So what’s the answer?  Neither.  Bring your own reusable bags.  Wondering what to get the hard-to-buy-for person this holiday season?  How about a reusable bag?

Paper or Plastic? 

 

This is a question you have probably been asked a lot lately.  So what’s the right answer?  Here are some facts comparing paper and plastic:

 

Paper                vs.             Plastic
1 ton of bags = 17 trees	1 ton of bags = 11 barrels of crude oil
20% get recycled	1% get recycled
Each bag leads to 5.75 pounds of air pollution	Each bag results in 1.2 pounds of air pollution, almost 80% less than paper
Generates five times as much solid waste as plastic	40% less energy to manufacture and 91% less energy to recycle than paper
14 million trees were cut down in 1999 to supply the U.S. with paper bags	An estimated 500 billion to one trillion new plastic bags are used every year.  That’s as many as two million per minute.
Manufacturing process uses 50 times more water pollution than plastic	Easily washes out to sea, where it clogs the stomachs of whales and turtles