Plastic fantastic! Carrier bags 'not eco-villains after all'

[Aurora]

The Independent - 20/02/11

Unpublished government research suggests the plastic carrier bag may not be an eco-villain after all, but – whisper it – an unsung hero. Hated by environmentalists and shunned by shoppers, the disposable plastic bag is piling up in a shame-filled corner of retail history. But a draft report by the Environment Agency, obtained by The Independent on Sunday, has found that ordinary high-density polythene (HDPE) bags are actually greener than supposedly low-impact choices.

HDPE bags are, for each use, almost 200 times less damaging to the climate than cotton hold-alls favoured by environmentalists, and are responsible for less than one-third of the CO2 emissions of paper bags given out by retailers such as Primark.

Article continues ...

[biffvernon]

There's a lot of strangeness about that article.

The paper is still, after a year, unpublished, supposedly going through the peer review process in a not so smooth way.

It appears to concentrate on CO2 emission but doesn't address other aspects (such as the long term effect of plastics in the oceans) so may be only looking at part of the problem.

This is curious

It found that an HDPE plastic bag would have a baseline global warming potential of 1.57kg CO2 equivalent, falling to 1.4kg if reused once,

How does impact fall by re-use? You either measure the impact of making the bag - and that's that once the bag is made, or you present the impact as warming potential per shopping trip - in which case it halves every time you double the number of shopping trips.

And let's dwell on that figure of 1.57kg CO2 equivalent. 1.57kg is quite a mass, especially when associated with the mass of a bag of just a few grams. What's going on there?

And of course nobody's talking about the elephant in the shopping bag. The real villain is the shopping itself.

[Pepperman]

Got to agree with Biff here. Something odd's going on with those numbers and CO2 emissions were never the issue with plastic bags.

[RenewableCandy]

Geo. Marshall does a fantastic p!ss-take on the theme of worrying about plastic bags too much. Yes the CO2 profile is negligible, the important thing is they don't end up somewhere where they can strangle or choke wildlife, or block drains causing problems the fixing of which has a large CO_2 profile in its own right.