My washed reusable bags won't kill me. A bullet could, right NRA?

A week ago, for the first time ever, I washed, along with the regular laundry load, the two reusable bags that I have been using for a few years now.  These are bags that I take to the grocery store, and to the university too when I have a whole bunch of papers to return to students.  The bags are no ordinary ones, but are from the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers, and many times the grocery store clerks have paused to read the lettering on the bags related to the meeting and the association.

Now, there is a good chance that I wouldn't have washed those bags, perhaps never, if it hadn't been for this news item in my RSS feed a couple of days before that laundry day:

Are the bacteria living in reusable grocery bags making us sick? A new study finds that plastic bag bans may be causing an uptick in emergency room visits and even deaths from common foodborne bacteria like coliform and E.coli.

To some extent, I am a hygiene-freak, yes.  I wash my hands, a lot. I have hand-sanitizers in my car and in my office at work.  Thus, when I read those sentences, I made a note to myself to wash those reusable bags.

It makes sense, when we think about it: an unwashed bag that we use will keep collecting dirt and bacteria.  Not rocket science, really.  But, it did take a study to remind us about that!

 San Francisco passed America's "first-in-the-nation" ban on plastic bags in chain grocery stores and drugstores in 2007. In a research paper for the Wharton School Institute for Law and Economics, law professors Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright crunched state and federal data on emergency room admissions and food-borne-illness deaths and figured that the San Francisco ban "led to an increase in infections immediately upon implementation."
They found a 46 percent rise in food-borne-illness deaths. The bottom line: "Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths."

I am sure that the study will be sliced and diced.  But, hey, as far as I am concerned, it was a wonderful reminder for me to wash those two bags.  

When San Francisco introduced the ban, it was reported that:

Fifty years ago, plastic bags -- starting first with the sandwich bag -- were seen in the United States as a more sanitary and environmentally friendly alternative to the deforesting paper bag. Now an estimated 180 million plastic bags are distributed to shoppers each year in San Francisco. Made of filmy plastic, they are hard to recycle and easily blow into trees and waterways, where they are blamed for killing marine life. They also occupy much-needed landfill space.

That is right; they were introduced as a more sanitary alternative!  

It certainly is a horrible sight when plastic bags lie scattered by the roadside and when they become an environmental problem after their use.  My neighbor joked after his trip to Mali--this was way before the current turmoil there--that it seemed like Mali's national flower was the plastic bag!  

I switched to the reusable bags only because of my own worries over the environmental aspects.  I even authored an opinion piece a few years ago about this very issue.  The news report does not mean that I will ditch my reusable bags; I know better now, and will regularly wash them.  But, this is yet another story about unintended consequences of our actions, however noble our goals might be.

Anyway, back when the ban was introduced in San Francisco, the business community protested:

The grocers association has warned that the new law will lead to higher prices for San Francisco shoppers.
"We're disappointed that the Board of Supervisors is going down this path," said Kristin Power, the association's vice president for government relations.

So, now the grocers association will be excited, right?

Wrong, again!

Dave Heylen of the California Grocers Association ripped the study for not understanding something really basic about how the San Francisco bag ban worked at first. "People weren't using reusable bags, they were using paper bags," Heylen said.
Be it noted, the grocers have supported proposals for a statewide ban on plastic bags - which would require supermarkets to charge for single-use bags - because they provide what the sponsor of Sacramento's latest effort, Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, calls "uniformity of experience" for shoppers and store owners. (It also means big stores can charge for bags and blame the government.)

Haha!

Anyway, if using reusable bags, and avoiding plastic bags, is from an environmental perspective, then, shouldn't we factor into the calculation the environmental costs of manufacturing the reusable bags and of washing them?  Gets complicated, eh!

As I tell students, in so many ways and over and over, rarely is anything what we think it is, and our gut reactions are almost always incorrect, which is why we need to critically think through the issues.  Will add this plastic bag issue to my collections!

And will maniacally wash my reusable bags, of course!