Unfortunately, silicone rubber products strike out here, too, says Beyond Plastic’s science director Trisha Vaidyanathan. “I don’t think it’s a direct replacement for plastic. It has a lot of the same problems. It is still dependent on fossil fuels to make, it’s a very energy intensive process to manufacture, and at the end of its life, it is going to end up in a landfill, or it’s going to be incinerated, just like plastic,” she says. “It cannot be recycled. It doesn’t biodegrade.”
The Wirecutter dug into this question and found that from a carbon emissions perspective, reusable silicone bags must be reused for a very long period of time to start to break even with the disposable plastics they’re meant to replace—and some may never get there, because of the heat and water required to clean them over their lifetime.