A place for conversations from the University of Edinburgh community on topics around social responsibility and sustainability.
The Life of a Tote
Sustainability Champion Georgia Dodsworth shares insights on the environmental impact of tote bags, highlighting their often overlooked carbon footprint despite their popularity as eco-friendly alternatives.
What’s the strangest tote bag you own?
My friend Hannah has a PWR-BRU (the luminous yellow Irn-Bru energy drink) tote she won at a cola-tasting competition (true story). My partner has a tote from the National Union of Journalists that’s the size of a crisp packet and thus pretty much useless. In my parents’ cupboard-under-the-stairs lives a tote from a Middlesbrough club night called ‘Creeps’, stamped with a huge pair of spooky black-rimmed eyes that stare you down when you open the door. I myself have no less than three totes from the German supermarket Penny, which I have no memory of acquiring.
Totes, totes everywhere
It’s a fact of life nowadays that in every household, shoved inside a cupboard, lies a bag stuffed with other bags – namely, the now ubiquitous cotton tote. If you don’t have this yet, give it time; chances are that by the end of your first semester, you’ll find yourself with a large handful of pristine tote bags, emblazoned with the logos of local businesses, uni societies and freshers’ events. One day you’ll go through these and be just as baffled as me by the bags you’ve managed to accrue over the years.
Over the last decade, the tote has unexpectedly become a fashion staple. Earlier this year, US grocery chain Trader Joe’s sold out of thousands of their $2.99 mini totes within days, some of which were resold on eBay for $3,000. Lulu Guinness designed a reusable tote for Waitrose in June: “on launch day it was the best-selling line in the whole of Waitrose,” says Tim Shaw, the store’s non-food buyer. “It sold more than any single line of milk, bananas or toilet roll and was selling on eBay for four times the in-store price by the time the shops closed that evening.” Just take a look down the streets of Edinburgh – on any given day you’ll see thousands of totes (see how many Daunt Books bags you can spot in particular).
Even more significantly, tote bags have also become synonymous with ‘green living’ and environmental consciousness. Single-use plastic carriers, the kind that shops and supermarkets used to give out by the fistful for free, are now a rarity, long replaced by the sturdier ‘bag for life’, including the cotton tote – in theory, since they’re not made of plastic and are meant to be reused, these must be the most eco-friendly bags possible, right?
How Trader Joe’s tote bags became an unexpected style symbol in Japan [External]
What your tote bag says about you [External]
In the bag: why this season is all about a branded tote [External]
A tote-ally unexpected eco footprint
It’s absolutely true that plastic items harm marine life, require unsustainable fossil fuels to produce and take centuries to degrade, and we should make every effort to reduce our plastic consumption. But the cotton tote’s environmental footprint is by no means small either.
Cotton is incredibly water-intensive – a single cotton T-shirt requires about 2,500 litres of water to produce. It’s also a pesticide-heavy crop, using 10% of the world’s insecticides and 4.7% of pesticides, despite covering just 2.4% of the world’s land. Pesticides are not only a major biodiversity problem, ruining soil health and driving down bird and bee numbers, but nearly 500 people a day in developing countries die from acute pesticide poisoning, with exposure leading to many more suffering chronic ill health.
A 2018 Danish study found the recommended number of reuses for a cotton bag based on its life-cycle environmental impact was a whopping 7,100 times (compared to 37 times for plastic and 43 for paper). Another UK study found that, in order to have lower global warming potential than single-use plastic bags, cotton bags should be used 131 times (alongside four to eleven times for reusable plastic bags, and just three times for paper).
So does this mean your tote of totes is single-handedly destroying the planet? Of course not. Even the bags we use to carry our groceries are evidently an environmental and ethical minefield, and there’s no way to be a perfect environmentalist in the system we live in.
The Apparel Industry’s Environmental Impact in 6 Graphics [External]
Pesticides And Climate Change: A Vicious Cycle [External]
Pesticide concerns in cotton [External]
What can we do?
The key thing to focus on is being considerate of the planet and its resources in the daily choices we make. Your cotton tote bag, despite technically causing less pollution, has created more carbon emissions and used more resources to produce than its plastic counterpart – all the more reason to use it as much as you possibly can. Pop it in your pocket, sling it over your shoulder or bundle it into your bumbag before you leave the house – you’ll be thankful for it later. The more we use the items we already own, the less we buy in future – better for our bank balances and the planet.
What if you simply have too many totes to use? You could give them away to tote-less friends, or via sharing apps like Olio, or donate to a local charity shop (the Shrub Co-op’s Zero Waste Hub is a great local swapshop that can always use more bags!). If you’re of the crafty persuasion there are countless ideas online for upcycling your unused totes, from adding your own designs, to turning them into kitchen storage bags, to crafting a picnic or beach blanket – the possibilities are endless!
Living sustainably isn’t just about how we act as consumers either – one day you may be organising an event, or heading up a club or society. You may be tempted to order some cheap totes to advertise your event or organisation – instead, remember this blog and take the time to consider whether this expenditure of resources is necessary for the success of your event. Does the world really need another tote bag? I think you know the answer!
Which Bag is Greener: Plastic, Paper, or Reusable? [External]
Shrub Co-op: Zero Waste Hub [External]
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