Are Reusable Grocery Bags Safe During The Coronavirus Outbreak?
The Portland, Oregon, grocery chain Green Zebra prides itself on caring for the environment. The store specializes in sustainably raised food and socially conscious policies, encouraging customers to use reusable bags for their purchases in order to help reduce waste. But lately, they’ve reversed this policy. Due to the coronavirus epidemic, customers are being asked not to bring reusable bags into the store. Instead, they are being provided with recyclable paper bags.
Green Zebra founder and CEO Lisa Sedlar told HuffPost, “In the best of times, reusable bags can be unhygienic because a lot of people don’t wash them with soap and water after each use. During this unprecedented time, it’s life-and-death important to protect everyone’s health, so it wasn’t a hard decision to ban the use of reusable bags.”
Sedlar isn’t alone in worrying about reusable bags. Across the country, the governors of states such as Massachusetts, Illinois and Maine are temporarily banning reusable bags in an attempt to protect both customers and grocery store employees from spreading the virus.
Marion Nestle, a professor of food studies, nutrition and public health at NYU, said this policy makes sense. “The single greatest risk factor for COVID-19 is getting within breathing distance of someone who is carrying the virus. The next greatest is touching a surface they’ve touched recently. In this situation, the theoretical risk goes both ways. The grocery store runs the risk that your bag is contaminated and the checkout clerk will touch it, pick up the virus and pass it on. You run the risk that the checkout clerk is a carrier and touches the bag you take home. Wasting some bags seems like a small price to pay for peace of mind.”
Despite this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to issue official guidelines when it comes to reusable bags during the coronavirus crisis. In most states, it is a case-by-case decision left to the stores...
