Do you Choose Plastic Shopping Bags?
OK. Here’s a Quick Quiz.
Quickly – which are more ecofriendly: plastic shopping bags or brown paper bags?
Quick now – there are only 2 choices!
If you answered paper, you’ve given the same answer as most people.
It’s logical, isn’t it? Plastic shopping bags lurk around and litter, while brown paper bags just rot away quickly. So they’ve GOT to be more ecofriendly.
When you want to consider something from an eco-friendly standpoint, you need to look at it from cradle to grave.
Cradle: what resources are used to manufacture it?
It takes more energy to make a brown paper bag than a plastic shopping bag. Plus, brown paper bags use up to 20 times more water to manufacture than plastic shopping bags (!). Paper comes from tree pulp. Some 10 billion brown paper bags are used each year in the US (a 2008 report) which means that 14 million trees are cut down to make them.
Plastic shopping bags, on the other hand, use more crude oil and natural gas to manufacture.
Pollution
Paper manufacture involves chemicals to heat and bind the wood chips. These chemicals contribute towards acid rain and water pollution near paper mills.
Plastic shopping bags contribute as we know to plastic pollution and are responsible for the deaths of millions of birds each year.
Recycling
It takes energy and resources to recycle both types of bags – but recycling rates are so low world-wide, that it’s not really a big factor.
Grave – degradation
Plastic as we know simply breaks down and lives forever, causing untold problems. Paper does degrade.
So, which is better?
Looking at things more thoroughly as we have now, you can see that in fact, brown paper bags aren’t really a great deal better than plastic shopping bags.
What SHOULD we use then? … 
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