Reusable bags are good for the environment, but if you’re not regularly washing them, you could be carrying bacteria and fungus with your groceries.
From leaving it in the trunk of your car to dragging it on dirty surfaces, most consumers admit they’ve never washed their reusable grocery bags and most say it never occurred for them to do so. A 2011 study conducted by scientists at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University found just three per cent of shoppers said they regularly washed them. That same study also found bacteria in 99 per cent of the bags tested, half carried coliform bacteria, while eight per cent carried Ecoli.
Global News collected several reusable grocery bags from colleagues and had them tested with Dr. Julian Guttman, a cellular microbiologist at Simon Fraser University. The results, to put it mildly, were gross.
“I thought it was completely disgusting when I saw all those bacteria in there,” says Guttman, “ When I saw a couple of those bags and especially when I saw fungus growing on them in our plates mixed up with all the bacteria and the amount of bacteria that were in there, it was actually pretty surprising.”
Petri dish full of bacteria and fungus from two reusable grocery bags tested at SFU.
Not all bacteria can cause illness, but some may be potentially harmful.
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“Bacteria can cause a whole host of illnesses. The most common ones we know are things like gastroenteritis where you get food poising. Everything from infecting babies in pregnant woman, which is not very common but it can happen of course with bacteria like Listeria. You can have things like typhoid fever with salmonella but also simply a food poising from salmonella which is probably more common here,” adds Guttman.
The good news is simply washing your bag on a regular basis can go a long way in preventing illnesses and improve overall hygiene.
In a recent study conducted on reusable grocery bags, Gutmann says “they found that if you wash the bags that the bacterial counts just went right down to pretty much nothing.”
“I think it would probably be nice if it could be just a normal, everyday thing that we do, just to wash the bags at the same time as we wash our clothes.”
In addition to regularly washing the bags, Guttman says when you’re using them, make sure you separate your meats from your vegetables. Store your reusable grocery bags at home in a cool, dry environment, not in the back of your trunk where it can feed off germs. Higher temperatures can cause germs to grow faster.
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“If you’re not packaging up the vegetables separately from the meats that’s probably not a good idea especially based on what we found is inside of these bags.”
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