For numerous years now stores have been offering customer carrier bags to help transfer their purchases from the store back to their homes in a safe manner – with these carrier bags normally either being made from paper or plastic – depending on the preferred material chosen by the retailer offering the carrier bags in their stores. Obviously the same question has been asked time after time, which is better the plastic bag or the paper bag – and there have been many answers dependant on what is most important to you – for example durability, cost, environment friendly to name but a few.
Did you know that there are an estimated 100 billion plastic bags that get produced in just the United States every year and what happens to these when people have finished with them – they simply get thrown away as they cannot be recycled which is obviously a huge bug factor when discussing with environmentalists and such like as disposal of all these plastics bags in a huge nightmare for the disposal companies alone.
It’s because of the issue with plastic bags like them not being able to decompose properly and the fact that they release harmful toxins into the atmosphere that retailers have started to turn more and more towards using paper bags. These paper bags are cheaper to produce which is obviously key to the retailers when trying to keep a business profitable, are nowhere near as toxic as the plastic bags and can obviously be recycled with ease. However as with everything there are major disadvantages to using these paper bags as it has been reported that an average house will go through approximately five to six hundred paper bags each and every year which much like the issue with plastic bags still causes disposal issues. Add to this the number of trees that have to be felled in order for all of these paper bags and you can see why a worldwide campaign to help reduce / avoid deforestation has been started against the production of paper bags.
It is also because of this campaign that manufacturers have started to look into and produce recyclable plastic bags which should be able to help with the deforestation issues, lower littering levels and obviously have an impact on the requirement for land filling which in turn will reduce landfill costs.
So plastic or paper bags which route do you take – the choice at the end of the day is yours.
If you would like to know more about eco bags, paper or otherwise, why not pay us a visit at www.amspac.co.uk