Comments on: Bag the fear-mongering and stick to the facts

By: Jess

Jess — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:56:04 +0000

What about the environmental impact of producing single-use bags — both plastic and paper? The production/transportation process consumes water and produces greenhouse gases and ozone, and it only takes a few uses for the environmental impact of resuable bags to be less than plastic/paper. In fact, although paper bags are recycles more often than plastic bags, the environmental cost of producing them is much higher than plastic. Banning just plastic bags is not the answer — we would need to ban all single-use bags.

By: Wendy Gregor

Wendy Gregor — Sat, 14 May 2011 15:15:11 +0000

Best article on plastic bags ever! So funny. I love that you make the politically incorrect points and use humor to shine light on the ridiculous.

By: Rich Rifkin

Rich Rifkin — Wed, 11 May 2011 23:35:07 +0000

\Anything that ends up in a landfill after limited uses that is not biodegradable is basically single use from an ecological perspective.\

Shawn, this is a distinction without a difference. Nothing, not even vegetation, biodegrades in the absence of oxygen. In a landfill, where you are burying waste, you are depriving what you bury of oxygen.

So the real question is volume of buried waste ‘from an ecological perspective.’ And with regard to plastic grocery bags, they have almost no negative impact in landfills because they take up so little space. I can’t recall the exact number but it is in the 0.4% range. In other words, getting rid of every single buried bag would be impossible to notice.

By: David Edwards

David Edwards — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:19:30 +0000

Low blow on the Beavs, Bob. Perhaps you haven’t been watching them the last few years.

By: Shawn

Shawn — Wed, 11 May 2011 18:50:55 +0000

“Now, I don’t know about you, but there’s no such thing as a “single-use” plastic grocery bag in our household.”

Anything that ends up in a landfill after limited uses that is not biodegradable is basically single use from an ecological perspective.