Australian supermarkets have excelled at replicating this paper bag fiasco.

The white plastic bags they replaced are magnitudes of order more durable and able to carry, I should test this, at a guess ten times the weight. Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.

Fortunately the white plastic bags are still available online (eBay / Amazon / etc) so I just buy 50 for my own use as required and use them till they nearly fall apart then repurpose them as bin liners.

They’re incredibly cheap, don’t really get dirty in an unhygienic way, can be washed if something does spill in them, and they fold up in to almost no space.

> Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.

Yeah that's not good, the way they do that is with more plastic in the bags. A single bag weighs as much as 5-10 old timey single use bags.