"An organic cotton tote needs to be used 20,000 times to offset its overall impact of production."

[NQAS]

14. Maybe that's true, maybe not. Don't know.

Sure, there's a link to a NYT article, but that kind of tweet on its own is alarmist and nothing more than click bait. Maybe the NYT article makes all the necessary comparisons. I'll check later. But on its own it just bugged me.

I was in the grocery store the other day, and an employee was taking new plastic bags out of their boxes. I was leaving the store and didn't pay close attention, but I though the box had a quantity of 10,000 single use plastic bags. Or maybe that was the box that held the boxes of bags. Whatever. That's a lot of bags. One store, one small town. There are three chain grocery stores in town. How many tens of thousands of bags are heading out of the store every day? Multiply that by the number of grocery stores nationwide, and worldwide.

There's no easy answer, of course. Sure, trees are renewable, but we're talking decades and decades. In the meantime, what would you like me to do? Gather all my groceries in a spare sheet? Oh, no, what's the impact of producing that sheet?

I think about these things in my business - do I ship in cardboard boxes and paper filler? Boxes and bubble wrap or sealed air bags? Poly mailers? Poly bubble mailers? What about the tape I use?

Bottom line, if there is such a thing on this issue, is that as individuals we need to make judgments calls and hope that we're doing the best we can.