### Impact

Tiny impact

### Cost

Saves money

### Time

Immediate

A 2018 [study from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/291023/scho0711buan-e-e.pdf) found that a cotton bag needs to be reused roughly 50 times to have a lower greenhouse gas impact than one single-use plastic bag. So if you’re going through roughly 4-5 plastic bags per week, that’s using your reusable tote for around 6 months for it to net out to being better than plastic bags.

When choosing between organic cotton and conventional cotton, the study found that conventional had lower greenhouse gas emissions than organic, which needed to be reused 150 times to beat plastic.

**Wren member** [**@pjain415**](https://www.wren.co/profile/pjain415) **adds:**

"Let your fruits and veggies breathe and avoid single-use plastic by opting for reusable produce bags. Not bagging produce saves me time (both at the grocery and when back home). Only for some smaller produce (like say brussel sprouts/ small peppers), I carry my own netted zipper bags. At home, I don't have to unbag produce to prevent spoilage. On top of personal convenience, it helps save our planet."

That said, it's complicated—when looking at all environmental indicators, like water use, freshwater eutrophication, terrestrial acidification, and ozone depletion, even conventional cotton would need to be reused up to 840 times to equal the environmental impact of plastic. This is where bleached or unbleached paper bags really win out, as they only need to be reused 10 times to beat plastic across all environmental indicators.

You might be wondering why we recommend using reusable bags at all over just accepting single-use plastic, since it takes reuse and effort to get their environmental impacts to balance out. As it turns out, plastic bags are not recyclable and, through waste mismanagement, have become the most common items of waste found in rivers and oceans. Plastic pollution can have severe impacts on marine life, affecting at least [800 species](https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/12/547032) worldwide.

Just remember that if you continually purchase alternatives to single-use plastic bags, you're probably increasing your environmental impact instead of decreasing it. Stick with any tote bags you already have.

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