In a recent LinkedIn poll asking "What's more sustainable? A plastic bag or a paper bag?", 90% of (the 39) participants answered that paper bags were more sustainable than plastic bags. However, as we will see, the answer isn't as obvious as it seems. In fact, it usually depends.
Looking at The Product Alone Isn't Enough To Know If It's Sustainable
Instinctively, many of us want to look at the material to know if something is sustainable (and many brands play on this!). Yet, simply calling one material "sustainable" overlooks key considerations.
The Manufacturing Impact
To produce paper, you need trees, water, trucks (and other machines powered by oil) to cut, transport and transform raw materials into paper. The same applies to plastics - which are made out of oil that needs to be extracted, transformed and transported. Extraction, transportation and transformation all require energy. This energy might either come from renewables sources or from fossil fuels.
Understanding how much energy and natural resources (e.g. water) is necessary to produce a specific good is key to evaluate how sustainable it is. Likewise, it is important to understand where the energy used in the manufacturing process is coming from.
The Usage Lifespan & The Consumption Pace
The context in which the object is used is key to evaluate how sustainable it is. For instance, is you use a paper bag to carry heavy groceries outdoors on a rainy day, you can be sure to throw the bag away after one use. In this context, this means that waste gets created for each use of a paper bag. So, basically, waste gets created for each use of the item if you don't use the item in the right context.
That's not good.
The point is, sustainability reflects environmental production costs balanced against usefulness and usage. A cotton tote bag has a large climate footprint to produce but can either have a tiny impact per use if you reuse it for years or it can have a massive footprint per use if, well, you treat it as a single-use bag...!
The Planetary Resource Production Cost Of a Product
As mentioned earlier, each product needs natural resources to be produced - water is needed in the production, carbon is emitted during the production, etc.
So, in essence, each product we consume has a "planetary resource production cost".
This planetary resource production cost is amortized for each use of the good. So, the planetary resource production cost per use (let's call it resource cost per use, or 'RCPU' for short) depends on your usage of the good and on your disposal habit.
Here's a simple example to understand.
If you buy one plastic bag that you use every day for 5 years to carry your groceries back home, this is better than throwing 365 single-use paper bags in the bin each year.
But, if you buy one plastic bag that you use only once and throw away, the RCPU of this bag will be very large and will be worse than that of a paper bag. (You effectively throw away a single use bag that took a lot of natural resources to be manufactured.)
Paper vs Plastic Bags
So, is a paper or plastic bag more sustainable? It depends on lots of things, especially how you will use them!
To decide which item is more sustainable, consider:
If it's built for purpose and durability
Your likelihood of reusing vs. disposing. Make sure to use the item in the right context to expand its lifecycle, e.g., don't use a paper bag to carry heavy items outdoors on a rainy day (paper doesn't like water). Similarly, don't use a bottle supposed to be reused, as a single-use bottle - as shown by the Stanley Cup craze on Tiktok.
Conclusion: The way and the pace at which we consume an item plays a key role when we determine if it's sustainable!
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