Paper or Plastic Bags, Which One’s The Winner?

By craftcentral on April 28, 2008 6:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While plastics are criticized for being an environmental hazard, the industry emphasizes that the claims against it aren't strong enough. Eventually, it's the users' choice that would determine the course of the environment and perhaps the industry too!
	It's just been about a quarter of a century and the plastic bags have become a rage like no other. Estimates put the figures of consumption at 500 billion to a trillion plastic bags a year, the world over. Using 500 million bags annually means that a million are consumed each minute.
	The Controversy Environmental concerns are often cited as the fallout of using plastic bags, and any paper bags supplier would vouch for it. While paper bags are often put forward as the solution, there's certainly more to it than meets the eye.
The Source Will Cause Remorse It's hardly a quiz that oil's non-renewable and if we kept on consuming oil to make plastic bags we'd be at a great loss wouldn't we? However the metrics aren't all that simple because only miniscule amounts of oil is consumed to make plastic bags. For instance in the USA, a 100 billion plastic bags are made from just 12 million barrels of oil. That's a meager 0.15 percent of the country's yearly oil consumption.
	To top it all, if you thought that paper was better then behold! Paper bags too are made from trees, thus causing unhealthy deforestation. About 14 million trees are chopped off in the US to make paper bags annually. What's most paradoxical is that it takes more oil to make a paper bag than to mold plastic into a bag!
Toxic Manufacture Apparently, since plastic doesn't grow on trees so it's manufacture is perhaps more poisonous. The facts aren't quite different from the notion as some of the most hazardous chemicals are used in the plastic industry, viz. propylene, phenol, ethylene, polystyrene... But is paper, free from this allegation? No, because to produce Kraft Paper, wooden chips immersed in chemicals are heated. This process too releases toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
	Biodegradability... Is that the differentiation? During much of their life cycle, lasting a few decades to a millenium, plastic bags spend their time choking sewers and animals alike. Moreover, the plastics that call themselves biodegradable are often sensitive to sunlight, however much of such waste ends up under layers of other waste in landfills and the sun hardly reaches it, thus failing to decompose it.
	At the same time a lot of biodegradable plastic does break down due to sunlight, microbes, etc. But even with these plastics' decomposition, the story doesn't end and many contend that this, simpler plastic compounds ultimately end up in our food chain and our bodies.
Reusability & Recyclability, Who Scores Better Here? We know that both can be recycled, so is this really a matter of debate? Perhaps, it is as plastics can be recycled about 15 times but paper bags only 4 - 5 times. The plastic seems to have won this one, when you also account for the fact that it's more durable and that many people reuse plastic many times for myriad purposes, including doggie duty! About 92 percent of the plastic bag consumers reuse it. And why shouldn't they, when fruits and vegetables stored in plastic packs have been found to stay fresh longer and also retain their nutritional content.
	Furthermore, poor paper's a bit too fragile to be used over and over again and anything wet is a complete damper for it. So far so good, but only if you didn't scratch the surface to look beneath the ice. It's a fact, recycling of plastic bags hardly takes place.
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, just about 1% plastic bags got recycled, while 20% of paper bags were recycled in 2000. Similarly, in the UK only 1 in 200 plastic bags are recycled. Reportedly, recycling plastic isn't profitable enough. Trailing The Carbon Footprint Paper bags are about 6 times heavier and take 10 times more space. Moreover, to make a paper bag, the amount of energy consumed is 2 to 4 times higher. Naturally, the emissions of green house gasses due to the manufacture and transportation of paper bags is greater than what plastic bags have. However, it doesn't mean that the carbon footprints of plastic bags amount to nothing.
So Who's The Winner Finally? Both paper and plastic bags seem to have their own merits and demerits, and one of them would have been a clear winner if they both were to be rated on a single parameter, perhaps. See below for the summary of the arguments:

Many suggest that the problem isn't the usage of either paper or plastic, but it's littering. So whether it's plastic or paper its consumption needs to be reduced and the waste management made better. Whatever's done about it, the objective is the same, which is to protect the environment and the final judgement rests with the consumers.