Want to really protect the environment, use plastic bags!

Many urban areas around the world have implemented bag ban campaigns in an effort to protect the environment from the so-called evils of plastic shopping bags and to eliminate the dangers of plastic bags. However, the Atlantic recently published an article showing that reusable cloth bags can be worse for the environment than plastic bags.

Is this really the case?

In the past, there have been authors who have reflected on the countless germs that can grow in cloth grocery bags. The germs are the inevitable result of this process. Now, the Atlantic has uncovered a study by the UK Environment Agency (UKEA) that looked at the resource costs of different types of bags: paper, plastic, cloth, and recycled polypropylene. Surprisingly, the authors found that in typical use and disposal patterns, many consumers reused plastic bags at least once. The study also found that “conventional plastic bags made from hHDPE, the plastic bags found in grocery stores had the best environmental impact after at least one use, across all tests. Paper bags, on the other hand, showed the highest and most severe global warming potential for the Earth’s atmosphere, simply because they require more resources to produce and distribute.”

For anyone in the plastics industry who understands the science behind the production of plastics and various polymer-derived products, this fact comes as no surprise. We widely understand that making plastic and then turning it into granules for everything from plastic bags to sandwich bags to car bumpers and more is much greener than growing cotton (which requires lots of water, spraying with pesticides and then spraying defoliants on cotton bolls that people can harvest automatically by large, gasoline-powered machines). Moreover, the environmental costs of papermaking are high, as they require large amounts of water and other human resources including bleach (white paper) and wood.

Evidence

“UKEA research has calculated that the cost of an HDPE plastic bag is less than 2kg of carbon. In comparison, a paper bag requires seven times more carbon to achieve the same usage rate. Bags made from recycled polypropylene are nearly 26 times more carbon-intensive and cotton bags are nearly 327 times more carbon-intensive. “However, Noah Dillion’s article, “Are cloth or cotton handbags really better for the environment?” points out that handbags have become so popular that people see them as disposable goods and are being thrown away as often as plastic bags, undermining their ideal purpose.

“This loss of central control, which was originally intended to prevent ecological disaster, seems to be backfiring – doing more harm than good, which is part of the problematic environmental rhetoric.” This encourages consumers to consider what is better for the environment. Currently, biodegradable plastics are increasingly proliferating, and the use of this type of plastic also contributes greatly to reducing waste.

In short, our environment is polluted not because of plastic and nylon bags, but because of people’s poor awareness and improper littering. What we need to do is not to replace plastic with paper or cloth, but to educate people on how to classify and recycle plastic waste.

Conclusion

So, there are a few things we in the plastic industry can do to overcome this challenge. First, educate our children on the science of plastics compared to paper or cloth bags. Then, require schools to have practical courses on the environmental friendliness of plastics. Finally, don’t forget to show everyone your pride in plastic!

According to the Plastic World magazine

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