This [quote] is undoubtedly apocryphal, like many other quotations attributed to Lincoln or Washington. No one has ever found any evidence that Washington said it. In the next edition of the Yale Book of Quotations, barring any further discoveries, I will list it as a pseudo-Washingtonism, with the earliest known citation being [in 1902].

Of course, being apocryphal does not mean it’s still not an astute observation, whoever said it.

Only if the user doesn’t know the first thing about hygiene.

“I am not condemning cloth bags, but warning that they should be washed with bleach between uses.”

It depends how one handles them, now doesn’t it? How many people do you know put dripping meat in a cloth bag? Most of my bags get filled with packaged goods, bottles, and the like. Washing and bleaching them after such use would be over-kill, to say the least. If the meat looks as if it might drip I put it in a plastic bag before putting it in the canvas bag. And for fruits and vegetables I re-use the small plastic bags used for weighing and rinse the produce before eating.

I don’t use cheap canvas bags sold by grocery stores, which typically fall apart after a few uses, but sturdy ones sold by companies like L.L. Bean. They last for decades, and they are much easier to carry into the house than dozens of plastic bags full of groceries.

As I said, I’m not in favor of banning plastic bags. They have their uses. But I think it is also naive to pretend that they all get recycled, re-used and properly disposed of. Some get loose into the environment — e.g., because they blow out of trash bins or out of garbage trucks, or at the land-fill. Or people just pull out the stuff they want and throw the bag down as litter. And the ultimate fate of almost all things plastic that are not burned or deeply buried is to move downhill, which means through water courses to the ocean. (And I have seen plenty of people carry things in plastic bags to the beach.)

So now you are condemning canvas bags because some people don’t know how to use them properly? Should we condemn plastic cutting boards because some people don’t clean them adequately after cutting up pork?

You really don’t have to look hard to find examples of plastic bags killing marine turtles and mammals. For example:

http://www.marineconnection.org/archives/marine_impacts/plasticbag.htm

That is not to say that I’m in favor of banning plastic bags. I would rather people use alternatives voluntarily. But I should think that any conservative would be against waste — the kind of waste I see at Walmarts, for example, where they typically use four bags where two would have sufficed.