Let's start with the bag itself. The war on single-use plastic bags has long been waged on the assumption that they are uniquely destructive and that swapping them for paper is an obvious win. The life-cycle science disagrees. A comprehensive Danish Environment Review found that a paper bag must be reused at least 43 times just to break even with the climate impact of a single plastic bag. Studies have found that the carbon footprint of a paper bag is more than three times higher than a single-use plastic bag. Plastic bags generate 39% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than uncomposted paper bags and 68% fewer than composted ones, and using paper bags generates five times more solid waste than using plastic.
When legislators in Cape Cod or Columbia debate a plastic bag ban, they are not choosing between pollution and cleanliness. They are choosing which environmental costs to impose and then pretending those costs don't exist.
Paper bags contribute less to the impacts of littering but in most cases carry a larger burden on the climate, eutrophication, and acidification compared to single-use plastic bags. That's the tradeoff ban advocates never put on the poster. They talk about the bag on the beach but not the acid rain or the deforested hillside that produced its replacement. Environmental policy that ignores inconvenient tradeoffs isn't environmentalism.
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