Paper or Plastic?

Amy Standen Post on Dec 13, 2007 by
Topics: Environment, Radio
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This November, San Francisco became the first city in the country to outlaw plastic check out bags at large supermarkets, arguing that the bags are dangerous to marine life and hard to recycle. But some studies say paper bags can be just as harmful for the environment. So why target plastic?

You may listen to the "paper or Plastic?" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.


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  • Tania Levy

    A study published in 1990 (with even older data) is useless to predict current bag recycling and use impacts. In the past SEVENTEEN years, recycling collection has increased dramatically, as has technology for making bags with recycled content.

    The bron paper shopping bags used in San Francisco are required to contain at least 40% post consumer recycled, and 100% total recycled fiber. They are made by Duro bag, in Arizona from recycled brown bags and cardboard boxes, at a modern facility with very low impacts, including glues and inks. See http://www.DUROBAG.COM. Cardboard's recycling rate is over 80%. Any valid comparison of paper and plastic bag whole-life-impacts MUST take that into consideration.

    Berkeley is looking at a plastic bag ban also, tho different from San Francisco's, and we are doing the background research.

  • Shiloh A.

    The fact that brown bags don't break down in our landfills points to a problem with our landfills and not the bags. Plastic never breaks down. If and when these dumps do see the light of day and the elements, the paper will degrade while the plastic will drift around the planet negatively impacting wildlife. The Pacific Gyre is a scary example of this where plastic from around the world collects forming a massive and deadly hazard for turtles, fish, and birds.

  • S Tokoloshi

    Charge 35 cents for each bag.
    Immediately customers bring their own long-term bags. This works in Ireland. Plastic bag litter has ceased.

    "Plastic vs Paper" is a red herring argument, perhaps invented by industry lobbyists.

  • Mary Lou Van Deventer

    What the plastics industry knows but dares not say is that plastics normally break down in the natural environment. Think of a child's big-wheel bike left in the sun. Its plastic thins, becomes brittle, and breaks. Where did the molecules go? "Water" in the Pacific's plastic gyre contains more plastic molecules than H20. On land and at sea, plastic bags escape control, then blow around, choking and killing animals that try to swallow them by mistake, from dairy cows to wildlife. The bags use precious fossil resources to create a short-lived usefulness and long-lived pollution problem. Brown paper bags are sturdier and degrade easily into substances that critters and soil love. But let's save the trees and use cloth to let our great-granchildren enjoy a nice planet too.