Undoubtedly you’ve been asked “Paper or plastic,” at the grocery store.
Paper bags use trees and take lots of energy to produce. Plastic bags are cheaper, and take less energy to produce, but they’re made from petroleum and create litter problems. As Tamara Keith reports, shoppers in one city soon won’t have plastic as an option:
Transcript
Undoubtedly you’ve been asked, “Paper or plastic?” at the grocery store.
Paper bags use trees and take lots of energy to produce. Plastic bags are cheaper and take less energy to produce, but they’re made from petroleum,
and create litter problems. As Tamara Keith reports, shoppers in one city
soon won’t have plastic as an option:
Instead of plastic bags, groceries in San Francisco will soon be packed
in recycled paper bags, or compostable bags made from corn starch or
potato starch. Legislation recently approved by the San Francisco
board of supervisors will make the city the first in the nation to ban
plastic shopping bags, first at grocery stores, followed 6 months later
by large drug stores.
Jared Blumenfeld is director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment:
“It’s a great alternative to plastic. It sends a great message
that we can do small things in our lives to combat climate change. And
people love it here in San Francisco. They’re like, why did it take so
long.”
Blumenfeld says it takes 430,000 gallons of oil to make 100 million
plastic bags, and San Francisco stores hand out nearly twice that many
each year. The new bags will be able to go into curbside compost bins,
and Blumenfeld says he hopes the change will keep tons of waste out of
landfills.
Grocery chains oppose the change and say it stymies their efforts to
get customers to recycle plastic bags. They say the new bags will be
more expensive and they may have to pass those costs along to their
customers.
For the Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.