The Flame

I recently had to do a science project on how our ecological footprint (which is the measure of space needed to support consumption), could be reduced in our everyday activities. There was the option of making a solar powered oven, and planning a green wedding, and so on. For my project I chose to go straight to the source, the vessels that carry our goodies from the stores to our cars, from our cars to our homes. I went looking for the most energy efficient shopping bag. Below are my findings.

I started with the most common. It’s stretchy and may be used as a suffocation apparatus, yes; it is our dear plastic bag. It takes 480 KJ to make one plastic bag and about 4 to 5 trillion plastic bags are produced per year. You might be thinking “Well, hey, you know, there’s a lot of people in the world, so, you know, that’s not such a bad number if it’s, you know, spread over all those countries, you know?” but North America and Western Europe account for 80 % of that. A car driving one kilometer takes the same amount of energy as producing 8.7 plastic bags (don’t you just wish you could stuff you’re gas tanks with plastic bags?). The manufacturing of plastic bags accounts for 4% of the worlds total oil production. One hundred million new plastic bags require the total energy equivalent of about 8300 barrels of oil for just the extraction of the raw materials. So, yeah, plastic bags, not really a gratifying use of our much needed non-refundable resources au naturale (natural resources). Oh, but it does not stop there, my friend! The manufacturing of two plastic bags makes 1.1 kg of atmospheric pollution and 0.1 g of waterborne waste. And of the trillions of bags made only 1-3% are recycled! I mean, come on people, how lazy are we that 96% end up in a landfill! Or they’re littered, which is also illegal as far as I know. And a plastic bag can last up to 1000 years, so it’s not going to rot, nope; it’s just going to sit there like nobody’s business. In this century about 46 000 pieces of plastic are floating around in every square kilometer of ocean. Over a billion seabirds and mammals are killed annually from the ingestion of plastic bags with as many as 100 cows a day in India. Protect you’re milk. After the animal dies, it rots and the bags are released back into the environment to strike again. Plastic bags also clog rain gutters and cause floods. Not to mention that plastic shopping bags cost retailers over 4 billion dollars a year. No doubt we’re probably paying for that somehow.
Okey-dokey, moving on. Next up, the one, the only- the lovely paper bag. It’s a classic, folks, home of the brown bagged lunch, and it is also the original grocery bag. Now, after all the llama dung I just gave you about plastic bags, paper’s probably looking pretty good, like a cold glass of water on a hot summer’s day, or a nice squishy gel seat after a ten mile bike ride. Well, here’s the dealio, it takes five times more energy to make a paper bag then to make a plastic bag and, with a gallon per bag, 20 times the water. It takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than does to recycle a pound of paper. Still only 10-15% of paper bags are recycled. And if there was any hope that they were cleaner… paper bag production causes 70% more air pollution and 50 times more water pollution. Have you ever tried to crumple a paper bag? Yeah, it’s loud and useless. They take up 7 times more room in landfills and because of lack of water and oxygen, they don’t biodegrade any faster then plastic. As for transportation, with the extra space needed and 10% more weight, ultimately, paper bags will cause between tens and hundreds of times more greenhouse gas emissions than plastic bags would have. I also hear that they murder quite a few trees. In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper shopping bags used by Americans that year alone. Think of the blood shed, and all of the saplings orphaned! Have a heart!

That brings us to reusable bags. If 1 out of 4 Americans used a reusable shopping bag we could save 3 million barrels of oil. That’s 105 million gallons. One reusable bag can save 12000 shopping bags. Hmm, I wonder what my message could be. Which bag have I discovered to be the greenest? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Oh, you got me, smarty pantaloons! ‘Twas the reusable bag!

So, now that I have passed my knowledge unto you, spread the word. Disposable is old news, reusable is the way of the future, not only because it doesn’t look as cheap, but because it will insure that our planet will last that long.

-Alyson Sarty