The correspondence about plastic grocery bags shows that the small clear vegetable and fruit bags probably equate to about 7 grams of CO2e and the larger opaque shopping bags about 11-19 grams CO2e. Now can someone come up with estimates for paper grocery bags such as are used in the US?
Marion
Paper Shopping Bags
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I found the following information in the Australian report "Plastic Shopping Bags - Analysis of Levies and Environmental Impacts" of December 2002. Assuming 52 grocery shopping trips per year using 10 bags per trip: Singlet HDPE bags contribute the equivalent of 6.08 kg carbon dioxide. (This works out to about 11 grams of CO2e per bag). Kraft paper bags with handles contribute the equivalent of 11.8 kg carbon dioxide. (This is about 23 grams of CO2e per bag). The information I obtained from the University of Bath report was for LDPE bags (less strong but more resilient). I imagine the amount of petroleum it takes to make them is similar. To repeat the information from U of Bath: The small clear vegetable and fruit bags equate to about 7 grams of CO2e and the larger opaque shopping bags about 11-19 grams CO2e. So if a person uses 520 paper bags with handles and 520 vegetable bags a year (not unusual in the US), 15.4 kg of CO2e goes into the atmosphere. For Americans this translates into about 34 pounds of CO2e. (That is just for the manufacture of the bags.) For the average American consumer (emitting 42,000 pounds of CO2 a year) that is about 0.08 % of his or her carbon footprint (about two gallons of gas). The CO2e is just one part of the problem of single use shopping bags.
Marion
Considerable analysis has been done in Europe comparing paper shopping bags with plastic, much of it based on a study commissioned by French multinational, Carrefour. The Scottish government website offers a detailed review of this research (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/08/1993259/33039). As you may know Scotland has been in a leadership role with her tax on plastic bags. The original life cycle study for Carrefour (in French) is also widely available on the internet (http://www.ademe.fr/htdocs/actualite/rapport_carrefour_post_revue_criti que_v4.pdf).
Cheers,
Neil
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Try this: http://www.nedlac.org.za/research/fridge/plastics/life.pdf Page 22 has a comparison.
Raj Lathigara
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