Photo: mtsofan / Flickr

When it comes to choosing plastic or brown paper bags when you go shopping, you may think the obvious answer would be to go with paper. Paper is biodegradable and comes from renewable resources, right? While that is true, there’s more to brown paper bags than meets the eye. Read on to find out why you’d be doing the best you can for the environment by choosing neither plastic nor brown paper bags.

Where brown paper bags come from

As you well know, paper comes from trees. What you may not know is just how much impact turning those trees into paper has on the environment. First, there’s the logging industry to consider. Huge machinery is used to clear forests of trees (often destroying habitats and wreaking long-term ecological damage), which are then left to dry for three years before they can be turned into paper.

More machinery is used to strip bark and chip wood, which is turned into a wood pulp. The pulp is then bleached. Both getting the wood to the pulp stage and bleaching the pulp uses vast amounts of water. On top of this, the machinery used by logging companies and paper manufacturers relies on fossil fuels to run.

Where plastic bags come from

Plastic bags are made from oil, which is a non-renewable resource. All plastics are a by-product of the processes used to refine oil, and rely on a lot of electricity to heat the oil up to as much as 750 degrees Fahrenheit.

When we’re done with shopping bags

Photo: jessica mullen / Flickr

Brown paper bags can be recycled, but recycling them is not as easy as you might imagine. A chemical process re-pulps paper that’s being recycled, then bleaches and separates the paper’s fibres. They’re then cleaned and screened for any contaminants, and finally washed again to remove any ink before being rolled into paper again. This process uses up a lot of resources, including water and electricity.

Biodegradable plastic bags aren’t always biodegradable. Some are simply recycled plastic with cornstarch added. The corn starch competes with our food supply, and is often harvested unsustainably. Shopping bags that can’t be recycled end up on landfills, where it’s estimated they may remain for up to a thousand years.

What to do

The answer is, simply, to avoid using both plastic and brown paper bags. For as little as £3 you can invest in a reusable shopping bag that will last you for many years to come.

Tags: Eco-friendly, shopping, shopping bags