one minor use case?
though the biggest problem with reusable plastic bags is the weakness of the handles. i'd rarely get more than a dozen uses out of a plastic bag before the handle rips. and that is not as easily to fix because of the stresses involved.
also, i feel the math is off, because cloth bags are a lot stronger and they get uses that no plastic bag is even designed for. so the reality is that even if i use plastic bags for shopping, i'd have a cloth bag anyways for other needs. and if i have it already, then using it more comes with zero additional impact.
plastic bags only have less impact on the environment than the cloth bags that i don't already own.
Except using it more means more wear and tear which means replacing it sooner. So unfortunately it doesn’t make the math easier.