Very few people are using a bag to the expected life cycle limit, and even fewer are doing it without WASHING, which is key in doing full LCA (life cycle analysis).
Washing and cleaning are surprisingly inefficient and costly (in terms of $, energy, resources, and emissions) compared to manufacturing, and many assumptions about recycling and reuse go out the window once the realistic numbers descrbing how people actually behave replace idealistic assumptions that go into a manufacturers internal emissions calculations.
As someone who loves to use cotton everything- it pretty much never makes sense to use from an LCA perspective (and that's OK).
Washing and cleaning are surprisingly inefficient and costly (in terms of $, energy, resources, and emissions) compared to manufacturing, and many assumptions about recycling and reuse go out the window once the realistic numbers descrbing how people actually behave replace idealistic assumptions that go into a manufacturers internal emissions calculations.
As someone who loves to use cotton everything- it pretty much never makes sense to use from an LCA perspective (and that's OK).