Are Cotton Tote Bags Really Good for the Environment?

棉布手提袋真的那么环保吗？

Cotton tote bags have become a means for brands， retailers and supermarkets to telegraph a planet-friendly mindset—or， at least， to show that the companies are aware of the overuse of plastic in packaging.

So far， so Earth-friendly？ Not exactly. It turns out the wholehearted embrace of cotton totes may actually have created a new problem.

An organic cotton tote needs to be used 20，000 times to offset its overall impact of production， according to a study by the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark. That equates to daily use for 54 years—for just one bag.

Producing cotton is water-intensive， and figuring out how to dispose of a disused tote in an environmentally low-impact way is not nearly as simple as people think， according to Travis Wagner， an environmental science professor at the University of Maine.

棉布手提袋已经成为品牌、零售店和超市传达环保理念的一种手段，至少是表明企业对于过度使用塑料包装的态度。

到现在为止看起来是不是很环保？未必。事实证明，棉布手提袋潮流可能引发了新的问题。

丹麦环境和食品部的一项研究发现，一个有机棉布手提袋需要被使用两万次才能抵消其生产过程中对环境的总体影响。那相当于每日坚持使用同一个棉布手提袋要长达54年。

美国缅因大学环境科学系教授特拉维斯·瓦格纳指出，棉布的生产需要耗费大量水资源，用尽可能环保的方式处理废弃棉布袋也远远没有人们想的那么简单。

You can’t， for example， just put a tote in a compost bin， and only 15 percent of the 30 million tons of cotton produced every year actually makes its way to textiles. Even when a cotton tote does make it to a treatment plant， most dyes used to print logos onto them are PVC-based and thus not recyclable; they’re “extremely difficult to break down chemically”. Printed patterns have to be cut out of the cloth，which causes 10 to 15 percent of the cotton to be wasted this way.

That’s not to say a cotton bag is worse than a plastic one， or that the two should even be compared. While producing cotton can use pesticides and has dried up rivers from water consumption， lightweight plastic bags use greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels， which are not biodegrade and clog up the oceans.

Some brands are turning to other textile solutions. Ally Capellino， a British designer brand， exchanges cotton for hemp， while Anya Hindmarch introduces a new version of her original tote， 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.

比如说，你不能直接将棉布袋放进堆肥箱里。每年生产出的3000万吨棉布只有15%会被制成纺织品。即使一个棉布手提袋进入了垃圾处理厂，多数用于印刷标识的染料都是聚氯乙烯材质的，无法被回收利用。这些染料“极难被化学分解”。棉布上印有图案的部分必须被裁掉，这导致约有10%到15%的棉布被浪费掉。

这并不是说棉布袋比塑料袋更糟，或者二者可以相提并论。尽管生产棉花需要使用杀虫剂，还会耗费大量的水，但是制作轻薄塑料袋会用到产生温室气体的化石燃料，它们不能被生物降解，还会在海洋中堆积成山。

一些品牌转而使用其他针织面料。英国设计师箱包品牌Ally Capellino最近用麻取代了棉，而Anya Hindmarch品牌推出了一款用回收水瓶制作的新版原创手提袋。Nordstrom也在其门店使用了类似材质的购物袋。

说到底，最简单的解决方案或许也是最显而易见的——不是每个产品都需要袋子。

Word Bank

telegraph /'telɪɡrɑːf/ v. （无意中）流露（思想）

offset /'ɒfset/ v. 抵消；弥补；补偿

dispose of 处理;将（某物）处理掉

clog up 堵塞

Don’t clog up your mind with useless facts.