8-Comparison and Contrast of Paper Bags and Plastic packaging
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8-Comparison and Contrast of Paper Bags and Plastic packaging
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The supermarket chain Morrisons is raising the price of its reusable plastic bags from 10p to 15p as a trial and introducing a 20p paper version. The paper bags will be available in eight stores as part of a two-month trial. The supermarket chain said reducing plastic was their customers' top environmental concern.
Paper bags remain popular in the US, but they fell out of use in UK supermarkets in the 1970s as plastic was seen as a more durable material.
But are paper bags more environmentally friendly than plastic ones?
The answer comes down to:
how much energy is used to make the bag during manufacturing?
how durable is the bag? (i.e. how many times can it be reused?)
how easy is it to recycle?
how quickly does it decompose if thrown away?
'Four times as much energy'
In 2011 a research paper produced by the Northern Ireland Assembly said it "takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag."
Unlike plastic bags (which the report says are produced from the waste products of oil refining) paper requires forests to be cut down to produce the bags. The manufacturing process, according to the research, also produces a higher concentration of toxic chemicals compared with making single-use plastic bags.
Paper bags also weigh more than plastic; this means transportation requires more energy, adding to their carbon footprint, the study adds.
Morrisons says that the material used to make its paper bags will be 100% sourced from forests that are managed responsibly.
And if new forests are grown to replace lost trees, this will help to offset the climate change impact, because trees lock up carbon from the atmosphere.
In 2006, the Environment Agency examined a range of bags made from different materials to find out how many times they need to be reused in order to have a lower global warming potential than a conventional single-use plastic bag.