The C is for Crank
Paper or Plastic?
After a thwarted effort to charge a 20-cent fee on disposable grocery bags (both plastic and paper) in 2009, Seattle City Council members now say they may consider an outright ban on plastic bags---no public vote required. (The 2009 vote was thwarted in large part by a $1 million spend by the plastic industry).
The arguments against plastic bags are sound: They clog landfills, kill wildlife, contribute to massive dead patches of ocean like the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch , and break down into smaller bits that never decompose. Additionally, plastic bags can't really be recycled; they can only be downcycled (used as part of new consumer products) or upcycled (essentially, reused). So there's little question that throwing away tons of plastic is not sustainable.
The question is: Is switching consumers to paper grocery bags really an improvement?
The consensus, pretty much unequivocally, is no. Here are a few reasons why.
Although plastic bags do hang around forever and can't be recycled, producing a paper bag takes about four times as much energy, and 20 times as much water, as producing a plastic bag---an environmental cost internalized into the bag itself.
Additionally, paper bags are (obviously) produced from trees, requiring 14 million trees a year to meet demand in the US alone.
Paper production, which involves heating acid-treated wood chips under pressure in a chemical solution, is incredibly toxic, contributing to air and water pollution.
Finally, only about 10 to 15 percent of paper bags are actually recycled. The rest are thrown into landfills, where their decomposition rate varies widely (and where they take up more space than plastic bags). Obviously, higher recycling rates would improve this situation, but even recycling has environmental costs---those paper bags have to go through much the same process to become new paper bags (pulping, washing, bleaching, etc.) as they did to become paper bags in the first place.
In short: The difference in the environmental impacts of plastic and paper grocery bags is minimal. Reusing bags you already have is a far better solution than using new ones.
A better solution than banning one or the other arbitrarily, then, would be to ban both, or to charge a nominal fee for bags whose cost is now built into the cost of groceries. Given that the latter failed, it might be time for the city council to take a bold step and go for the former.
Or, even better: Give up your car, buy local produce, eat less meat, move into a denser neighborhood, and stop buying so much stuff. And then, feel free to use those single-use plastic or paper bags with abandon.
The arguments against plastic bags are sound: They clog landfills, kill wildlife, contribute to massive dead patches of ocean like the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch , and break down into smaller bits that never decompose. Additionally, plastic bags can't really be recycled; they can only be downcycled (used as part of new consumer products) or upcycled (essentially, reused). So there's little question that throwing away tons of plastic is not sustainable.
The question is: Is switching consumers to paper grocery bags really an improvement?
The consensus, pretty much unequivocally, is no. Here are a few reasons why.
Although plastic bags do hang around forever and can't be recycled, producing a paper bag takes about four times as much energy, and 20 times as much water, as producing a plastic bag---an environmental cost internalized into the bag itself.
Additionally, paper bags are (obviously) produced from trees, requiring 14 million trees a year to meet demand in the US alone.
Paper production, which involves heating acid-treated wood chips under pressure in a chemical solution, is incredibly toxic, contributing to air and water pollution.
Finally, only about 10 to 15 percent of paper bags are actually recycled. The rest are thrown into landfills, where their decomposition rate varies widely (and where they take up more space than plastic bags). Obviously, higher recycling rates would improve this situation, but even recycling has environmental costs---those paper bags have to go through much the same process to become new paper bags (pulping, washing, bleaching, etc.) as they did to become paper bags in the first place.
In short: The difference in the environmental impacts of plastic and paper grocery bags is minimal. Reusing bags you already have is a far better solution than using new ones.
A better solution than banning one or the other arbitrarily, then, would be to ban both, or to charge a nominal fee for bags whose cost is now built into the cost of groceries. Given that the latter failed, it might be time for the city council to take a bold step and go for the former.
Or, even better: Give up your car, buy local produce, eat less meat, move into a denser neighborhood, and stop buying so much stuff. And then, feel free to use those single-use plastic or paper bags with abandon.
