Ever since plastic bags became available as the means to tote our groceries home, I've heard that we need to switch back to paper bags. Indeed, in 2007 San Francisco banned the use of plastic bags by chain stores for the carrying home of retail purchases (albeit with this controversy, as explained in a January 7, 2009 article debunking that particular bit of feel-good legislation in the San Francisco Weekly), and Whole Foods recently converted to using paper bags or reusable bags only.But do such changes really save the environment?
Marc Fisher of the Washington Post recently made the following excellent points about the paper-or-plastic wars....
Read the rest at Always On Watch.
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ReplyDeletePlastic recycling is little understood by the general population. For this reason there is lot of misleading information out there about what actually can and cannot be recycled. We are plastic recyclers and this admittedly is a plug for our new product THE BETTER BAG, a unique reusable grocery bag. First of all, most municipal recycling programs do not accept any kind of reusable bags for recycling. Consequently the recycling symbol printed on the tags of these bags is really meaningless. Reusable bags put into your home recycling will most likely be culled out and thrown away. Second, plastics need to be virtually 100% pure to be recycled by ordinary plastics recycling methods. Plastics that are impure are called contaminated or commingled. We've purchased a variety of common reusable bags now being sold at supermarkets, office supply stores and other retail outlets. Many of them bear a tag that says that they are 100% pure. When we tested most of these bags, we found that the threads or the handles or the bottom stiffeners used to make these bags are often made from a different material than the bag fabric itself. This renders these bags commingled and in our opinion, not recyclable. A famous grocery chain promotes bags that are made from 80% recycled soda bottles, what they don't understand is that the other 20% of the bag is another foreign material and that the mixture of these materials creates a commingled product. Sure, using any reusable bag beats using a one time disposable paper or plastic bag but why use a bag that will eventually end up as solid waste when you can use a bag that can be recycled over and over again?
ReplyDeleteTHE BETTER BAG is a triple play. It's made with recycled material. It's incredibly sturdy and it's the only reusable bag that's guaranteed recyclable. We can offer this guaranty because we recycle it! To learn more, please visit our website:
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