People are encouraged to utilize reusable grocery bags (pictured above), however they are actually just as harmful to the environment as plastic bags (courtsey of senior Airman Christopher L. Ingersoll/U.S. Air force photo).
On Earth Day 2019, Governor Cuomo banned the use of plastic bags, signing it into law that will take effect in March 2020. It’s estimated that New Yorkers use 23 billion plastic bags each year. Obviously, that’s a lot of bags. It’s worse when you learn that about 50 percent of single-use plastic bags end up as litter. The banning of single-use plastic bags was seen as a good first step in the fight against pollution, but is it really a step in the right direction?
At a base level, single-use plastic bags have a terrible reputation. Non-bio-degradable, they’ve been pinned as the worst choice when it comes to your weekly shopping. But all of that might change in light of what it takes to produce paper bags, something that’s thought to be a good alternative to plastic. While they are biodegradable and relatively easy to recycle or compost, according to Stanford Magazine, “producing them in quantity requires a lot of water, fuel and cut-down trees.” On top of that, they aren’t made from recycled material since new paper is much stronger and more likely to be able to hold heavy groceries.
In 2011, Britain’s Environment Agency conducted a study to find the most common types of bags used regularly in grocery stores and their environmental impact. They found the carbon emissions of producing paper bags to be very dangerous and, according to the study, a paper bag must be reused at least three times in order to “ensure that they have lower global warming potential than conventional HDPE carrier bags that are not reused.” From a global warming standpoint, paper bags are beginning to look a lot worse than the dreaded single-use plastic bag.
Here is where one might make the argument for reusable bags, which is great assuming one very important detail: you have to actually reuse them—a lot. In the same study, it was found that a shopper would have to reuse their cotton bag 131 times before it would have a lesser global warming impact than a single-use plastic bag that was only used once. For a durable, plastic bag, it would have to be reused at least four times before it began to equal out their relatively high climate costs.
To add insult to injury, what you put in the bag probably matters more than if the bag is plastic, paper or reusable. According to Science Magazine, “feeding 7.6 billion people is degrading terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, depleting water resources and driving climate change.”
Who would’ve thought that feeding an ever-growing population would have negative effects? Well, in actuality, it shouldn’t. There is enough food to go around as the food industry exists now, but because of how food is made and, more specifically, how the excess is thrown away (and the fact that there is so much excess) climate change and global warming are helped along immensely by the food industry.
In the end, it matters more what you put in your bag than what type of bag you have, which makes Cuomo’s ban little more than a misguided restriction on single-use plastic bags, which are bad—but are not nearly as bad as they’re made out to be. Not quite the fault of the grocery stores and the food industry’s global warming problem, single-use plastic bags are merely eyesores that, while they do contribute to the levels of plastic in landfills, are not particularly worse than any other type of bag.
Maria Pawlak is a an English and political science major freshman who is looking for someone with whom to speak Hungarian on campus.