Paper or Plastic? The Answer isn't as Obvious as you Think

Here's another thing that is bound to infuriate my Eco-nazi friends: plastic bags are infinitely better then paper bags. And here is why; paper bags cost 5 times more to produce then plastic bags. Thus economically, paper can't hold a candle to plastic.

A National Packaging Covenant Council plastic bags working group in Australia once did a study on plastic bags, (honestly, couldn't they find a better use of their time?). It concluded with 4 issues that they would like us to be concerned about:

1. Plastic bag littering, and associated indiscriminate waste disposal and consumer behaviour
2. Resource consumption issues, including reduction, reuse and recycling
3. Plastic biodegradability issues relating to littering and resource use
4. Social issues, community education and awareness, and consumer perceptions

I will now go through the list slowly, and argue all 4 points.

1. Would it be any better if plastic bags were replaced with paper? The same individuals would still litter. Animals can still be caught in paper bags. Both are eyesores, nevertheless, if you made a list of eyesores in the city, plastic bags would come quite low in the list. Once you list down graffiti, billboard advertisements, holes in the road, dirt on buildings, some lazily designed buildings itself, and the 30 year old junkers still roaming the streets spewing black smoke into the atmosphere, plastic bag littering doesn't seem like such a big problem, does it?
2. Reduction, reuse, and recycling. Reduction; the act of reducing usage of one such product. Plastic bags can be made much bigger then their paper counterparts. You can fit more stuff into plastic bags. Plastic can also be made thinner compared to paper, because of its inherent strength. Reuse; being able to use the objects more then one time. How many of us keep our old plastic bags? I have plenty, (almost a whole plastic bag's worth). Now, how many of us still keep our paper bags? Paper bags are useless when wet, and lack that longevity necessary for efficient reuse.
3. Recycling, (I know it was meant to be included in explanation 2, but this is a major thing I want to mention, deserving its own bullet point). You would think that paper bags are easier to recycle. That is not true. Paper recycling consumes almost 100 times more energy to produce then plastic. Paper bags are also less likely to be recycled then plastic ones. All in all then, pointless.
4. I admit, plastic is not biodegradable. But then again, it was never meant to be. However, paper bags in a landfill is not biodegradable either. Surprise! Trash in a landfill is compacted; compacted trash can't biodegrade well, (lack of air, moisture, sunlight). Go to a landfill, you can still find old newspapers. On another note, I thought we needed to preserve our trees? The environmentalists, (emphasis on the word "mentalists") want us to use more paper bags, but at the same time forbid us from chopping down trees? This is a time when their inner fanaticism comes out. Honestly, they are just as bad as those crazy mullahs sometimes.
5. This last point is something that I am really opposed to; social issues, community education and awareness. We are now brainwashing our kids into believing that the world is going to hell in a hand basket unless we all switch to using bikes, start running our houses on manure, and begin worrying about global warming. We are scaring our children at a time when they are most vulnerable. We cannot view environmental groups as crusaders for a cleaner tomorrow, but as any other political entity, with their own priorities, possibly distorting the truth to further their own means. Can we truly say that Greenpeace doesn't have its own lobbyists?

The usage of paper bags is just so wrong, and on so many fronts. But even that is not as ridiculous as the barefaced lies told by Eco-activists, in the name of a so-called better tomorrow.