Plastics industry releases anti-cloth-bag FUD study (BoingBoing)

[Drew Wilson]

The Canadian Plastic Industry Association commissioned a study concluding that using cloth bags is bad for your health because they're full of bacteria (and certainly not because using cloth bags is bad for the profitablity of Canadian Plastic Industry Association members!). They hired an ex-health regulator (Dr. Richard Summerbell, Director of Research at Toronto-based Sporometrics and former Chief of Medical Mycology for the Ontario Ministry of Health) to say that cloth bags put you at risk of "skin infections such as bacterial boils, allergic reactions, triggering of asthma attacks, and ear infections". Of course, it's bullshit, and the regulator who traded his credibility for a consulting fee should be ashamed of himself.

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Wow... that was sad.

[1cooldude]

I am going to start going naked soon or find me a better material for my clothing.
Can you say "See'ya"? Bunch of douche bags..they must take us for some gullible maroons :smashfreakB:

[Signa]

so you throw it in the washing machine. Big deal.

[aqlo]

this reminds me of the old scam they used to recruit girls for, to go door to door spamming knives / cutlery sets with plastic or metallic handles; with the patter being how unclean the poor victims' wood-handled knives were because the porous organic wood gets all full of germs and crud and so on

It was a good scam I guess but between the stupidity of the first-job kids doing the spamming and the embarassment of the people whose cookware was being denigrated, it's amazing it didn't constantly degenerate into a knife-fight

This sort of thing is classic marketing though; it's terrible that it works, but as long as it keeps working, they are going to keep doing it