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Home › Encore™ Environmental Solutions › Paper or Plastic?
Paper or Plastic? Get the facts before you decide.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency*
- Paper manufacturing facilitates: smoke stacks, logging trucks, clear cut forests.
- It takes 13 to 17 trees to make one ton of paper bags. It has been reported that 955000
tons of paper bags were used in the United States (that's about 13 to 17 million trees).
- It takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to
manufacture a plastic bag.
- It takes 91 percent less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound
of paper.
- Paper sacks generate 70 percent more air and 50 times more water pollutants than
plastic bags.
- Plastic grocery bags generate 80% less solid waste than paper bags.
- 2000 plastic bags weigh 30 pounds, 2000 paper bags weigh 280 pounds.
Paper bags require significant more landfill space.
- Current research demonstrates that paper in today?s landfills does not degrade or break
down at a substantially faster rate than plastic.
USA TODAY reported**
- Four times as much energy is required to produce paper bags and 85 times as much energy
is needed to recycle them.
- Paper takes up nine times as much space in landfills.
- Compostable bags must also be segregated from regular plastic, making recycling efforts more difficult.
The New York Times stated***
- The paper industry emits the fourth-highest level of carbon dioxide, following the chemical,
petroleum, coal products, and primary metals industries.
“It is a myth that if plastic is eliminated it will create more available oil or gas for heating or fuel. Less than 3% of the feedstock, oil or natural gas, is used to make ALL plastics - that 3% is known as derivatives that become available during
the refining process. If all plastics were banned, that would not create 3% more fuel, it would create 3% wasted material that would be burned at the refineries." ~Pete Grande, Command Packaging president commenting from statistics reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
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Banning plastic bags means more paper bags which means more
pollution, more energy consumption, and more landfill usage.
Protect the environment by doing the RIGHT thing.
Choose plastic bags - AND RECYCLE
Source:
* www.epa.gov/region1/communities/shopbags.html
** USA Today, Editorial, April 2, 2007
***The New York Times, Editorial, October 5, 2006
Read more about Paper or Plastic...
RECYCLE PLASTIC BAGS – learn how to recycle
plastic bags and where to recycle them:
http://www.plasticbagrecycling.org
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