PLASTIC BAGS

If there’s one thing that really seems to get people fired up about ‘green issues’ it’s plastic bags.

Apparently we use 10 billion of them in the UK every year and 4 billion of these are Tesco bags! My view is that we should be using a lot less of them – but not just plastic bags, paper bags too. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, I think that paper bags are worse than plastic ones from a green perspective.
Paper bags are about 6 times heavier than plastic ones and take up about 10 times more space in landfill because the material is denser. And bag for bag they use about the same amount of fossil fuels as a plastic bag to make.
Then there’s the biodegradability issue. If something is biodegradable it means it’s broken down by bugs and bacteria over a period of time. But anything that rots also releases greenhouse gases – either CO2 or more problematic, methane. So isn’t it better to put plastic in landfill sites and have the carbon stored rather than paper when it’s released to the atmosphere?

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