The universal rule when trying to achieve environmental accolades is “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.” When retail businesses try to adhere to this rule, there are many things that have to be taken into consideration from an environmental standpoint.
The two most common bags used by retailers are paper shopping bags and plastic shopping bags, and here are the advantages and disadvantages of using each.
Paper bags are used for many different purposes outside of the retail industry, whether it is for arts and crafts or for storing lunches. Paper bags are made of a renewable resource: Paper is made from wood, wood grows on trees, and as you know, we can always grow more trees after we cut them down. Wood is an all-natural material, making it easy to recycle and unnecessary to break up into different components. Paper bags will also easily degrade if they end up in a body of water.
Paper shopping bags, on the other hand, weigh more than plastic bags, and buying paper bags in bulk increases the carbon footprint when it comes to shipping them. Making paper bags could even be more detrimental to the environment, as the production process to create paper bags involve the use of thousands of gallons of bleach and water in order to clean out the pulp. With that in mind, paper bags require more resources to craft than plastic bags.
Plastic, on the other hand, is durable. It’s elastic, and will not tear as easily as paper. Plastic is considered to be more reusable and will not degrade in water or moisture. Plastic is very light and uses fewer resources for shipping. It also requires less energy to recycle plastic than it would to recycle paper if both materials weighed the same amount.
Plastic, however, is not completely recyclable, but there are multiple components of plastic bags which need to be separated before the bag can be recycled. For example, a handle on a plastic bag may be made of a different kind of plastic from the actual bag itself, so it must be removed and recycled on its own.
While recycling is a primary component of the “environmental triad”, not many plastic bags actually do get recycled. There are billions of plastic bags that have been made around the world, and only less than 3% of these bags end up getting recycled altogether.
Even though plastic bags do not break down in water and moisture, it can be a serious problem to the environment. The bulk of plastic bags are not degradable. 10% of all plastic bags created every year around the world end up in the ocean, and 7 of every 10 bags within that 10% manage to reach the ocean floor, where they may never degrade.
So which material is better for bags than the other? While both paper and plastic have their benefits as well as flaws, there are three reasons why we feel that paper is the better choice over plastic.
As mentioned previously, paper comes from a natural, renewable resource that we can always make more of. Plastic, however, is a synthetic resource that is made up of next to no natural ingredients.
Paper is more recyclable than plastic, and more paper actually does get recycled than its plastic counterpart. While paper requires more energy to get manufactured, it is also cheaper to get manufactured.
And as stated before, paper is degradable. While it is more brittle than plastic, it is considered a good thing when the bag is lost in landfill or in the ocean, which is better for the ecosystem.
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