3 ms·

How? Care to elaborate on that?

• evgen 17y ago
  Processing wood to create paper uses water. Recycling paper uses water. Growing the trees in the first place uses water. Paper bags are not reused more than plastic ones so they end up in landfills, where they take forever and a day to breakdown (paper decomposes very, very slowly in an anaerobic environment -- you can date the layers of landfills by taking a core sample and just looking for dates on the 20-50 year-old paper scraps that come up in the sample.) Paper bags are heavier and bulkier than an equivalent capacity of plastic bags so it takes much more energy to deliver them from the production facility to the end-user. The only downsides to plastic bags are the fact that they are mostly produced from a small amount of fossil fuel (until bioplastic versions get cheaper) and that they are lightweight and therefore tend to blow around and get captured in unsightly places like trees when they are improperly disposed.