Paper or plastic – which has the bigger environmental impact? Its not what you might think…
Your at the checkout and you have forgotten you green bag (again) and so you opt for the paper bag assuming that this will absolve you of the plastic bag guilt. It seams obvious that the brown, natural looking paper bag would of course be far better for the environment than the plastic nightmare bag… right?
Wrong. A life cycle assessment (LCA) conducted by leading researchers has shown that paper bags are actually more environmentally damaging then plastic bags when a functional unit comparison is conducted.
The research demonstrated that when all the life cycle stages (extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, use and end of life) are taken into consideration, then the paper bag has almost 3 times as much impact as the plastic bag.
This is mainly because more raw material (paper) is required to achieve the same function. Its heavier and the process of extracting paper from the natural environment is more damaging then extracting plastic.
The study actually looked at a variety of bag options and found that reusable bags were by far the most environmentally preferable option. But that calico bags actually had a very high water and pesticide impact so the good old green bag is best (even when they took into consideration the increase in bin liner sales).
What this shows us is that whilst we might assume that paper is better than plastic based on our associations of a natural product being environmentally superior, when we actually look at the life cycle implications we discover that this assumption is not correct. SO it’s really important that we investigate impact areas across the entire life of a product or material before making decisions about what has an environmental benefit and what does not.
The report of the plastic bag LCA study can be found here and a video of the researcher, Tim Grant explaining the findings is below.
On a side note it is worth bringing up the fact that it’s actually the method of getting the products home from the shop that has the biggest impact. So if you drive then you better make sure you have you green bags with you to reduce the massive impact of you getting your products home!
“Tis a pity that the “Re-use” part of the old reduce-re-use-recycle slogan is the bit which seems to get the least attention. We (my family) don’t buy bin liners, we use bread, potato and other plastic bags for rubbish. Carefully shaken out cereal and bread bags also make good freezer bags, so we don’t buy those, or cling wrap either. Cardboard cartons are our usual resort if we forget the “green bags” and are usually available somewhere in the average supermarket- they’d otherwise go in the supermarket’s recyling, may as well end up in ours once they’ve been used to shreds. Ideally I want to make my own cloth bags from old sheets/shirts/skirts etc. and if I use dark coloured fabrics they won’t aquire that permanently grotty, stained look that the calico bags inevitably develop over time. Hey, we’ve got such an oversupply of supposedly one use disposable packaging going to landfill, why not divert some of it as appropriate to a second (third, fourth…) use?
A lot of people are getting more concerned about the on-going environmental issues and are now taking initiatives by using ”green” products.
Part of our (society’s) problem is that buying a new whatever is so easy,and we end up with no time available for reusing or remaking what we already have. I’m guilty of stockpiling such projects and not getting to them. To see brilliant reuse you need to look at poor countries or Depression/wartime history, where if you didn’t recycle and reuse you ended up going without. How drastic does our rubbish and pollution problem have to get before we have to do something about it? But yes, there are designers out there with great examples of recycled material usage.