Resuable shopping bags can be imprinted with environmental slogans as well as corporate logos and are earth-friendly substitutes for the billions of disposable plastic bags that wind up in landfills every year.
The artilce goes on to say that if each bag is used once a week, it can replace 520 disposable plastic bags a year. With this in mind, Home Depot distributed 500,000 free reusable shopping bags last April on Earth Day and Wal-Mart gave away one million.
Fueling the reusable-bag boom is the growing unpopularity of the disposable bag. An estimated 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away in the U.S. every year. Last year, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban the bags from supermarkets and this month the city of Westport, CT, banned most kinds of plastic bags at retail checkout counters. Boston, Baltimore and Portland are also considering bans. Such efforts are helping to make reusable totes the nation’s fastest-growing fashion accessory with sales this year up 76% to date over last year.
