"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. And because many of the bags are made from heavier material, they're also likely to sit longer in landfills than their thinner, disposable cousins, according to Ned Thomas, who heads the department of material science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
What about you, readers? Do you use those reusable bags or do you reuse your current bags? My thing is, I reuse all of my plastic grocery bags again in my house for trash bags and for scooping out cat litter. I reuse the paper bags for recycling because they won't let you put recyclables out in plastic bags and won't give large apt buildings reusable plastic bins (nor will a huge bin fit in my tiny Fan kitchen). Most of the cloth or remade totes are not large enough to hold what a normal bag would anyway, and I'd need several of them for a large grocery trip.
