VEZINA: On climate change, plastic is often better than paper

And what is popularly described as 'biodegradable' is often not biodegradable once it is mixed into a landfill

Many people consider climate change to be the world's pre-eminent issue in terms of the need for disaster risk reduction.

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Getting things right when it comes to addressing climate change often requires doing what is known as a life-cycle analysis. That means considering the environmental impacts and costs of any particular action across its entire process, from its creation to disposal by the end-user.

Unfortunately, many so-called "green" solutions to addressing climate change are actually quite "brown."

In some cases, they may be "browner" than the thing they are replacing.

A major example of this can be found in the issue of replacing single-use plastic products with paper ones.

Single-use plastics are viewed as notoriously bad from a waste management lens.

Indeed, our federal government is in the process of banning a number of these products.

The reality, however, is that when it comes to producing greenhouse gas emissions and environmental damage from the time it is manufactured to the time the product reaches the consumer, plastic is often the better choice than the so-called greener alternatives.

Consider the issue of replacing single-use plastic straws with paper straws.

Conservative estimates put plastic straws at almost a third of the energy cost and carbon dioxide emissions of paper. Most estimates say the difference is almost double.

Producing a plastic straw requires 39 kilojoules of energy and produces 1.5 grams of carbon dioxide emissions.

Producing a paper straw requires 96 kilojoules of energy and produces 4.1grams of carbon dioxide emissions.

That's without considering the felling of trees to produce paper straws.

A mature tree captures about 48 pounds of CO2 per year. That equates to 21,772.4 grams of CO2.

This means 14,515 plastic straws could have been created, without increasing CO2 emissions, had the tree not been cut down to manufacture paper straws.

For those curious, because the question often comes up: How many trees would it take to capture all global CO2 emissions?

Recent estimates put total emissions at 37.8 billion metric tonnes. This comes out to needing approximately 1,736,140,314,825 (1.7 trillion) mature trees to reduce global emissions to net zero.

To put that in perspective, the Amazon Rainforest, which is half of the world's rainforests, is approximately 390 billion trees, although not all of them are mature.

There are, of course, other types of forests

When looking at plastic bags versus paper and cotton bags the numbers can be surprising.

The process for producing a cotton bag in particular is extremely inefficient in terms of CO2 emissions compared to plastic.

A cotton bag would have to be re-used 7,100 times to equal the much smaller environmental impact of a plastic bag. Using organic cotton, it would have to be re-used 20,000 times.

Put another way, assuming an individual reuses an organic cotton bag every day, it will need to be used for 54.7 years before it ties the plastic bag in terms of environmental impact.

Until then, the single-use plastic bag is better for the environment.

On another issue, what is popularly described as "biodegradable" is often not biodegradable once it is mixed into a landfill.

In addition, because paper is heavy, a lot of energy must be used to transport and distribute it, and turning a tree into a consumer product is generally not eco-friendly.

On the issue of waste management, plastic would be a clear environmental winner if people did not litter and if recycling processes actually worked as they claim to work.

Instead, our governments have decided to vilify single-use plastics which are often less environmentally damaging than their alternatives, while the public is told they’re helping to save the planet by using a paper straw instead of a plastic one.

The best environmental choice, of course, would be not to use any straw in the first place.

— Alex Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and teaches Disaster and Emergency Management at York University. He can be reached at [email protected].

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