The Plastic bags are creating a big mess which we all want to solve. But is the cheap tote bags the answer to this plastic problem? After all what are we trying to solve, the feeling of doing nothing about the problem, or the visibility of the problem or the problem itself.
An estimate says that an average Canadian household has about 150+ tote bags sitting in their garage. This is their collection of cheap or free tote bags they have collected over time that they forgot to garbage. This does not include how many cheap free promotional tote bags that people throw away almost right away. We at Bombay Bags regularly receive phone calls from prospective customers who want cheap Tote bags for their promotions and they are clearly expecting those bags to be used only 1-2 times. A Cheap tote bag with a usage life of 1-2 times, that is what is driving the volume in the Tote Bags Wholesale market. There is almost nothing as bad for our environment as this cheap tote bag.
Even a plastic bag is not as bad as a cheap tote bag.
Another major issue with the cheap bag is that they create a lot of pollution in the other part of the globe that is not visible but it does exist. The cheap bags are made of cheaper plastic type of materials and use cheap poor quality dyes. The people who work on manufacturing these things, their pictures are heart breaking. The kind of ill health they have to go through just because they are poor is a good argument in favour of feudalism and all the bag things we think that happened a few decades or centuries ago. When you think about it, it seems, we have not grown much as a Human society. And the amount of pollution and environmental damage it has done in the places where these cheap tote bags are made is real. After all we want to solve the problem not just push it to the other end of the globe.
A good looking well made bag invites you to carry it.
Read more how this author feels about the heap of tote bags that we are surrounding ourselves in: https://www.weeklystandard.com/j-f-riordan/not-with-a-bang-but-a-tote-bag
Picture copied from the Weekly Standard (above link).
