Impact of Plastic bags:

Impact of Plastic bags:
•    take over 400 years to biodegrade and result in a large amount rubbish in our landfills
•    Air pollution is caused during incineration
•    Manufacture add many tons of carbon and other toxic chemicals into the atmosphere annually
•    Approximately 60-100 million barrels of oil are required for manufacture annually
•    Stray bags pollute much of our environment and cause 100000 marine organisms death each year
•    Small particles given off during breakdown accumulate in ecosystems and contaminate the food web
Impacts of paper bags:

 

•    Use four times as much energy as plastic bags to produce
•    Many toxic chemicals are used in the production, contributing significantly to air pollution
•    The impact production on forests is enormous as millions of trees are cut down for production
•    Consumes 9 times as much energy to recycle compared to a plastic one
•    Due to the lack of water, light and oxygen in today’s landfill, paper does not degrade at a faster rate than plastic yet takes up much more space
Impacts of jute bags:
•    Greatest financial production costs
•    Production uses and produces large quantities of chemicals, notably CH4
•    Production uses more than 7 times as much water as plastic production
•    High energy usage related to transportation
•    Negative impacts on human workers with respiratory illnesses, skin disorders and cancer prevalent as the result of exposure to NO, NH4, CO2 and spending long hours in waist deep water during retting.
It may be easy to say that plastic bags are the most environmentally harmful choice but in fact the production costs of paper and jute are significantly higher and gives plastic a slight edge in this stage. However, plastic bags are difficult to dispose of and generally are the most harmful once they have been used. While plastic represents just 0.3% of household waste, paper uses significantly more space of landfills.  The fact that paper degrades quite slowly in a landfill situation counts against it. The result is that reusable jute bags triumph over single use paper and plastic bags. While the embodied energy of jute bags is higher, the fact that many people will use a single jute bag over several years results in it being the most ecofriendly. Also in jute’s favour is the fact that it is readily compostable and recyclable which results in the lowest environmental impact.

Did you like this? Share it: