blog post #2 final

Just Another Day Running Errands

Your standing in line with a cart full of groceries. impatiently waiting for your turn to get the items you selected scanned and bagged. The cashier asks a simple question, “Plastic or paper?”. You reply with saying you want plastic, simply because of sheer convince. Your items are packed and loaded as you head out the door on your way to continue on with your life.

The average American throws away about 10 single use plastic bags per week. That’s 23 billion used just in the state of New York a year. This plastic that we use in the short time to carry food from the store to the home. Can take millions of times longer to break down in a landfill or find way to pollute our ocean and take even longer. There are more than two dozen countries that prohibit or impose a fee for use of plastic bags. So why hasn't America jumped on this plastic free train? Why do people go through the checkout lines without a hesitation to choosing plastic over paper?

450 is the number of years that it takes plastic to biodegrade. This being said it can take twice as much depending on the plastic. Billions of pounds of plastic can be found in our oceans today. This has a major effect on life in the ocean. Fish and sea birds ingest plastic, sea turtles mistake floating plastic for food, and marine mammals ingest and get tangled in plastic. As plastic floats in the seawater, it gets absorb and can create dangerous pollutants that are highly toxic. This toxic chemical has a wide range of chronic effect.

Plastic is all over because it is very inexpensive to mass produce. The material itself is flexible and durable which makes it a sought after product on the market. There's even talk that plastic bags can be a better for the environment because of the energy it takes to create is less then paper. It takes two to four times more energy to produce paper bags then it does with plastic bags. The pollution that comes with the production of plastic bags is twice as much and will in the end create more waste. With these facts which is better in the long run for the environment?

            Paper manufacturing is a highly energy intensive process. It uses large amounts of water, energy and chemicals. The nations paper industry creates 12 million tons of waste a year through the process of making paper. Plastic bag production creates less greenhouse gases and uses less water than paper bag making. Not to mention the transportation of paper vs plastic. Trucks transport paper and plastic bags all over America. Paper bags are five to seven times heavier then plastic which makes it so more trucks are required to carry them. Which in the long run adds to more air pollution?  Is there a solution even better than using plastic and paper?

Now picture this, you're standing in line similar to the same serrano I started this article with. You get to the checkout line; cashier asks “Paper or plastic?”. You reply with, “I actually brought my own bags”. These same bags you have used for years now, enough to save hundreds of plastic or paper bags. These bags are big enough to carry all your items in just a few of them. Very durable and easy to use. The solution was simple but something you had to think about. If you would have never known the reasons not to use plastic or paper, you would have never questioned it. This could be due to lack of education on the matter. But who is supposed to provide that awareness for you? By bringing your own bags to the grocery store it becomes mutually beneficial to the environment and to you.