可重复使用的塑料袋比一次性塑料袋更糟糕

可重复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.

可重复使用的袋子，有时也被称为“生活袋”，这些天在环保意识很强的消费者中非常流行，他们希望减少塑料垃圾。在某些杂货店，这些袋子甚至是必须的，除非你想为一次性使用的品种支付费用(或忍受别人的批评)。

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.

只有一个问题。很多时候，这些环保袋也是由塑料制成的;更厚，密度更大的塑料。事实证明，人们并不经常重复使用它们。

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.

换句话说，我们似乎已经用更贵、更厚的一次性塑料袋取代了廉价的一次性塑料袋。它使我们的良心平静下来，但只会使我们的塑料污染问题更加严重。

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.

英国环境调查署(EIA)和绿色和平组织的一份报告对英国的杂货店进行了调查，发现到2019年为止，排名前10位的商店报告出售了15亿个塑料可重复使用购物袋，相当于每家出售54个“终身购物袋”。这比前一年有显著的增长，前8大零售商售出了9.59亿个塑料袋。

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.

记住，这些统计数据是年度数据。所以这些袋子不是终身使用的;它们正在被定期替换，而且替换的速度越来越接近一次性使用。

“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.

报告称:“我们的调查显示，‘终身塑料袋’的销量大幅上升，这表明现行政策的不完善，它显然没有为人们提供足够强大的激励，让他们不再把‘终身塑料袋’作为一次性使用的选择。”

"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."

该报告的作者之一菲奥娜•尼科尔斯在接受《纽约时报》采访时表示:“我们用一个问题代替了另一个问题。”“一辈子的包变成了一周的包。”

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.

因为这些可重复使用的袋子里的塑料更厚，有时还用细塑料纤维编织而成，所以只使用几次实际上会比每次只使用便宜的一次性塑料袋增加更多的塑料。此外，这些细纤维会变成微塑料，最终通过生物积累进入我们的食物链。

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.

部分问题似乎是这些可重复使用的塑料袋仍然太便宜了。它们很容易被丢弃后，一对夫妇的使用另一个可重复使用的袋子。一个解决办法可能是简单地提高我们的环保袋的价格，这样人们就更有动力不断地使用它们，从而避免为一个新的环保袋买单。

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.

当然，真正的解决方案最终需要停止使用塑料袋，无论它的用途有多少。如果塑料袋不是由塑料制成的，那么消费者重复使用塑料袋的频率就无关紧要了。

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，如果你真的想成为一个有环保意识的购物者，带上你自己的可重复使用的塑料袋，而不是用塑料做的。只要它们能用，就可以重复使用。一个很好的经验法则是:如果你的包会比你活得长，那么它可能是一个错误的选择。