According to China Radio International, are shopping bags made of paper or plastic? Every time we go shopping in the supermarket, we may ask ourselves such questions. As paper bags and plastic bags have their own advantages and disadvantages on the environment, even some environmentalists are confused about this simple choice. Experts say that the raw material of paper bags is wood, and the raw material of plastic bags is crude oil. To produce the shopping bags Americans use every year, manufacturers need to use up 14 million trees, or 12 million barrels of oil. The air pollution caused by the production of paper bags is 70% higher than that of plastic bags. But once plastic bags are produced, they are difficult to degrade naturally. They can exist for hundreds of years, even thousands of years.
Because plastic bags are cheaper to produce, American grocery stores generally choose them. But San Francisco is restricting consumers from using plastic bags. From April this year, only biodegradable plastic bags or renewable paper bags will be allowed in the city. Biodegradable plastic bags can break down in months rather than centuries.
Whether it's paper bags or plastic bags, environmentalists advocate the same thing: they should be recycled. They further pointed out that the best choice, of course, is to use cloth bags and always bring their own bags.
Here are some basic data of plastic bag PK paper bag:
plastic bag:
——Every year, the world consumes 500 billion or 1 trillion plastic bags.
——Plastic bags can't be biodegradable, but they can be photodegradable. Under the action of sunlight, they can decompose by themselves.
——HDPE bags will not decompose for hundreds of years after they are buried underground.
——Plastic bags are one of the 10 most common types of waste along the coast of the United States.
paper bag:
——Compared with the production of plastic bags, the production of paper bags can bring 70% more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants.
——2000 plastic bags weigh about 30 pounds, and 2000 paper bags weigh about 280 pounds. Discarded paper bags will occupy more space for burial.
——The energy required to recycle a pound of plastic bag is 91% less than that required to recycle a pound of paper bag, and the energy required to produce a paper bag is more than four times that of a plastic bag.