Reusable Bags Need To Be Washed

Recently, an outbreak of norovirus in Oregon was traced to a reusable grocery bag. A girl transmitted the virus to her soccer teammates by using a reusable grocery bag she kept in the bathroom to transport their snacks.

OK, rule #1: don't keep a bag you are going to use for food in the bathroom.

But beyond that, these bags, just like anything else, are going to get funky with bacteria the more times you reuse them. According MSNBC, a 2010 paper by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University, large amounts of bacteria -- 12% of which was E. coli -- was found on reusable bags. To be fair, that study was funded in part by the American Chemistry Council -- who are somewhat pro-plastic disposable bags.

But it is just common sense to wash your bags every so often if you intend to use them more than once. That 2010 study concluded that contamination decreased by 99.9 percent with regular washing. You wouldn't wear the same shirt without washing ever, right? How much more careful should you be about something that is potentially touching your food?


And yet I have a bunch of bags I reuse for groceries, and I never thought about laundering them until reading about the norovirus outbreak in OR.

I feel like a news story such as this potentially gives ammo to people who are "anti-green" and feel that the environmental movement is just the work of a bunch of hysterical hippies; the news item has been linked-to by a number of Conservative websites presumably for just that reason. But why does it have to be all or nothing? It's common sense to reuse bags when you can, rather than flood landfills with plastic. And it's common sense to wash these bags. The end.