An Inconvenient Bag by Ellen Gamerman, WallStreet Journal

The article is about the conundrum of the reusable shopping bag.

It's manufactured in China, shipped thousands of miles overseas, made with plastic and could take years to decompose. The bags usually are printed with environmental slogans as well as corporate logos and pitched as 'earth-friendly' substitutes for the billions of disposable plastic bags that wind up in landfills every year. But this is...another area where it's complicated to go green. "If you don't reuse them, you're actually worse off by taking one of them," says Bob Lilienfeld, author of the Use Less Stuff Report (an online newsletter about waste prevention). http://www.use-less-stuff.com/ Because many of the bags are made from heavier material, they're likely to sit longer in landfills than their thinner, disposable cousins. Used as they were intended, the totes can be an environmental boon, vastly reducing the number of disposable bags that do wind up in landfills. If each bag is used multiple times - at least once a week - four or five reusable bags can replace 520 plastic bags a year, says Nick Sterling, reserach director at Natural Capitalism Solutions, a nonprofit focused on corporate sustainability issues. "Think about it," [Lee] Scott said in his big speech to employees last fall. "If we throw it away, we had to buy it first. So we pay twice - once to get it, once to have it taken away. What if we reverse that? What if our suppliers send us less, and everything they send us has value as a recycled product? No waste, and we get paid instead."

Many of the cheap, reusable bags that retailers favor are produced in Chinese factories and made from non-woven polypropylene, a form of plastic that requires about 28 times as much energy to produce as the plastic used in standard disposable bags and eight times as much as a paper sack, according to Mr. Sterling.