Goal For The Green

As of today, San Francisco is banning plastic bags, and the Whole Food Markets are requesting their customers to bring their own bags.  The choice will be paper in both places.

When it comes to cost, it is much cheaper to produce a plastic bag over a paper one. The drawback is, plastic is a petroleum product.  However, it only takes approximately .003%of oil per barrell to produce alot of plastic bags.  At least 100,000 birds and marine life die each year because of the plastic that liters our beaches and other public places. This could be one of the reasons for the choice of paper over plastic in the San Francisco area.

Paper bag producton takes one 20 year old tree and four times the energy to produce 700 bags.  In 1999, America cut down 14 million trees to produce 10 billion paper bags, and that was just for that year.  The impact on our forests is mind boggling.  The forests are a major absorber of green house gases.  When we cut them down, and then use clean water and chemicals to produce the pulp to manufacture paper bags, we create more greenhouse gases.  The sad thing is there is not enough forest areas left to absorb the pollutants. It doesn’t stop there, hence, not enough trees to help with run-off from heavy rain.  So, we’ve seen more severe flooding in recent years.

The problem is, while it takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic, only 1-3% of plastic bags are recycled. Paper on the other hand, is recycled at a rate of 10-15 %  more often, and it is compostable. Plastic is not.

Nothing completely degrades anymore in our modern landfills.  This is because of the lack of water, light, oxygen and other elments that are necessary to complete the degradation process.  The end result is, paper really doesn’t brake down any faster than plastic in a landfill. It also takes up more space than plastic.  The goal should be to keep both of these products from ever reaching a land fill.  The bottom line is, we may all need to get used to BYOB – bring you own bag.

Written in association with plastic disposal experts