The dirt on cloth grocery bags: It's safe to keep them

Vancouver Sun
May 23, 2009

Just because a study into the safety of cloth grocery bags was sponsored
by the plastics industry does not make it wrong.

It does, however, suggest that the central finding that reusable cloth
bags pose a public health risk needs a closer look.

The study was based on swabs of reusable grocery bags collected from
shoppers in downtown Toronto.

It found almost two-thirds were contaminated by some level of bacteria,
a third had bacterial counts higher than what is considered safe for
drinking water and 40 per cent had yeast or mould.

A few had coliform, which is never good.

The potential hazards from all of the above, according to Dr. Richard
Summerbell, who spoke for the Environment and Plastics Industry Council,
include food poisoning, bacterial boils, allergic reactions and ear
infections.

So what are we to think? Perhaps the shoppers who gave up those bags
should be thanking their lucky stars that they were saved from such a
nasty fate.

Should we abandon our growing pile of reusable bags and beg our
shopkeepers to continue dispensing food-grade plastic?

In fact, the study found only the potential for hazard, it did not
conclusively link dirty shopping bags with any of the aforementioned
plagues.

So no, there is no need to throw out your cloth sacks.

What the study usefully highlights, however, is that anything that comes
into contact with food needs to be kept clean.

It is also useful to keep a separate bag for meat and another for fruit
and vegetables that won't be cooked before eating, just as the Canadian
Food and Safety Agency recommends maintaining separate cutting boards.

Shopping bags also need to be kept dry; if they do get soiled, they
should be washed.

That requires water and energy, of course, which will diminish to some
extent the environmental gains of switching to cloth.

In that respect, the study also usefully reminds us that as with other
so-called green products, the question of "will that be paper or
plastic?" is not as black and white as it may first appear.

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