Happy Nice Mall

Venetia Berry, an artist in London recently, counted the free cotton tote bags she’d hoarded in her closet. There were at least 25 of them.

There were bags from eco-fashion brand Reformation and bags from vintage stores, bags from Soho House, boutique rural hotels, and bags from independent art stores. She had two bags from Cubitts, a millennial optician, and even one from a garlic farm. “You get them unselected,” said Ms. Berry, 28.

Cotton bags have become a tool for brands, retailers and supermarkets to telegraph a planet-friendly mindset or at least show that companies are aware of the excess plastic in packaging. (During the pandemic, there was a brief recession in the use of cotton cloth. Fears that reusable bags may harbor the virus, but they are now fully in effect.)

“There’s a trend in New York right now where people are wearing merchandise: carrying bags from the local deli, the hardware store, or their favorite steakhouse,” designer Rachel Comey said. (See: Gossip Girl reboot”for pop culture proof.)

So far, so earth-friendly? Not exactly. The heartfelt embrace of cotton cloths may have actually created a new problem.

An organic cotton cloth should be used 20,000 times to balance the overall effect of the production. According to 2018 study By the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food This equates to 54 years of daily use for just one bag. By that measure, if all 25 of her bags were organic, Miss Berry would have had to live for more than a thousand years to balance her current arsenal.

“Cotton is very water dense,” said Travis Wagner, a professor of environmental science at the University of Maine. It is also associated with forced labor, thanks to disclosures about Treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, ChinaProduces 20 percent of the world’s cotton and supplies most Western fashion brands. And figuring out how to dispose of a bag in an environmentally friendly way isn’t as simple as people think.

For example, you can’t put a can in the compost bin: Maxine BedatThe director of the New Standard Institute, a nonprofit focused on fashion and sustainability, said it “has yet to find a municipal compost that will accept textiles.”

And only 15 percent of the 30 million tons of cotton produced each year goes to textile warehouses.

Even if a can comes to a processing plant, most of the paints used to print the logo on it are PVC-based and therefore not recyclable; “They’re extremely difficult to break down chemically,” said Christopher Stanev, co-founder of Evrnu, a Seattle-based textile recycling firm. Printed patterns must be cut from the fabric; Mr. Stanev estimates that between 10 and 15 percent of the cotton Evrnu receives is wasted in this way.

At this point, it’s a matter of turning old fabric into new, which is almost as energy-intensive as making it in the first place. “The biggest carbon footprint in textiles occurs in the factory,” said Ms. Bédat.

The cotton cloth dilemma is “a really good example of the unintended consequences of people trying to make positive choices and not understanding the whole landscape,” said Laura Balmond, project manager for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular campaign.

How did we get here?

It was probably British designer Anya Hindmarch who put the reusable cotton bag on the map. its 2007″I’m Not a Plastic BagCreated with environmental agency Swift, the “tote” sold in supermarkets for around $10 (£5). It encouraged shoppers to stop buying disposable bags, and it effectively went viral.

“Eighty thousand people lined up in a single day in the UK,” the designer said. And it was effective. The number of bags purchased in the UK fell from around 10 billion to around six billion by 2010. According to the British Retail Consortium. “Using fashion to communicate the problem was important back then,” said Ms. Hindmarch.

Naturally, it soon became a branding tool. The famous cream-black New Yorker bag has become a status symbol; According to a spokesperson for the magazine, it has gifted two million bags to weekly subscribers owned by Condé Nast since 2014.

Skincare brand Kiehls offered bags for $1, while fashion brands like Reformation started buying bags in black cotton versions; Lakeisha Goedluck, a 28-year-old Copenhagen writer, said she was “at least six”. Some customers get rid of them by selling them. poshmark.

Shaun Russell, founder of Skandinavisk, a proprietary Swedish skincare brand, B Corp. – or business that meets certain standards for social or environmental sustainability – is “using your customers as mobile billboards”. It is free advertising. Any brand that claims otherwise is lying.”

Aesop’s chief customer, Suzanne Santos, doesn’t know exactly how many ecru bags the Aussie beauty brand produces each year, but admits that’s “a lot.” Aesop, also a registered B Corp, first introduced them as shopping bags a decade ago; Ms. Santos said customers see them as “a symbolic part of the Esop experience”. So much so that the brand receives angry emails when online orders do not arrive. “Abuse would be the right word,” he said, explaining this in a Zoom call from Sydney. (Ms Santos said customers wishing to empty their excess bags can return them to stores, but Aesop did not advertise this possibility on its website or in-store.)

Cotton bags have long been in luxury; shoes and handbags come in protective dust wraps. But the supposed sustainability of the boxes means that more brands than ever before have packaging products in more layers than ever before. Items that don’t even need dust protection, like hairpins, organic tampons, and facial cleansers, now come in a swaddled sleeping bag.

“It’s just packaging on top of packaging on top of packaging,” Ms Bédat said.

That doesn’t mean cotton is worse than plastic, or that the two should be compared. Cotton can use pesticides (if not grown organically) and while it dries up rivers from water consumption, lightweight plastic bags use fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, never biodegrade and clog the oceans.

By weighing the two materials against each other, “we end up with an environmental what-about-ism that leaves consumers with the idea that there is no solution,” said Melanie Dupuis, professor of environmental studies and science at Pace University.

Buffy Reid of British knitwear brand &Daughter stopped production of its cotton bags in April this year; plans to implement an on-site feature where customers can choose to buy one. While Aesop hasn’t stopped production, the brand is converting the composition of its bags into a 60-40 blend of recycled and organic cotton. “It will cost us 15 percent more,” Ms. Santos said, but “it reduces water by 70 to 80 percent.”

Some brands are turning to other textile solutions. British designer Ally Capellino recently replaced cotton with hemp, while Ms. Hindmarch introduced a new version of her original bag, this time made from recycled water bottles; Nordstrom also uses similar bags in its stores.

In the end, the simplest solution may be the most obvious. “Not every product needs a bag,” said Ms. Comey.