可重復使用的塑料袋比一次性塑料袋更糟糕

可重復使用的塑料袋比一次性塑料袋更糟糕

Reusable bags, sometimes called "bags for life," are all the rage these days for environmentally conscious consumers looking to cut down on their plastic waste. In certain grocery stores, these bags are even required unless you want to fork over a charge (or endure the judging snarls of others) for the single-use variety.

可重復使用的袋子，有時也被稱為“生活袋”，這些天在環(huán)保意識很強的消費者中非常流行，他們希望減少塑料垃圾。在某些雜貨店，這些袋子甚至是必須的，除非你想為一次性使用的品種支付費用(或忍受別人的批評)。

A reusable plastic bag is still a plastic bag. (Photo: TooHotToHandle at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0]/Wikimedia Commons)

There's just one problem. Much of the time, those reusable bags are also made of plastic; thicker, denser plastic at that. And it turns out, people aren't really reusing them much.

只有一個問題。很多時候，這些環(huán)保袋也是由塑料制成的;更厚，密度更大的塑料。事實證明，人們并不經常重復使用它們。

In other words, it seems we've replaced our cheap single-use plastic bags with more expensive, thicker single-use plastic bags. It calms our conscience, but only makes our plastic pollution problem worse.

換句話說，我們似乎已經用更貴、更厚的一次性塑料袋取代了廉價的一次性塑料袋。它使我們的良心平靜下來，但只會使我們的塑料污染問題更加嚴重。

A report from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Greenpeace looked at grocery stores in the United Kingdom and found that the top 10 stores reported selling 1.5 billion plastic reusable bags so far in 2019, which cashes out to roughly 54 “bags for life” per household. That's up significantly from the prior year, when the top eight grocers sold 959 million of these bags.

英國環(huán)境調查署(EIA)和綠色和平組織的一份報告對英國的雜貨店進行了調查，發(fā)現(xiàn)到2019年為止，排名前10位的商店報告出售了15億個塑料可重復使用購物袋，相當于每家出售54個“終身購物袋”。這比前一年有顯著的增長，前8大零售商售出了9.59億個塑料袋。

Remember, these statistics are annual numbers. So the bags aren't being used for life; they're getting replaced regularly, and at a pace that's increasingly approaching single use.

記住，這些統(tǒng)計數(shù)據(jù)是年度數(shù)據(jù)。所以這些袋子不是終身使用的;它們正在被定期替換，而且替換的速度越來越接近一次性使用。

“Our survey reveals a huge rise in the sale of plastic ‘bags for life,’ demonstrating the inadequacy of the current policy which is clearly not providing a strong enough incentive for people to stop using ‘bags for life’ as a single-use option,” the report reads.

報告稱:“我們的調查顯示，‘終身塑料袋’的銷量大幅上升，這表明現(xiàn)行政策的不完善，它顯然沒有為人們提供足夠強大的激勵，讓他們不再把‘終身塑料袋’作為一次性使用的選擇。”

"We have replaced one problem with another," said Fiona Nicholls, one of the report's authors, to The New York Times. "Bags for life have become bags for a week."

該報告的作者之一菲奧娜•尼科爾斯在接受《紐約時報》采訪時表示:“我們用一個問題代替了另一個問題。”“一輩子的包變成了一周的包。”

Because the plastic in these reusable bags is thicker and sometimes woven with fine plastic fibers, using them only a few times actually adds more plastic overall to our landfills than if we just used cheap single-use bags every time. Furthermore, those fine fibers become microplastics that can eventually enter our food chain through bioaccumulation.

因為這些可重復使用的袋子里的塑料更厚，有時還用細塑料纖維編織而成，所以只使用幾次實際上會比每次只使用便宜的一次性塑料袋增加更多的塑料。此外，這些細纖維會變成微塑料，最終通過生物積累進入我們的食物鏈。

Part of the problem seems to be that these reusable plastic bags are still too cheap. They're easy to discard after a couple of uses for another reusable bag. One solution might be to simply make our reusable bags more expensive, so that people are more incentivized to keep using them again and again to avoid paying for a new bag.

部分問題似乎是這些可重復使用的塑料袋仍然太便宜了。它們很容易被丟棄后，一對夫婦的使用另一個可重復使用的袋子。一個解決辦法可能是簡單地提高我們的環(huán)保袋的價格，這樣人們就更有動力不斷地使用它們，從而避免為一個新的環(huán)保袋買單。

Of course, the real solution ultimately needs to be to stop using plastic for our bags at all, no matter the number of uses it's intended for. If bags weren't made of plastic, then it wouldn't matter how often consumers reused them.

當然，真正的解決方案最終需要停止使用塑料袋，無論它的用途有多少。如果塑料袋不是由塑料制成的，那么消費者重復使用塑料袋的頻率就無關緊要了。

So if you really want to be an environmentally conscious shopper, bring your own reusable bags made of something other than plastic. And actually reuse them for as long as they last. A good rule of thumb is: if your bag is going to outlive you, it's probably the wrong choice.

所以，如果你真的想成為一個有環(huán)保意識的購物者，帶上你自己的可重復使用的塑料袋，而不是用塑料做的。只要它們能用，就可以重復使用。一個很好的經驗法則是:如果你的包會比你活得長，那么它可能是一個錯誤的選擇。