Green Shopping: Bring your own bag
Compared with paper bags, producing plastic ones uses less energy and water and generates less air pollution and solid waste. Plastic bags also take up less space in a landfill. But many of these bags never make it to landfills; instead, they go airborne after they are discarded—getting caught in fences, trees, even the throats of birds, and clogging gutters, sewers, and waterways. To avoid these impacts, the best alternative is to carry and re-use your own durable cloth bags
Supermarkets around the world are voluntarily encouraging shoppers to forgo plastic bags-or to bring their own bags-by ffering a small per-bag refund or charging extra for plastic. In many countries there are now programs to reduce reliance on plastic bags.
Try to go at least one week without accumulating any new plastic bags. If every shopper took just one less bag each month, this could eliminate the waste of hundreds of millions of bags each year.
Plastic bags start as crude oil, natural gas, or other petrochemical derivatives, which are transformed into chains of hydrogen and carbon molecules known as polymers or polymer resin. After being heated, shaped, and cooled, the plastic is ready to be flattened, sealed, punched, or printed on.
-Source http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/goodstuff/plasticbags/
When 1 ton of plastic bags is reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil are saved. Paper or Plastic? The energy and other environmental impacts embodied in a plastic grocery bag is somewhat less than in a paper grocery bag. But paper is easier to recycle, being accepted in most recycling programs. The recycling rate for plastic bags is very low. So, which is better for the environment? Neither! The fact is that the difference between paper and plastic RECYCLING is small compared with the REUSING bags. Save Oil, Save Trees: Reuse Your Grocery Bags!
Using sustainable, re-usable tote bags is a simple idea. However, up until the year 2005 there were very few choices for those who cared to make the change from paper or plastic bags to cloth bags. BYOB has changed that BYOB would like to see the global citizen make the environmentally friendly decision to choose cloth reusable bags in place of plastic or paper bags. their vision is to see everyone using a reusable cloth bag that is produced in their own communities under socially responsible and ethical working conditions.
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