I also googled it and found multiple different results with numbers more like 100 times (which is quite easy to achieve in practice). I didn’t immediately find any results in the thousands, but isn’t looking for the highest number going to produce the statistically least likely outlier?

I think fixating on number of reuses to meet equal carbon footprint is fraught with problems and painting an incomplete picture though, this doesn’t really account for things like plastic production & waste toxicity, or the fact that plastic is non-renewable while cotton is renewable.

https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/climate/plastic-paper-sho...

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/paper-plastic-or-reusable