When grocery shopping, it’s important to stay mindful of precautionary measures you can take to stay safe and healthy–which might require reevaluating some grocery store habits. Specifically, experts are starting to warn shoppers against bringing reusable bags to grocery stores.
Keep reading for why you should stop making this mistake asap!
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Bringing A Reusable Bag
Many stores and states encourage bringing your own reusable bag for grocery shopping in an effort to reduce plastic use. However, many of these policies have changed recently due to coronavirus.
Joseph Vinetz, a professor of infectious diseases at the Yale School of Medicine, explained to Minnesota's MPR News: "I think that using billions of plastic bags a year is a bad thing for our environment. But right now, it's even worse for our environment to have an ongoing pandemic."
Although coronavirus is primarily spread through person-to-person contact, there is still the possibility of it being spread through infected surfaces, including reusable grocery bags. In fact, a 2018 study that tested how a contaminated reusable bag might spread the virus throughout the store.
Eat This, Not That! explains, "After checkout, high levels of the virus were found to have been transmitted to surfaces throughout the store: Shopping carts, checkout counters, self-checkout touchscreens, packaged foods, unpackaged produce, as well as the hands of the checkout clerks and shoppers themselves."
Ryan Gene Sinclair, an environmental microbiology professor at Loma Linda University who led the study, explained the findings to to MPR News:"So there's the idea that you could bring [the virus] in [to the store], which is what we were testing," .
He continued, "But … as I've been thinking about this since the coronavirus, it's also about bringing things out of the store."
