Plastic-Bag Ban: Friend or Faux Pas?

Photo by Sam Rae, under a Creative Commons license
Is San Francisco’s ban on plastic bags merely a band-aid solution to a deeper environmental issue? Anna of Bring Your Own makes a convincing argument:
Replacing plastic bags with paper and compostable does little to address the root of the issue: our disposable mentality. Yes, its potentially preventing plastic bags from winding up in the ocean, to be chomped by poor unwitting sea turtles…..but at the end of the day, a tremendous opportunity to educate is missed. We gotta start valuing our resources! Bring your own damn bag, use it over an over, take some responsibility for your crap!
She cites Ireland’s tax of 15 cents per plastic bag as a more effective solution. “People no longer looked at the nasty little suckers as expendable, valueless items, to be tossed unthinkingly,” Anna writes in her blog. “We HATE having to pay for things we think should be free…..and when we have to PAY, even a paltry sum of 10-15 cents, we immediately attach some value.”
It’s an indisputable fact that plastic bags are a scourge on our planet—each takes 1,000 years to break down into microscopic particles that wind up polluting our soil and waterways, not to mention enter our food chain through accidental ingestion by animals. (Thousands of marine animals die each year after mistaking plastic bags for food.) In the case of the endangered leatherback turtle, plastic bags masquerading as delectable jellyfish—its primary food source—are far too tempting to pass up.
San Francisco’s solution: Replace all petroleum-based plastic bags with bags made from recycled paper—which returns to the earth in about a month—or compostable ones made from plant starches. Corn plastics, such as the patented PLA, only decompose into carbon dioxide and water under industrial composting conditions, in special facilities that can subject compost to high temperatures—we’re talking about something like 140 degrees Fahrenheit—for long spans of time. That rules out utilizing your backyard compost pile or tumbler. PLA also poses a problem for conventional recycling facilities that aren’t equipped to handle this newfangled plastic. Unlike polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which can be broken down into pellets and fabricated into new products such as carpeting or fiberfill, PLA currently has few applications, largely because of its low melting point. In fact, recyclers see PLA as a contaminant if it’s mixed in with your PET recyclables—they have to fork out cash to get the PLA sorted out and disposed of. (This does not make them happy campers, as you can imagine.)
Paper bags are no better, and in fact could be far worse than their plastic counterparts. According to the EPA, paper bags generate 70 percent more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags do. Four times as much energy is expended in the production of a paper bag. Plus, it takes 91 percent less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle the equivalent in paper. (And, regardless of the medium, there will always be antisocial yahoos who litter and don’t recycle. This is where educational programs need to come into play.)
So paper, plastic, or corn starch? If our society is ever to break from its throwaway, narcissistic mentality, the right, most ecologically beneficial answer would be “none of the above, I’ve brought my own.”
References:
1. Royte, Elizabeth. “Corn Plastic to the Rescue.” Smithsonian August (2006)




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