What is more ecologic ?

Question

a plastic or a paper bag ?

Answer 1

The most environmentally friendly is to bring your own reusable bag (i.e. canvas bag).

If you can't or won't, then it depends.

Paper bags require more energy to produce and trees to be cut down, but are easily recyclable.

Plastic bags require less energy to produce, but are not recyclable. They are reusable for other applications, but only if your area has a specific plastic grocery bag recycling program (every retail store in California is now required by law to have one, for example).

So from most to least environmentally friendly:

1) Bring canvas bag(s)
2) Plastic if there's a specific recycling program
3) Paper
4) Plastic if there's no recycling program

Answer 2

It takes more than 4X more energy to produce the paper bags and it generates 70% more air and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags. It also takes more energy to recycle the paper bag than it does plastic.
Yeah, the pulp is a renewable resource but it still results in 10's of millions of trees being cut every year. Of course when you are done with the bag it is biodegradable and will breakdown in a relatively short amount of time if you compost the bags yourself. If they end up in a landfill they do not break down much quicker than plastic.

The plastic bag is made from petroleum which is non-renewable. The production impact is lower but unless you recycle your plastic bags they probably end up in a landfill where they will remain for thousands of years. Another drawback to plastic bags is the ones that don't end up in a landfill or recycling center. They end up drifting around and present a threat to wildlife that may get tangled in the bags.

Fortunately there is another option and that is reusable bags. If you don't already have reusable bags around the house most grocery stores now sell inexpensive reusable cloth bags for a low price. If your store of choice doesn't have them available you might want to ask a manager why. The store wins in several ways. They can profit from selling the bags. They cut expenses by not using so many disposable bags.

You can also find a wide variety of reusable shopping bags at specialty sites such as http://www.reusablebags.com and even Amazon.com sells reusable bags.

Answer 3

Neither. The green solution is to take a reusable carrier to the store with you, e.g. a cloth sac. Of the two plastic or paper it depends on where you live and what you do with them. Both can be recycled, if you do then they are equal. If you don't recycle paper is greener since it will decompose in the landfill, plastic take forever to decompose.

Answer 4

Plastic is the general term for a wide range of synthetic or semisynthetic polymerization products. They are composed of organic condensation or addition polymers and may contain other substances to improve performance or economics. There are few natural polymers generally considered to be "plastics". Plastics can be formed into objects or films or fibers. Their name is derived from the fact that many are malleable, having the property of plasticity.

Paper is thin material used for writing upon, printing upon or packaging, produced by the amalgamation of fibres, typically vegetable fibres composed of cellulose, which are subsequently held together by hydrogen bonding. While the fibres used are usually natural in origin, a wide variety of synthetic fibres, such as polypropylene and polyethylene, may be incorporated into paper as a way of imparting desirable physical properties. The most common source of these kinds of fibres is wood pulp from pulpwood trees. Vegetable fibre materials such as cotton, hemp, linen, and rice are also used.

my guess would be paper bag since Ecology(also known as Oekologie, Okology, or Oekology[1],from Greek: οίκος, oikos, "household"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how the distribution and abundance are affected by interactions between the organisms and their environment. The environment of an organism includes both physical properties, which can be described as the sum of local abiotic factors such as insolation (sunlight), climate, and geology, and biotic factors, which are other organisms that share its habitat.

The word "ecology" is often used more loosely in such terms as social ecology and deep ecology and in common parlance as a synonym for the natural environment or environmentalism. Likewise "ecologic" or "ecological" is often taken in the sense of environmentally friendly.

The term ecology or oekologie was coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, when he defined it as "the comprehensive science of the relationship of the organism to the environment".

Answer 5

hmm....i'd go with paper bag as it's easily recycled, whereas the plastic has to be treated before recycling etc. (costs money.)